THE BEING OR THE PRESENCE -- PART 2

Then Tolle says – give up defining yourself to others. You won’t die. You will come to life, instead. And don’t be concerned how others define you. If they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. As soon as you are trying to be this or that, you are playing a role. “Just be yourself” is a good advice, says Tolle, but it can be misleading. The mind will come in and will develop some kind of strategy: “How can I be myself?” You can be anything you like within limits, but to be brief, Tolle suggests: If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are – the Being behind the human, “a field of pure potentiality” (my quotes here imply that I heard this also from another prominent guro, Deepak Chopra) rather than something that is already defined. It’s the Being behind the human that is the Presence we feel when we are in deep meditation or preferably when meditation has become a flowing contemplation in our ordinary life and we see the sacred in everything we do as in washing dishes, clearing one's desk, or taking out the garbage, preparing dinner even if you are just phoning Jollibee to deliver the fried chicken because you are tired of your own cooking (give me an emoticon image), hehehe
or when meeting any living form, especially to me, flowers and butterflies, kittens and puppies, and smile in sweet silence.

Then Tolle continues: In a wider sense of the word, the ego itself is pathological no matter what forms it takes. The Greek in ancient times used it to describe a condition of disease which is derived from pathos which means suffering. The Hindu sages call it dukkha, a word which sounds like a Tagalog or Pilipino word referring to a state of poverty consciousness in people who nurture anger and resentment towards a certain unsatisfactory situation, and so they submit to suffering as if fated. To me, it’s not far-fetched to suggest that dukkha is a position of the ego when it cannot distinguish between a situation and its interpretation of and reaction to that situation. You might say,
“What a dreadful day,” without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction to it, and the emotion that is created by that reaction. In Shakespeare’s words: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” What is more, Tolle says, suffering or negativity is often misperceived by the ego as pleasure because up to a point the ego strengthens itself through it.


THE PATHOLOGICAL EGO

When possessed by such negative states as anger or resentment – you would see that your ego is enormously strengthened in its position of “rightness” by increasing your sense of separateness or by emphasizing the “otherness” of others, and creating a seemingly unassailable fortress-like mental position of your being “right.” And both extremes of feelings can create this seemingly unassailable mental position when they are suffering from negativities such as anger and resentment. If you are able to observe the pathological changes that take place inside your body when possessed by such negative states, how they adversely affect the functions of the heart, the digestive and immune system, and other bodily functions, it would be enormously clear that such states are indeed pathological, are forms of karmic suffering and not pleasure. A well- known study has been made by the medical world that the cause of cancer is largely due to embedded emotional negative states. It appears that healthy cells can get very sick under such an unhappy psychological climate.


Whenever you are in a negative state, Tolle explains, there is something in you that wants the negativity that perceives it as pleasurable, or believes it will give you what you want. Otherwise, who would want to hang on to negativity, make themselves and others miserable, and create disease in the body?

If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize “At this moment I am creating suffering for myself “it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditional egoic states and reactions you will be amazed at the infinite possibilities that open up to you when you have awareness – other vastly more intelligent ways of handling any situation come to you particularly if you happen to be the top leader of the republic, and you want to raise the GDP of its economic growth to prove you are truly competent in your job.

You will be able to release your unhappiness the moment you realize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever but it is not intelligent. You may think you are talented and clever, but cleverness is not intelligent, as it is selfish. It pursues its own goals by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Based on his cosmically-inspired deep insights and multi-dimensional study of human nature, Eckhart Tolle considers most politicians and business people clever. Even street-smart. Very few among them are intelligent.
Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns to be very self-defeating, he declares. Cleverness divides people; intelligence includes.


NEW EARTH, NEW HEAVEN

A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore not arising at all, concludes Tolle in his book, A New Earth. What did Jesus tell his disciples? “Heaven is right here in the midst of you.” Jesus makes a prediction in the Sermon on the Mount that a few people understood up till now. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.” In the modern version of the Bible, “meek” is translated as humble. What does it mean that the meek or humble shall inherit the land?

The meek are the egoless. They are those who have Awakened to their essential true nature in consciousness, and recognize that essence in all “others,” all life-forms. They have made the important journey of transcending Ego to attain Essence. The Being, the Presence behind the human form. These awakened ones live in a surrendered state and Now feel their oneness with the whole of humanity and the Source, the Presence. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing the old ways of the world in order for them to become new. This is what Jesus meant by “they shall inherit the earth, the New Earth.”



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AN INHERITED DYSFUNCTION – Part 1

Meet Eckhart Tolle, our contemporary spiritual teacher or BFF who tells us the truth about ourselves in his book A New Earth, and who travels extensively taking his message throughout the world.

The purpose of this book is to ask questions: 1) Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection?
2) Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures of past centuries and become at last crystalline so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness of Spirit?
3) Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and rise above the identification of Form that keeps the ego in place and condemns ego to imprisonment within their own personality?

A widespread flowering was not possible at the time the messengers – Buddha, Jesus, and others not all of them known – were humanity’s early flowers of ageless wisdom, precursors, rare and precious Beings at an early time, whose messages became largely misunderstood and often greatly distorted. Except in a small minority of believers, they did not transform universal human behavior during that early time.

The first part of this truth as spoken in the Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth is the realization that a normal state of mind of most human beings contains a certain element psychologists call a dysfunction or even madness. At this time of the Shift in consciousness as we approach 2012, and go beyond, we will experience this dysfunction as a form of collective mental illness. A collective mental illness, as our BFF calls it, an epidemic of the mind, a realization of it is part and parcel of our Awakening consciousness, planet-wide. If you don’t know what is awakening. Read on.

When we read the newpapers these days there is this veil of delusion called by Hindu sages as maya hanging over us like the proverbial Manila smog blurring our view of ourselves and others, particularly those that we call leaders, and their followers… Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest Indian sages calls it: “The mind is maya.” According to the Buddha, the human mind in its normal state generates dukkha which when translated means suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or plain misery. Sooner or later, wherever you go, whatever you do, you will encounter dukkha. As we write this, I say “we” because we are One, we are all together in this
realization, you will feel the shift, the ground shaking beneath your feet, as a shocking sense of dysfunction overwhelms you which can be translated as disrespect of the law, and someone’s need for more power to control others which is frightening when you consider how you are actually witnessing the destruction of democracy before your very eyes yet you feel so helpless about it. Tha Maya prohesied it as coming about this time, view the previous blog on the Mayans.

According to Christian teachings, this collective mental illness is called the “original sin.” Translated from the ancient Greek text of the New Testament, to sin means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer or to cause suffering. Again, Eckhart Tolle calls the term when stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, a dysfunction that is inherent in the human condition. According to some highly perceptive columnists in the local news, or in TV talk shows, it is a way of afflicting the afflicted, and comforting the already comfortable.

WHAT AWAKENING MEANS

If you don’t know what Awakening means, read on. Only by awakening from a deep sleep you can know what the book A New Earth is about. Its main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind, says Eckhart but to bring a shift in consciousness, to awaken. It can only awaken those who are ready. Not everyone is ready yet, but many are, or are in a state of readiness prodded by a consistent series of crises… an ecological crisis, a financial crisis, now a looming constitutional crisis in this benighted country …As Eckhart affirms, many are now ready for an Awakening and with each person who awakens, the momentum in the collective consciousness grows.

For some, awakening in the New Earth, that the years 2001 to 2012 have brought, may have begun through loss or suffering as in the horrendous bombing of the Twin Towers of New York that changed the US and the world forever, particularly the Middle East, the arena of conflict between socio-political-religious fundamentalist thought of East and West. With his bestselling spiritual guide The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle inspired millions of readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived “in the now.” For others, through coming into contact with a spiritual teacher or teaching. In A New Earth, Tolle expands on these powerful ideas to show how transcending the ego-based consciousness within us is not only essential to personal happiness but also the key to ending conflict and suffering planetary-wide. I find reading Eckhart’s books spiritually alive and therefore transformational reading. If so, this will accelerate and intensify our search for transcending pain and suffering, to find our healing.

An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, so goes Eckhart. It is you as the ego, as it thinks, speaks and acts, it is us, the collective ego as it operates in the individual as well as the many. For two important reasons, it is important that we know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego. 1) you won’t recognize it, it will trick you into identifying with it again and again. 2) the act of recognition itself is one of the ways in which awakening happens. True, you cannot fight the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.

No doubt, the human mind is highly intelligent. It has created sublime works of music, literature, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Science and technology have brought about radical changes in the way we live and have enabled us to do and create things that would have been considered impossible to do two hundred years ago. Yes, the human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the mind has upon the planet, upon other life-forms, and upon humans themselves.

A CLINICAL CASE

If the history of humanity were the clinical case of a single human being, the diagnosis would be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against the perceived “enemies.” – what the psychoanalyst defines as “his own unconscious projected outward.” Tolle, however, tells us to realize that fear, greed, and the desire for power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of, but are themselves created by the dysfunction which is a deep-seated collective delusion that lies within the human mind. A number of spiritual teachings tell us to let go of fear and desire, Tolle continues, but these spiritual practices are usually unsuccessful. Fear, greed, and desire for power are not the ultimate causal factors.

THE EGOIC SELF

If you are so completely identified with the voice in the head, as most people are, the incessant river of involuntary and compulsive thinking called stream- of- consciousness-theme in stories by James Joyce, a modern existentialist writer, who describes people as being possessed by their mind. You take the thinker as you are, because there is a sense of the I (ego) in every thought, memory, interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. Spiritually speaking, this is unconsciousness – it also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long- standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than others or not as good, as a success or lack of it. Ego only differs on the surface, avers Tolle. Thus, ego is only appearance, and is concerned with appearances, and usually popular among people who idolize certain movie stars would prize the idea of someone putting on a good show. At this point, I am reminded of Dolphy, a top comedian of these 7,101 islands who had the wisdom to declare, I won’t run for election to the presidency, because I might win, hahaha. That speaks highly of many Pinoys who tend to be mesmerized by external appearance and their tinseltown popularity.

Deep down, all people are the same. How the same? They all belong to Pure Essence, the Source. But many live on identification with the ego which is precarious because thought and emotion by their very nature are ephemeral or fleeting so every ego is continuously struggling for survival trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I- thought they need the opposite the thought of “the other” But the others are mostly “others” when the I-thought see them as enemies. At the end of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others, a symptom of the sick mind as Tolle sees it, and most psychoanalysts do.

THE PINOY AS A COMPLAINING EGO

I may not be able to reach the more pathological aspect of the Filipino ego yet but I can start with the symptoms of mental illness such as that of complaining and resentment which will lead us eventually to it. Because complaining is one of ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself, as stated by Tolle. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with as for example in terms of achievement, easily survive on complaining alone. When one is in the grip of such an ego, complaining especially about other people’s failures to come up with his level of perceived standards, this habit becomes habitual, and not always unconscious, if it serves one’s position. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or behind their backs seems to be the issue here. Something more overt happened like this at a recent summit meet of a highly political nature attended by top echelon people like the president and chief of the supreme court, and it brought down the ceiling, sending shock waves all around. You have read about it in the news. Most commonly when you speak about other people, and you have nothing nice to say, you just grin and say nothing; it is often a sign of your breeding or how your parents brought you up knowing that good manners will never go out of fashion in terms of time and space. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling (according to Tolle’s bestseller book A New Earth, and most will agree) and of the ego’s need to be right and triumph over others, lambasting, prejudging others with all definitive pronouncements that you can’t argue with, since it is part of a public speech.

Jesus in the Bible, referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale, says Tolle, there is the physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus’ question remains unanswered. But the answer is, of course, because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior. That’s the ego.