Eckhart Tolle: On Excessive Thinking

"When you don't cover up the world with words and labels," notes Eckhart Tolle, "a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say identified with."

[Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," p. 26.]

". . . (T)hinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are," Tolle observes, and "thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence."

Know Thyself!: The Hidden Dimension of Consciousness

"Know Thyself!" is the great admonishment behind all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, for it seems that virtually all such traditions acknowledge that there is the small "self" or "ego" which we take to be "who" we are, and a hidden, transcendental "higher Self" which, though obscured by the ego's narrative, is the very essence of our being.

"Most people," observes the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents."

"People," he points out, "measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all this is not known, which also exists."

"What is commonly called "self-knowledge"," he notes, "is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen "with us" or "in our family" or among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand, one meets with illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities whcih merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case."

"In this broad band of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control," he warns, "we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what it is that is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 14-16.]

In "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" (written with Christopher Isherwood), Swami Prabhavanada notes that "(t)he external world even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman" (or true nature of our being). In short, we need to be "in the world" but not "of the world," as great sages and philosophers have told us since time immemorial.

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda observes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 24.]

But how to know this non-conflictive and acceptive consciousness of our inner being? Through introspection, self-examination and meditation is the answer found in virtually all traditions.

"(M)editation," Prabhavananda observes, "is evolution in reverse. Meditation is a process of devolution. Beginning at the surface of life," he explains, "the meditative mind goes inward, seeking always the cause being the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 41.]

Thus, to "Know Thyself!" one must move beyond the small "self" of the ego to the transcendental "Self" of one's own inner being.

On Yoga, Religion and the Ground of Being

The word for religion in the East is "yoga." It refers not just to the outward form of hatha yoga that we are all familiar with from the proliferation of yoga studios here in the West - which is just one of the "six limbs" of yoga - but, more fundamentally, it refers to the inner, esoteric path of religion. Derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English "yoke," it means to "tie" or "unite." In this instance, to unite one's being (the atman) with the Ground of Being (Brahman, or God).

Similarly, the word "religion" has an inner, esoteric aspect as well as an outer, exoteric one; albeit, when we talk of religion in the West, we refer almost exclusively to this latter meaning, denoting the various creeds, rites, rituals and observances that characterize the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, and common usage, the word "religion" has lost the "inner" aspect of its meaning.

The word "religion" - like "yoga" - also means to "tie" or "unite" (or, more accurately, to "retie" or reunite"). It is derived from the Latin root ligare, which means to tie, just as a 'ligature' is a stitch that ties up a wound, or 'ligament' is the tissue that ties the muscle to a bone. Thus, the inner meaning of "religion" is also to "retie" or "reunite" one's inner being (the soul, or spirit) with the Ground of Being (God). Unfortunately, the concept of "religion" no longer seems to refer to this inner, esoteric process of reunification, and is almost exclusively used to denote outer, exoteric forms.

In the West, at least, as Aldous Huxley points out in his classic work "The Perennial Philosophy," this loss of meaning demeans religious practice and obscures the inner path to spiritual awakening.

"Nobody," writes Huxley, "has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus in terms of which we may talk coherently about the Divine Ground and of the world conceived of its manifestation. For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in therms of a symbol-system, who relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," Perennial Classics: 2004, p. 35.]

One of the most respected modern theologians, Paul Tillich, in his memorable sermon "The Depths of Existence," notes that a true spiritual seeker may be prejudiced by what he knows of "God" and may, in fact, have to forget all that he knows about that term in order to find the Ground of Being within him or herself.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "Shaking The Foundations," Scribners, New York: 1948, pp. 56-57.]

 This misunderstanding of what the words "religion" and "yoga" originally referred to is illustrated by the misunderstanding I initially had about one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. (Although I am not Christian, per se, the only fully enlightened man I have ever met, once urged me to study all religions until I could see "the sameness" in them all.)

In Matthew 11:28-30, we read:

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest upon your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."

 Originally, this passage invoked in me an image of Jesus shouldering the cross, much like Atlas struggling with the whole world upon his shoulders. I assumed that the burden Jesus was talking about was in actuality, a literal burden. When I re-examined this passage, however, having learned that the "yoke" he talks about is his esoteric, inner religious teachings (i.e., his "yoga"), I got a wholly new meaning.

Here he first says he is "meek" meaning he is free of the small, egoic "self" which is the common burden of duality that virtually all men and women labour under. Then he notes that he is "lowly in heart," also signifying he is free of the ego and exists wholly within the Ground of Being alone.

Next, he notes that his "yoke" is easy, meaning that the process of his religion (his yoga) is simple and consists of the prayer and meditation that will free one from the bondage of the egoic "self" and its duality. Then, he describes what the fruit of his esoteric religious practice is - i.e. what the essence of his teaching consists of - and that is "light." And, of course, light - the clear light of Being - is what all inner religious practices refer to, in one form or another, as the source of our Being.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most famous passage from the Holy Quran, is the "Light Sura" Chapter 24, Verse 35 which reads:

"Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things."

Thus, when one begins to look to the inner, esoteric core of all Eastern and Western religions - to the yoking of one's depth of being with the the ultimate depth which is the Ground of Being - one begins to find the lightness of being free from the ego and the small sense of "self." This realization, it seems, is at the heart of all yogas and all religions.

The Expansive Universe

Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)

BRINK OF ETERNITY

In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of my room;
I find her not.

My house is small
and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord,
and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky
and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish
---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the deepest fullness.
Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch
in the allness of the universe.

-- Rabindranath Tagore --

Who has not gazed in rapt attention at the night sky and not had a sense of his or her own smallness against the background of the stars? Throughout history sages and poets, alike, have wondered at the depths of the heavens, but only now do we know how deep and expansive the depths of the heavens truly are.

For the pantheist, the spiritual but not religious, the agnostic and the non-dualist, alike, the depths of the cosmos may testify to the breadth of the manifest and non-manifest aspects of Unity and Wholeness, or what might be a single, unitary G_d.

Light, one of the few constants in the universe, travels at a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second (or 300,000 kilometres per second). At that speed, it still takes three-quarters of a second for sunlight reflected off the moon to reach our eyes, and a full eight minutes for sunlight to travel the approximately 93,000,000 miles (149,000,000 km) from the Sun itself.

Every star we see when we look up into the sky lies within our galaxy, the Milky Way. And, yet, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.35 light years away - that's  25 trillion miles, or 40 trillion kilometers away. The Milky Way, itself is a more-or-less average sized galaxy containing approximately 200 billion stars, and stretching across 100,000 light years of space.

There are approximately 80 billion other such galaxies in "the observable universe" - some larger, some smaller than the Milky Way - in which there are anywhere from 30 sextillion to a septillion different star systems (i.e., 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 separate stars), and who knows how many countless worlds.

At the largest scale, as the video clips below illustrate, superclusters of galaxies (each stretching across hundreds of millions of light years) weave themselves into a fabric of knots and threads that can be billions of light years long, with the density of this fabric stretching matter uniformly out throughout the heavens.

And, yet, as incomprehensible as such distances and numbers are to us, it is indisputable that amidst all this "we live and move, and have our being," (Acts 17:28).

Resolving Life's Equation

"Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted. "

--  Srikumar Rao --

Fill in the blank: "If ____________, then I would be happy."

I have heard it said that we humans are great logicians, and the mental equation that we are usually preoccupied with is "if x, then y,"

The problem with our great logic, however, is that we spend almost no time looking at the 'x' factor, and concentrate all our imagination on 'y.' "If I had great wealth, then I'd be happy." "If I lost 20 pounds, then I would be attractive." "If I had a great relationship, then I wouldn't want anything else." "If I lose this job, then I'll be homeless." Etc., etc., etc.

All this mental algebra is just thought-food for the inner mental narrative of our ego sense. So much of our time is spent on how great, or how awful, 'y' would be if 'x' occurs, and little or no time is spent on the reality, probability or possibility of 'x' occurring, a point stressed in a lecture on achieving "happiness" by Professor Srikumar Rao, (attached below).

Is it true that we would experience unending happiness if we just had lots of money in our pocket, weighed twenty pounds less and were in a new relationship? Most people's experience, but not their inner narrative, says that this is just not so.

Prof. Srikumar Rao

"It's the model itself that is flawed," says Professor Rao, "not what you put on the 'if' side of the equation."

"The problem," Rao notes, "is that your life right now, with all the problems that you have - or more precisely, all the problems that you think you have - is equally perfect, but you do not accept it. In fact, you are spending all your time striving with might and main to make it different. You are not accepting it. And, when you are not accepting it you are buying into the 'if/then' model - 'if this happens then I will be happy' - and it is the model itself that is flawed."

What is needed, Professor Rao observes, is to "invest in the process, and not in the outcome." Rao, like so many others, preaches the benefit of focusing our attention on what it is that we are doing in the here and now, rather on what may - or, likely, may not - be the outcome.

"As we grow up," he observes, "we lose the ability to invest in the process. We start investing in the outcome. By definition the outcome is outside of our control, (and) if that is where we spend all of our emotional energy, we will get drained as we do so."

In encouraging his audience to focus on the process rather than the outcome - to focus their energy on doing 'x' rather than in obsessing over 'y' - Rao quotes the following introduction that the great John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, would give to each of his teams at the start of their season:

"When it's over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If you did the best that you were capable of, the score doesn't matter. But, I suspect that if you did the best you were capable of you will find the score to your liking."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

What Is Our Essence?

"As a man thinketh . . . so he is."

What is the "essence" of a "human being?" It is a question that has haunted philosophers, metaphysicians and psychologists for millenia.

Etymologically, or looking at where our words come from, we can see certain similarities between the two concepts. "Essence" and "being" have similar roots in Latin, Greek and Old French (discussed below); whereas "human" is related to ancient words for both "man" and "ground."

The word "human" is related to both the Latin 'homo', meaning 'same,' and to 'humus' meaning 'ground.' Is this a reference to so many creation myths that have G_d forming the first man from clay, and then bringing the clay model to life; or is it a recognition that all humans are a part of the same "Ground of Being" that has been used to denote the Absolute throughout the history of the "perennial philosophy"? I prefer the latter, but it is probably an admixture of both meanings, and other factors that are not clear at first blush.

The origins of "essence" is much clearer. "Essence" means at once 'substance,' 'existence' and 'being.' It means "that by which a thing is what it is;" and its Latin root is 'esse,' its Greek root 'ousia' - both of which mean "to be."

Hamlet's immemorial self-scrutiny led him him to observe: "To be, or not to be? That is the question." And, like all good questions, the answer is implicit in it: a triumphant "to be!". The "essence" of a "human being" is simply "being," his or her "essence" within the "Ground of Being." And the sages and seers of all ages have spoken to this truth.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
(1920-1996)

The Buddhist master, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, remarked:

"Buddhas become awakened because of realizing their essence. Sentient beings become confused because of not realizing their essence. Thus there is one basis or ground, and two different paths."

[Tulku Urgyen Rinpoch,"As It Is," vol. 2, page 43.]

In the same vein, the great Sufi teacher and polymath, Idries Shah, observed:

Idries Shah (1924-1996)

'. . . (A)ll dervish teaching is based not on the concept of God, but on the concept of essence. . . "He who knows his essential self, knows God." Knowledge of the essential self is the first step, before which there is no real knowledge of religion.'

[Idries Shah, "The Sufis," page 309.]

 It is thus no mere cryptic abstraction that the words "Know thyself" were said to be carved over the doorway to the Temple of Delphi; for he who comes to know his higher "Self," beyond the lower "self" of the ego, comes to know much about his own "essence," the essence of G_d and how to "be" in the world.