The Seer

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When Tesshu, the famous medieval samurai swordsman, was young, he visited one Zen master after another. Once he went to visit Master Dokuon and told him triumphantly that all that exists is empty, there is no you or me, and so forth. The master listened to all this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu’s head with it. The infuriated young swordsman would have killed the master there and then, but Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is surely quick to show anger, is it not?” Tesshu left the room, realizing he still had much to learn about Zen.

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Most of us recognize or strongly suspect that we are more than simply a body. Seekers, like almost all people, have the conviction or maybe a simple belief that they are something more real or profound than the lump of protoplasm seen in the mirror. The body tells us that we are hungry, but if we are fasting, the mind can override the body’s repeated calls for food. If we are a marathon runner, and our muscles ache along the way, the mind’s determination can overcome the body’s call to stop running and rest. Thus, we may be forced to conclude that we are a “something” beyond the body that is far less tangible than the body. We find ourselves holding the belief that we are the mind, or a center of awareness located somewhere in the head, that has both the mind (“my” mind) and the body (“my” body).

In the mind, we generally find our existence as more real and alive. We identify with the mind, or our mental experience, and further identify the experience as the self or “I.” We become totally involved and get carried away in what appear to be “our” thought processes and the drama of life. Very few people ever suspect or discover that a realm exists beyond the mind and mental experience.

“Mind stuff” consists of worded thoughts, thought pictures, memories, dreams, visualizations, and ultimately, our entire experience. With sufficient effort, we may be able to witness and catalog our thoughts. In Richard Rose’s terminology, we can become a Process Observer. That
is, we become someone who identifies — not with the body or with the thoughts and emotions passing through the mind — but with the awareness that is able to witness both the body and the thought processes that transpire in the mind. In essence, we become or find ourselves to be an awareness that is beyond both the body and the mundane mind as we know or conceive it.

The description of this condition pales in comparison to the sudden and stunning realization that we are watching our thought processes. Momentarily, we become an awareness that is far superior to our ordinary, day-to-day, way of being in the world. This change in perspective
generally only comes after an intense period of meditation, in which we attempt to examine our thoughts as the subject matter for meditation.

Those who find themselves suddenly able to witness their thought processes may revel in this newfound ability to “be the Watcher.” They may mistakenly believe that the goal is to spend more and more time watching their thoughts until they become “self-aware” throughout all their waking hours. As desirable as this condition may seem, it is only a step along the way to the discovery of our true Essence.

What is the next step? What can or should we do once we recognize thought-forms as reflections, or objects, in our field of awareness? We have found that thoughts arrive, and if we are diligent, we can witness them as they pass before our awareness. We reside in or identify with the awareness that witnesses thought. At some point, we will realize that thought is inescapable while we are in a human body.

Even those who have Become, or entered into Union with the Absolute, return to a thinking mind, albeit with a vastly different perspective. Any sense of a personal self is left behind when entering the timelessness of the Absolute. Upon return to the mundane world, the mind again becomes active, and the thought processes come back to life with all their confusions, conundrums, and comparisons. Unfortunately, we have no alternative while living in this relative world of polar opposites.

by Paul Constant and Michael Casari

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We humans are in some difficulty because we don’t know how to stop thinking. Isn’t that true? How many people can stop thinking and just be here in silence and Presence? And if you cannot stop thinking, then you cannot be present, for all thinking takes you into the mind.

There is nothing wrong with thinking. There is nothing wrong with entering the world of the mind, as long as you know that you are entering a world of illusion, and you know that only the present moment is the truth of life. Then you can play in the world of time, with your thoughts, memories, and imaginings. Enjoy yourself, but be careful! It is easy to get lost there.

If you identify with any of it, or take any of it too seriously, you will separate yourself from the present moment and the truth of life. You will be abandoning God, love, truth, and the present moment for the illusory world of the mind, filled with distorted memories and false promises.

From Journey into Now by Leonard Jacobson

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What is love and where is it found? We search for love and try to get love, and yet it seems like we never get enough. Even when we have found love, it can slip away as time passes. What if there is a source of love that never fades and is always available? What if love is as near and easy as breathing? What if we have been “looking for love in all the wrong places” instead of actually lacking love?

Love is both simpler and more mysterious and subtle than we have imagined it to be. Love is very simply the spacious, open attention of our awareness. Awareness itself is the gentlest, kindest, and most intimate force in the world. It touches things without impinging on them. It holds all of our experience but doesn’t hold it down or hold it back. And yet, inherent in awareness is a pull to connect and even merge with the object of our awareness.”

This truth, that we are filled with love when we love someone or something else instead of when we are loved, can free us from the search for love outside of ourselves. If you are still not sure that it is your own love that fills you, think of a time when someone else was in love with you, but you were not in love with that person. The flow of loving attention towards you was not satisfying, in fact it could have been uncomfortable having someone so interested in you when you were not feeling the same way.

In contrast, when we are falling in love with someone, it can be rich, exciting, and energizing, even if it is not reciprocated. There is an intensity and beauty even in unrequited love. It is the outward flow of love that is filling us in that moment. So, along with the disappointment and hurt of not being loved back, we also experience a fullness and aliveness just from loving the other. In the Renaissance, unrequited love was even seen as an ideal. It is the love flowing out from our heart that fills us with joy and satisfaction. The source is within you.

There is just one awareness and one Being behind all the individual awarenesses. The way we as can reach that oneness of Being is by experiencing the flow of love from within our being. Paradoxically, the place where you are connected to others is inside your own heart. You
cannot really connect to another externally. Even if you used super glue to attach yourself to another person, there would still be a sense of separation in your outer experience, not to mention how hard they might be trying to disconnect!

On the inside, you are already connected to everyone and everything. The connection is this flow of awareness that is here right now reading these words. It is in the loving nature of awareness that the sense of connection is found, not in the objects of awareness. We are connected to others in the awareness flowing from within us to them. Connection is not found in the flow of awareness and love towards us as, by definition, that flow is connected to its source inside the other person.

This is good news! We can experience limitless love no matter what anyone else is doing. The only thing that matters is how much we are loving, not how much we are loved. Right now you can be filled to overflowing with the incredible sweetness of love, just by giving awareness to
anything and everything that is present in your experience.”

From the new free ebook, Love is for Giving, Not for Getting, by Nirmala

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There are various portals that you can use to enter the Now. One portal is to become aware of the energy field of your body as you sit there. To feel that you are actually alive in your hands and your arms and your legs, throughout your body. There is an aliveness that most people cannot feel because they are only in their heads, thinking. All their attention is absorbed by thinking and they are not present where they are. So you can use this portal, the aliveness of your inner body.

You can use sense perceptions…watch nature — trees or animals or your dog. Just be alert as you watch a dog, playing, resting; play with a dog … you can learn being present from an animal. Your dog can teach you to be present because the dog is ready to enjoy, celebrate life any moment … the Now. The dog is in the Now so it can teach you or remind you. When you become burdened with problems, look at your dog and see how the dog is always ready to celebrate life.

Another opening is to ask yourself whether you are friendly with the present moment or whether you are making the present moment into an obstacle or enemy. If you are against it or want to run away from it, you create stress, you create anxiety, you create past guilt or resentment … all these things that people carry around, they are in the past, and then you have the burden of the future which you can’t control, so to come to the present moment is actually a transformation of consciousness. That’s why The Power of Now has had such an impact because it has told people that they didn’t realize they could be present and they could simplify and deepen their lives tremendously and make it more joyful.

By Eckhart Tolle

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Only when you find the formless dimension in yourself can there be true love in any relationship. The Presence that you are, the timeless I Am, recognizes itself in another, and the other feels loved, that is to say, recognized.

To love is to recognize yourself in another. The other’s “otherness” then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form. The longing for love that is in everyone is the longing to be recognized, not on the level of form, but on the level of Being.

If you honor only the human dimension of the other but neglect Being, the other will sense that the relationship is unfulfilled, that something absolutely vital is missing, and there will be a buildup of pain in the other and sometimes unconscious resentment toward you. “Why don’t you recognize me?” This is what the pain or resentment seems to be saying.

When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world….

It has been said “God is love” but that is not absolutely correct. God is the One Life in and beyond the countless forms of life. Love implies duality: lover and beloved, subject and object. So love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.

From, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.

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Enlightenment is seeing that the “self” concept you have been building since about age two or three inside your head is totally unreal. Once you see this, once you get it, you will be awake. You will live fully and effortlessly in the present, because you will understand that the present is all that exists. You will always be at peace. You will always flow cheerfully with whatever is happening. Sure, there may be more fun awaiting you tomorrow evening, when you go out on some hot date, or do whatever else you love to do, but you don’t dwell on that.

In the meantime, there is only now, there is only ever the now, and even working in a freezing, windowless salad factory is okay when you are inwardly free. However, you may certainly form a plan, from a place of clarity and presence, to move on from the salad factory as soon as you realistically can.

So, the sixty-four million dollar question: how do you get free? You breathe, you come back to being very aware in the present, you notice your own mind stuff, your story, and you tell yourself, “This is not who I am.” You tell yourself, “Peace is my true nature, and I am always at peace, deep within.” Your consciousness is like a deep lake, and while the surface may get ruffled and buffeted by the challenges of life, deep down that stillness, that peace, is always here. You have to stop, and begin to feel into it.

One last tip: whenever you find yourself doing something you don’t really want to do, ask yourself, “If I were an enlightened Zen master (or Sufi, or Christian mystic, or whatever inspires you) how would I approach this?” Then act as if you were that.

Remember, the way to tell whether someone is enlightened or not is that what is happening right now is always the most important thing. Awakened people honor the past, keep an eye on the future, but they are always right here, enjoying and appreciating what is happening now.

by Jim Dreaver

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Inquirer — “I just started reading one of your books for the first time A New Earth. I am still having a hard time understanding why we have an ego and why it seems to be our enemy. Can you explain it more simply for me so I understand the ego’s purpose?”

Eckhart Tolle — The ego is a stage in the evolution of human consciousness. It is not your enemy. To perceive somebody or something as an enemy is in fact one of the main misperceptions or delusions of the egoic unconsciousness. So, you cannot fight against the ego and win that fight. If you think you have won the fight against the ego, it is the ego in you that thinks so and it has enlarged itself.

So the ego is not an enemy, but a dysfunction. Looked at from one point of view, it is an entity that the mind created. From another perspective, however, it is simply a delusion, resulting in a distorted way of perceiving reality and consequently in dysfunctional behavior. This second perspective is probably a more helpful one.

A delusion dissolves when you recognize it as delusion, and so does the ego. The ego is the by-product, as it were, of the rapid development of our faculty of thought over the past six thousand years. We lost ourselves in thought, that is to say became identified with it to such an extent that we now derive our sense of who we are from thinking. Thought is a particular way for universal intelligence to express itself. It is no more than a tiny aspect of that vast intelligence.

Thought, through naming things, analyzes, dissects, and separates reality into bits and pieces. Thinking can be a helpful practical tool, but when you identify with thinking the delusion of separation arises. Your reality becomes fragmented. You lose your original sense of connectedness with Being (“paradise”). You become unhappy, needy, discontented, full of ever unfulfilled desire, and you are always unconsciously attempting to regain your lost sense of being, of who you are.

Life is one and I am one with all life.

When you know this truth, the ego dissolves. To know means to realize. How, then, do you realize this truth?

At this moment – the only moment there is – there are some thoughts moving across your mind (the words you are reading and whatever your mind is adding to them). However, you can also KNOW that these thoughts are moving across your mind. That knowing is the dimension of awareness. It has nothing to do with thinking. While thinking happens, you can know yourself as the awareness behind the thinking, the alert stillness in the background – ungraspable, indefinable, elusive.

When you disidentify from thinking, you may also discover a growing ability within you to perceive things and people without immediately naming them. In this way, the ego, which is the unconscious habit of identifying with every thought that arises, begins to dissolve.

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Recently I saw an interview on television with Jane Goodall who in 1960 began studying chimpanzees in East Africa. Her mentor, the archaeologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey, was interested in whether chimpanzees and humans exhibit similar kinds of behaviour. If they do, this would support archaeological evidence indicating we share a common ancestor.

During the interview Goodall spoke about an occasion when she was walking through the bush with one of the chimpanzees she was studying and getting to know. After a while they stopped and she offered the chimpanzee a piece of fruit. Looking her in the eyes he took the fruit, dropped it, then squeezed her hand - then got up and carried on down the path. Goodall was so astonished she just sat there for a while, taking in what had happened.

It seemed obvious that although he had refused the food, he wanted her to know he was grateful. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. It was just how a human being might have responded.

She then described another scene. Some evenings the chimpanzees would gather by a waterfall. They didn’t go there for any practical reason – they weren’t going there to drink or eat or sleep. It seemed they were simply going to look. As they looked they swayed from foot to foot, as if they were dancing.

Jane imagined that for them the water cascading down was a mysterious, awe-inspiring thing for “it was always flowing in, always flowing out, and always there”. In the face of this magical vision, what did they do?

They danced!

Her picture of the waterfall is a perfect description of the present moment – things are always flowing in to this timeless awareness, always flowing out of it, and always present in it. Though what is in the emptiness is always changing, yet there’s always something in it. How amazing.

What is your (human!) response to the miracle of this moment, the miracle of sounds, colours, sensations and all the rest, given in this timeless emptiness?

I love to dance!

Richard Lang

For information about Jane Goodall:
click Here

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Enjoyment of what you are doing, combined with a goal or vision that you work toward, becomes enthusiasm. Even though you have a goal, what you are doing in the present moment needs to remain the focal point of your attention; otherwise, you fall out of alignment with universal purpose.

Make sure your vision or goal is not an inflated image of yourself and therefore a concealed form of ego, such as wanting to become a movie star, a famous writer, or a wealthy entrepreneur. Also make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank.

An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don’t empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole.

Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor or writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the unmanifested Source of all life through you for the benefit of all.

From: A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle