Eckhart Tolle talks about the stillness of a tree and says that what recognizes that stillness is the still part of me (see my post here). My suggestion is to not go into the meadow or the mountains to find the stillness in a tree but into the city. A tree is out of place in the midst of concrete, asphalt, cigarette smoke, carbon monoxide, blaring music, and Big Mac wrappers. But that is the point. That tree is still a tree. It still drinks water from the ground, collects sunlight with its leaves, produces flowers and drops its leaves. It does all those “tree things” despite being in a strange and oftentimes hostile environment. It is not perturbed when acid rain falls on it’s branches or a distracted driver slams into it or someone nails a flyer to its trunk. It doesn’t say, “How am I supposed to produce flowers under these conditions? This is ridiculous! I’m going to wait until a better time.” No, it goes on producing flowers. It goes on despite the distractions. That tree in the city is just as beautiful, just as majestic, just as still as the tree sitting on the quaint hill in the quaint meadow. And that is its stillness—the attitude that it doesn’t matter where, when, or under what circumstances it finds itself, it’s just going to go on being a tree.
Archive for the 'buddhism' Category
Last night was the last in the series of Tolle’s DVD presentation. The first two installments are here and here. Following are a few brief thoughts from the session:
“Who is becoming aware of awareness?” Our language produces duality. A better wording is: “The awareness that is the essence of who I am becomes aware of itself.” I.e. self-realization.
Consciousness is no longer trapped in the form.
Tolle talked about reincarnation but from a different spin. Our sense of self gets mixed up with forms of thought and emotion and you are reincarnated in that form. That is, there is no awareness in the background—there is only the form. Therefore, desiring to end reincarnation means to free oneself from identifying with form.
Of course, you cannot reject all forms altogether. The goal is to see something hiding in every form that is one with my essence.
He talked about labels and how we slap a label on something and then go on to the next thing. Once we label something, we think we know it. But, all we really know is a word—the label. We can’t go any deeper than the label to know the thing more deeply. Perception is much closer to the unmanifested, to being, than thought. Whenever something new enters our awareness, there is a second or two of no labeling and pure perception. After that, we slap a label on it and think about it and the perception is gone.
“True love is the recognition of the formless in the other—the recognition of yourself in the other.”
Death is the dissolving of a form. What’s left is the formless. Similarly, all endings are a form of death so we should embrace endings as they help us let go of forms.
There was a question about laughter and Tolle had a great quote: “Beware of any spiritual teacher who is dreadfully serious.”
Last Thursday, the Kansas City Friends of Jung showed the next 1.5 hours of the Eckhart Tolle DVD. I talked about the first hour here. Again at this session, someone pointed out that Tolle is not saying anything new. Anyone who does Insight Meditation or knows much about Buddhism will know just about everything he is talking about. For whatever reason, Oprah has picked up on Tolle and is getting the message to the masses. I guess this is a good thing. It really all depends on how the message is modified for the masses. I expect that there are a few people who tune into Oprah who will be open to Tolle’s message but I expect the majority of her viewers to not really get it. I mean REALLY get it.
Anyway, here are some comments on this session:
Accepting the present includes accepting the past. We all carry grievances and believe that the past interferes with my ability to be myself at this moment. So, to accept who and what we are right now, includes accepting what happened to us in the past.
Become friendly with what is. “I want out” is a resistance pattern. We don’t have to say “yes” to our current story but we also don’t have to stay stuck in our current story and accept it as our unalterable destiny.
Say yes to the present moment. Things will change but I accept where I am right now. Break the continuity between past and future.
Step out of your story into the aliveness of the present moment.
What is the problem NOW? Not what will be the problem in the next minute, hour, day, week, year. What is the problem NOW?
Step out of the thought which judges this present form as wrong.
Don’t solve problems by thinking but by stepping outside. Don’t demand that others behave different so that I can be happy.
Just talk to any tree and see how still it is. What recognizes that stillness in the tree is the still part of me. (This was a great way to put it.) Human beings pull you quickly into forms and thoughts. Nature is easy to be still with.
The now and yourself are one. Things come and go and there’s one underlying piece — who you are.
We don’t have a life because then there is me and life. We are life. Life is living through us — we are not living life.
The old consciousness is identified with form and time. It cannot survive much longer. Many are transitional beings int hat the old still has momentum but the new is arising.
The purpose of true art is to see the formless shining through the form. Our purpose is to become that art so the formless shines through us. This happens when we have access to the realm of stillness. The new state is a balance between what is manifested and what is unmanifested. Living this way, we have become a work of art.
The people of this age are obsessed with form and things. They cannot carry the burden of their overcomplicated structures. Collapse is coming. It is liberating when you see how short-lived all forms are.
Death is the most threatening thing to a civilization obsessed with form.
Tonight, the Kansas City Friends of Jung showed the first hour of a DVD set of Eckhart Tolle talking about “Approaching the Self.” We’ll be viewing the rest of the 4-hour DVD set at later times. This was my first exposure to Tolle although I had heard of him before tonight. It was very interesting although hardly new — it was essentially Buddhist mindfulness mixed with a hint of Jung. Tolle’s strength, from what I saw tonight, was putting the ideas into language easy for Westerners to comprehend. I’ll go over just a few highlights of what I saw:
Tolle’s main topic was about reaching the Stillness inside us all; a Stillness that we don’t have to get or find because we already have it — we just don’t always notice it. He described this Stillness as “the dimension inside yourself far deeper than the movement of thought.”
“Analysis always destroys the object.” This reminded me of something from The Gateless Gate about the difference between a Westerner and a Buddhist appreciating a flower. The Westerner plucks the flower and analyses it by pulling it apart to see how it’s made and see inside it. The Buddhist leaves the flower where it is and just looks at it.
“If you become truly present [in the now] you will find the sacred everywhere.”
We are not truly present because we are always thinking; thinking about the future, worrying about the past, focusing on our problems. We rationalize it by saying, “I have important problems to think about.” But all our “problems,” the future, all of it are thought forms and all forms crumble.
We focus on who/what we think we are as a separate, independent person. We have a compulsion to search for more, to add more to who we think we are — more possessions, recognition, etc. Yet all these things are thought forms. We complain about things because “complaining makes you feel right and the other person wrong.” This conflict helps us keep our separate sense of self in tact.
We reduce others to caricatures. We relate to the thoughts in our heads that we have about others and not to the persons directly.
That’s the hakuna mattata way of thinking. No worries because God’s gonna save our asses before things get real bad. So all these environmental, racial, terrorism, educational, political, &c. issues are God’s problem, not ours. He’ll clean them all up before his 1000 year reign and he’ll have 7 long years to do it — piece of cake for the great omnipotent one.
Ah, t’would be easier, t’wouldn’t it!
But back on the sane planet Earth, I’m watching a show about the biggest science discoveries of 2007 and one of them was that we lost an amount of ice in the Arctic equal in surface area to half of the U.S.A.! They didn’t expect that amount of loss for another 30 years but it happened this year! Talk about ahead of schedule.
So, I’m watching this show and imagining cities under domes to protect them from the poisonous atmosphere and scorching temperatures; and cave dwelling, marauding hordes of starving, bear-skin-wearing pirates; and underground cities where the temperature is cool enough to sustain life but it’s completely dark so the people mutate into walking, talking mole-people. And I’m imagining all this happening in the next 20 years or so because it’s getting serious out there, folks. It’s all rather depressing.
Then I ran across “On Hopelessness” at Sacred Awe. Fitting title, I thought, for my mood. One of the excellent points made in this meditation is that of “committed action, non-attachment to outcome.” This comes from Buddhism but I think it can be equally stated as “love your neighbor as yourself, do not worry about tomorrow.” You know, maybe it’s because I grew up with the “Christian version” and I heard the words so often that I became almost numb to them, but a simple rephrasing in different words makes the difficulty in carrying it out much more clear. Non-attachment to outcome: it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t lie awake at night worrying about all the changes that are raining into your life like fire and brimstone, just do what you have to do right now. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t worry about being annihilated but don’t expect God to save your ass, either.
Something else from the mediation was part of a poem by Patricia Lay-Dorsay:
But it’s OK if sometimes we’re out of balance because the Universe goes on whether we’re along for the ride or not. Nothing humanity can do will disrupt the perfect balance of the Universe. We are not that powerful. Even though our choices can throw certain elements like climate species survival land and water ecology out of whack nothing we can do will throw off the beauty of the Universe itself.
I appreciate the motivation behind this poem but, honestly, my first reaction was: knowing the Universe will outlast our globally-warmed, nuclear-weapon-destroyed, raped-to-the-point-of-sterility little planet is not a whole lot of comfort. Maybe I just need to get out and look at the stars more often but I live in a city and it was snowing all day so there weren’t any to see. But maybe there is more here . . .
I’m not really sure it is relevant, but the first thing I thought of was the following from Alan Watts’ Myth and Religion where he is talking about the Hindu and Buddhist concept that “everybody is a manifestation of the divine, playing this game and that game. Your not knowing it, if you do not know it, is part of the game. It makes it all the more fun.” Watts says:
I would say to those among you who are the most ignorant, unspiritual, and stuffy, Congratulations! You are so lost in the game you do not even know where you stand, and are taking a gorgeous risk. Because of you we might even blow up the planet, and how close are we going to get with that one? In the same way as that car racer watches the speedometer needle going up, up, and up, there are people feeling more and more self-righteously determined that good shall prevail in the world, all the while watching that needle of world tension go up. It is getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and finally we may all go out in a blaze of glory. When the dust settles they will say, “That was quite a dream we have just woken up from. What shall we do next?”
Talk about non-attachment to outcome! But how do you get there??? That seems to be the question I’m asking a lot these days. I can see — off in the distance, across the chasm — an alternative viewpoint, one that seems like it will actually work for me (unlike Fundamental Christianity) but the bridge is out, my GPS is broken and it’s the longest, moonless night of the year. So, for now, I’m walking around in circles waiting for sunrise.
Found a quote from The Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus on The Fire and the Rose:
The Son is image of the Father, and image of the Son is the Spirit, through whom the Christ dwelling in man gives it to him to be to the image of God.
So, we can’t become the image of God without the Holy Spirit? But I thought we were created in the image of God. There’s no becoming involved.
Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.
In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki writes:
Indeed, we are all apt to forget that every one of us is Buddha himself. In the Christian way of saying, this means that we are all made in the likeness of God, or in Eckhart’s words, that “God’s is-ness is my is-ness and neither more nor less.”
We already are the image of God so what does the Holy Spirit have to do? The Holy Spirit is the reminder of things we’ve forgotten because (again from Mysticism)
… the sense of opposites is dominating your consciousness. The idea of participation or empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience, while as far as the experience itself is concerned, there is no room for any sort of dichotomy. The intellect, however, obtrudes itself and breaks up the experience in order to make it amenable to intellectual treatment, which means a discrimination or bifurcation. The original feeling of identity is then lost and intellect is allowed to have its characteristic way of creaking up reality into pieces. Participation or empathy is the result of inellectualization.
. . .
It is our eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge which has resulted in our constant habit of intellectualizing. But we have never forgotten, mythologically speaking, the original abode of innocence: that is to say, even when we are given over to intellection and to the abstract way of thinking, we are always conscious, however dimly, of something left behind and not appearing on the chart of well-schematized analysis. This “something” is no other than the primary experience of reality in its suchness or is-ness …
The Holy Spirit does not enable us to become the image of God but, rather, is the constant reminder that we already are the image of God. If we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, then we can realize this a-rational identity. A-rational because it does not come from our intellect. We cannot think our way into the image of God. We must experience it in a raw, unprocessed manner.
Ok, that’s the answer I’ve been looking for but the new question of the day is “How?????”
Been thinking lately about how in the hell I’m going to make any spiritual progress when I have very little time to be “spiritual.” You know, “Deadlines and commitments. What to leave in? What to leave out?” My 17 month old daughter is definitely a “leave in” and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for other stuff. (But I love it!)
Then I found the following in The Gateless Gate by Koun Yamada:
The poem that expresses the Hinayana point of view is:
Since the whole cottage has been built by assembling brushwood,
If we took it to pieces,
Nothing would remain but the field, as before.The one which expresses the Mahayana point of view is:
Since the cottage has been built by assembling brushwood,
There is nothing but the field,
Even without taking it to pieces.Now, what does the field mean? Again, it is nothing but the empty-infinite, our essential nature, and what does the brushwood represent? It is the objective world, which includes our body and mental activities — concepts, ideas, thinking, feeling, and so on. When we get rid of this objective world, there remains only standing up, sitting down, going to bed, walking and running, eating a meal when you are hungry, crying when sad, working when you need money. There are no concepts or ideas whatsoever attached to these. When you sit down, there is no philosophy attached. Our life in this world is made up of such actions. Is there anything more? No! And from the standpoint of sitting down or taking a walk, there is no difference at all between Buddhas and us.
And this reminded me of I Corinthians 10:31
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
“Whatever you do.” That means every single second of every single day. That’s more than saying grace before I eat — it’s eating my hamburger for the glory of God. It’s brushing my teeth for the glory of God. It’s driving to the grocery store for the glory of God. It’s doing all the mundane, mindless, mediocre, menial things for the glory of God. Because that’s what life really is. Life is what happens between the couple of high points you may experience.
So, the question has now become shorter but no less simple: “How?”
I’ve been lightly skimming (no offense intended 
) the Confessing Evangelical’s posts on Ellul’s What I Believe. But I went back and looked more carefully at The Word That Grips Us and then at the list of Ellul’s other publications on Jesus Radicals. I just want to say a huge “thank you” to John for leading me to Ellul. It looks like fascinating stuff that’s right up my alley and I’m definitely going to read him. Well, I’m definitely going to put him on my stack of books to read. But up near the top! (I’m finding less and less time to read these days.)
Just a comment on The Word That Grips Us …
Ellul’s statement:
The revelation is not for me a matter of mystical contemplation. It is more like what many of us are familiar with; a word suddenly becomes so true to us that we can no longer doubt it.
We know well how astonishing this experience can be. I read in the Bible texts that I have read a hundred times, that I know by heart, that are part of my objective knowledge of the biblical God, and suddenly the word that I know so well intellectually takes on an unexpected significance, a blinding force that constrains me to accept it as truth, as a truth at once comprehensible, irrational, and rigorously certain.
seems to me to be precisely “mystical contemplation.” It immediately evoked images of Zen monks achieving a moment of satori or enlightenment as the master raises a finger or slaps across the face. The “contemplation” part was when Ellul read these passage “hundreds of times” and committed them to memory. And the revelation is when you suddenly see what you’ve been staring at. You see it in a totally different from; from a new angle; with “fresh eyes.” It’s been there the whole time but something in you has changed so that you really see.
Now, I don’t know Ellul and of course I can’t speak for him. If he does not consider this as “mystical contemplation” then it’s not. I just can’t help but notice the similarity.
In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist D.T. Suzuki quotes Meister Eckhart …
I have read many writings both of heathen philosophers and sages, of the Old and New Testaments, and I have earnestly and will all diligence sought the best and the highest virtue whereby man may come most closely to God and wherein he may once more become like the original image as he was in God when there was yet no distinction between God and himself before God produced creatures. And having dived into the basis of things to the best of my ability I find that it is no other than absolute detachment from everything that is created. It was in this sense when our Lord said to Martha: “One thing is needed,” which is to say: He who would be untouched and pure needs just one thing, detachment. [emphasis mine]
This is quite interesting to me and very non-mainstream Christian. Eckhart is saying that man existed before God created anything. But man didn’t exist as man, man existed as an image in God and as an image that was not distinct from God. Does this mean that man was/is God?
What does “no distinction between God and himself” mean? The meaning that first comes to mind is that you can’t tell them apart. Does this mean than man is God? As an analogy, it is most likely possible to produce a counterfeit ten dollar bill that is indistinguishable from a real ten dollar bill. But what would that take? It would take the exact same ink, the exact same paper, an exact duplicate of the plates, and probably a couple other things. But if the “fake” bill uses the same ink and paper and identical plates, is it really fake? Isn’t it really only fake because it wasn’t printed in a sanctioned government mint (or wherever it is that money is printed)? And if this is the only difference, then isn’t it really a genuine bill; fake in name only? In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …
Then I looked up the word “distinction.” The definition, of course, references “distinct” which has two definitions that seem relevant: 1. distinguished as not being the same; not identical; separate and 2. different in nature or quality; dissimilar. Following these definitions then, Eckhart is saying that man and God are the same, identical, not separate, not different, not dissimilar. This is quite a statement! It is so very reminiscent of the well-known Zen koan: What was your face before your parents were born? Answer that and you’ve discovered your Buddha-nature. Answer that and you’ve discovered God. Answer that and you’ve re-discovered your true, essential Self; the Self not tied to this earthly body, this creature made by God.
Eckhart is also implying that the act of creating man on the sixth day was the act that resulted in the separation (the distinction) between God and man. Being human is being separated from God. Or, more accurately, thinking of our Selves as human — being attached to our humanity, as as such, our separateness from other humans and from God — is being separated from God. Perhaps this is the real reason Jesus became human. We were so intent on pushing God “out there” and then trying to re-bridge the gap with religion but it wasn’t working. We had totally forgotten our origins, our face before our parents were born, our true nature as indistinct from God. Jesus’ humanity demonstrates our actual situation — God (or something indistinct from God) incarnate. That is what we are to emulate in Jesus — his God-nature.
Paradise was never lost because we can’t change what we are. Paradise only seems lost because all our attention is on our humanity. We’ve really just forgotten that we are already in paradise right now. And the solution, as Eckhart says, is “absolute detachment from everything that that is created.” Detachment from our humanity and from our society and our culture. This detachment is exactly what Jesus speaks of when he tells us to not worry and trust in him for everything. It’s what Paul talks about when he tells us to pray without ceasing. It’s having our focus on heaven and storing up riches where thieves do not break in and steal.
Thomas Merton, again, from Zen and the Birds of Appetite:
The best we can say is that in certain religions, Buddhism for instance, the philosophical or religious framework is of a kind that can more easily be discarded, because it has in itself a built-in “ejector,” so to speak, by which the meditator is at a certain point flung out from the conceptual apparatus into the Void. It is possible for a Zen Master to say nonchalantly to his disciple, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him!” But in Christian mysticism the question whether or not the mystic can get along without the human “form” (Gestalt) or the sacred Humanity of Christ is still hotly debated, with the majority opinion definitely maintaining the necessity for the Christ of faith to be present as ikon at the center of Christian contemplation. Here again, the question is confused by the failure to distinguish between the objective theology of Christian experience and the actual psychological facts of Christian mysticism in certain cases. And then one must ask, at what point do the abstract demands of theory take precedence over the psychological facts of experience? Or, to what extent does the theology of a theologian without experience claim to interpret correctly the “experienced theology” of the mystic who is perhaps not able to articulate the meaning of his experience in a satisfactory way?
Everyone espousing a particular theology needs to have a way to distinguish those who believe the same from those who don’t. For the mystic, there is a certain language that is shared which makes no sense to outsiders. For the “theologian without experience” the theology must take on a rigid belief system which must be intellectual since there is no experiential basis. This external theology then requires adherence to sacraments, creeds, and behaviors. This is precisely why mystics have been questionable, at best, and often outcasts. The two theologies have nothing in common and there is a one-way path of communication. The mystic can interpret the other theology in terms of her experiences and thereby gain from participating in the sacraments, creeds, and behaviors. But there is no such understanding going the other direction. The non-experiencing theologian cannot understand the mystic’s theology any more than he can understand a joke told in a foreign language. Therefore, he has no ruler by which to measure the mystical theology’s closeness to his own. The easiest thing to do is condemn her.
And a little later …
On the other hand, let us repeat that we must not neglect the great importance of experience in Christianity. But Christian experience always has a special modality, due to the fact that it is inseparable from the mystery of Christ and the collective life of the Church, the Body of Christ. To experience the mystery of Christ mystically or otherwise is always to transcend the merely individual psychological level and to “experience theologically with the Church” (sentire cum Ecclesia). In other words, this experience must always be in some way reducible to a theological form that can be shared by the rest of the Church or that shows that it is a sharing of what the rest of the Church experiences. There is therefore in the recording of Christian experiences a natural tendency to set them down in language and symbols that are easily accessible to other Christians. This may perhaps sometimes mean an unconscious translation of the inexpressible into familiar symbols that are always at hand ready for immediate use.
Two things for me here but the second will be the subject of its own post. First is the idea that since “experience must always be … reducible to a theological form that can be shared” then there is “a natural tendency to set them down in language and symbols that are easily accessible to other Christians.”
I agree that if you are going to share experience with everyone then it must be reduced down to something concrete that can be passed around. And this is somewhat of a problem for me because by solidifying an experience, you lose so much and gain so little because it’s impossible for someone to partake in your experience who has not had the same experience (or similar) herself. Just imagine trying to share the experience of the color red with someone who has been blind since birth.
But making it “easily accessible” is the real problem for me. If it’s easy then it’s not so precious. I’ve talked on this topic before but I’m coming to realize that this is one of the bigger “issues” I take with Evangelical and Fundamental Christianity. (I hesitate using such adjectives as I know there is a wide range of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists and what I’m saying does not apply to everyone. What I really mean to do is describe the type of Christianity/Christian I am referring to by my description. The old “if the shoe fits …” and it’s up to you to decide if I’m referring to you or not.) But back on point. “Easily accessible” requires a formula. It does not allow for differing experiences of the same thing where these experiences are not trivially reconciled. Everyone must follow the formula or risk being labeled as a heretic.
This leads to legalism and fanaticism, and lends itself extremely well to hypocrisy. As long as you appear to be following the formula, toeing the line, then you are in the right. If you deviate from the formula, it is obvious and are a prime candidate for rebuke or retaliation from those in the right. Worse still, those who only appear to be correct are the ones who most vehemently require absolute compliance from the rest of us for it somehow alleviates the self doubt they secretly harbor. It’s their shadow being projected on others.
It is in such a legalistic context that the sacred symbols of our experience of Christ become the battle grounds of theologians who cannot admit the validity of formulae different from their own. The precise meaning and interpretation of the sacraments, for example, overshadow the experience and actually insulate the Christian from the full experience of Christ. The focus is so strongly fixated on the external details that the experience itself is lost. Whether the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus or whether they represent the body and blood or whatever should be a distant second in importance to the experience itself of partaking in the death and resurrection of The Christ.
Furthermore, the “easily accessible” formula not only insulates but actually works to prevent the experience because the experiencer has outside constraints on how the experience is to be realized. What one does and how one thinks is dictated by the formula and so one is not free to experience the sacraments, for example, apart from the well-defined, specific, ritual set down by the theologians. It’s like painting by number where you are told exactly what color to use where. That’s not really painting at all. There’s no feeling in it. There’s no connection with the work. There’s no real experience of painting.
The second point is the “set them down in language and symbols” part. Merton has an excellent passage on how we use language which is germane to this point and will be posted later.
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