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.
Sphere: Related ContentTag Archive for 'buddhism'
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.”
Sphere: Related ContentLast 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.
Sphere: Related ContentTonight, 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.
Sphere: Related Content
