Disidentifying from Thoughts

For the past month or so I have enormously enjoyed and benefited from the recorded discussions between Eckhart Tolle and Oprah. More than a dozen hours of discussion can be found for free on Oprah's web site, focused on Tolle's new book, A New Earth. You can download mp3 audio files, watch videos, or read the PDF transcripts of the discussions. I highly recommend checking it out! Usually I do not follow the adventures of Oprah or the topics on her TV show. I haven't owned a television for years. But recently I learned she was following a 21-day vegan diet, and that really piqued my interest. If Oprah can enlighten the mainstream masses towards a more compassionate diet and promote a higher state of consciousness, then I am all for it! Gives me a glimmer of hope for humanity's future.

The following is just one amazing quote from A New Earth:

What you may be aware of as a voice in your head that never stops speaking is the stream of incessant and compulsive thinking. When every thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of ego. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of "I Am," which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare.

So the trick is to realize that when we become so totally identified with our own thoughts, and the emotions that can arise from them, that we have lost touch with our true self, our authentic "sense of Beingness." We have confused our identity with our thoughts. Descartes' famous statement, "I think, therefore I am," really describes the ego, not the true self. As Tolle points out, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre responded with, "The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." Tolle interprets this as, "When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness."

Any thought or opinion we hold dear can be ripe for examination. It reminds me of some wise words in the movie Fight Club:

You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

We could add plenty of other common false identities:

• You are not your health problems.
• You are not your political affiliation.
• You are not your prejudiced viewpoints.
  
• You are not your religious beliefs.
• You are not your mistakes.
• You are not your successes.
• You are not your depression/anxiety/fear.
  
• You are not your hobbies.
• You are not your lack of hobbies.
• You are not your nationality/culture/race/gender.
  
• You are not the television shows that you watch.
• You are not your sense of victimhood.
  
• You are not the ideology you think you believe in.
  
• You are not the diet that you follow.
• You are not your face/body in the mirror.
  
• You are not the success/failure of your children.
• You are not the experiences of your childhood.
• You are not your family's history.
• You are not your opinions.
• You are not your perceptions.
  
• You are not your feelings.
  

So if you're not any thing, if you're not a collection of labels or roles or accumulated experiences and conditioning, then what ARE you? As Tolle suggests, your REAL you is that which observes your thoughts. The real you is in the stillness between what your body perceives with its senses and the thoughts that arise in your mind. The real you is the sense of aliveness or Beingness that is having this experience of being a human in this body at this time and place, in this present moment.

Now, this is not to say that the items in the list are not important or that you shouldn't care about anything or not deal with your feelings, opinions, or experiences, or not make an effort to improve the world. The problem arises when you get so absorbed into your thoughts that you confuse your identity with your thoughts. If you hold an opinion so strongly that you get terribly offended or emotional when someone attacks your opinion or disagrees with it, this would be one example in which you have mistaken your opinion, your thought, and made it into your identity. Your ego has decided that your actual opinion is YOU, your identity, and to have your opinion attacked is to be attacked personally. This is an illusion and a terrible cause of much unnecessary suffering.

Become the observer, the witness, of your own thoughts and feelings and see what happens. This is the beginning of disidentification with the ego, your artificial self, the mask that hides the real you inside. This is also the beginning of "salvation" or "enlightenment" which the great religious traditions attempt to lead us towards.

Lost Christianity

I just finished reading Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman. The following is a quote from Father Sylvan, a mysterious, spiritually-advanced monk who crossed paths with Mr. Needleman. The author received the monk's journals, using them to explore the deeper levels of Christianity. From Father Sylvan's journal:

The idea of levels of Christianity may never again be known in the West. There is an intermediate level of Christianity which teaches the way that the higher level becomes distorted. We need the intermediate level. We need to observe how we lose Christianity, lose mysticism, lose the energy of God. Here lies the origin of sin and repentance, on the border between heaven and hell.

Modern people do not understand that the Christian ideals to which half the world attempts to conform comprise a description of the results of a specific inner act and inner inquiry. Mysticism is a result, a great result perhaps, of the inner inquiry; but everything is corrupted when I confuse inner work with the results of inner work.

To experience love for God or my neighbor, even for an instant, is no less a result than mystical experience. To be virtuous is a result. To have faith is a result. Similarly, wisdom and compassion are results.

All corruption of tradition begins with the confusion and mixing of inner work with the results of inner work. Jesus saw that the Judaism of his time had fallen into this confusion and that no one was practicing the inner discipline free from the expectation or assumption of results.

And another quote from Father Sylvan:

In a certain sense, the problem of Christianity is not that something has been hidden, but that not enough has stayed hidden.

Fascinating stuff! I think this connects very well with what Maurice Nicoll explores in The New Man:

The idea behind all sacred writing is to convey a higher meaning than the literal words contain, the truth of which must be seen by Man internally. This higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric, meaning, cast in the words and sense-images of ordinary usage, can only be grasped by the understanding, and it is exactly here that the first difficulty lies in conveying higher meaning to Man. A person's literal level of understanding is not necessarily equal to grasping psychological meaning.

And this, also from The New Man:

The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development - that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. The Gospels are not about the affairs of life, save indirectly, but about this central idea - namely, that Man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth. Man is compared with a seed capable of a definite evolution. As he is, Man is incomplete, unfinished. A man can bring about his own evolution, his own completion, individually. If he does not wish to do this he need not. He is then called grass - that is, burned up as useless. This is the teaching of the Gospels. But this teaching can be given neither directly nor by external compulsion. A man must begin to understand for himself before he can receive it. You cannot make anyone understand by force, by law.

So if we take what Father Sylvan and Maurice Nicoll have said, we get an impression that what we think we know about Christianity could be only a very simplistic and superficial understanding, maybe even a grossly distorted understanding. The depth of truth concealed in the Gospels has probably been beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of humanity for centuries, let alone much of the hierarchy of the Church which has tried to convey those truths. Contrast this with Ken Wilber's concepts of the states and stages of development in Integral Theory. Western civilization has only recently started to emerge from the mythic/ethnocentric stage of development in the past century or two (perhaps as much as 70% of humanity is still at the mythic stage today). If the Gospels are read and comprehended from a mythic, ethnocentric stage of consciousness, then it would make sense why much of humanity has failed to grasp the deeper meaning of the Gospels. This is not to criticize people at the mythic stage. All humans and societies and civilizations progress through stages of development, from lower to higher. But what do we do with this situation, if anything? How do we help that 70% move up to a higher stage of consciousness? Should they be helped or not? Can the "lost Christianity" be rediscovered and be a catalyst for humanity's spiritual development?

Eudaimonia

There's a wonderful little article on the Oprah web site about five traits of happy people. Here is a quote from the article:

Cobbled from the Greek eu ("good") and daimon ("spirit" or "deity"), eudaimonia means striving toward excellence based on one's unique talents and potential—Aristotle considered it to be the noblest goal in life. In his time, the Greeks believed that each child was blessed at birth with a personal daimon embodying the highest possible expression of his or her nature. One way they envisioned the daimon was as a golden figurine that would be revealed by cracking away an outer layer of cheap pottery (the person's baser exterior). The effort to know and realize one's most golden self—"personal growth," in today's lingo—is now the central concept of eudaimonia, which has also come to include continually taking on new challenges and fulfilling one's sense of purpose in life.

I think this is such a wonderful concept! I hadn't heard of eudaimonia before but it really resonates with me as encapsulating something I have been seeking since childhood. I think part of the path of becoming a fully conscious and enlightened human being involves this innate drive towards perfection and fulfillment; of striving towards the best that you can be and fulfilling your life's purpose.

The idea of the "baser exterior" that hides "one's most golden self" can also refer to the way in which our ego, desires, appetites, and attachments, can obscure and block us from getting to know our true inner self (part of the classic conflict between the animal nature versus the rational mind). It makes sense that if you begin to crack apart that false outer layer that you start to tune into that authenticity of knowing your true self, which in turns directs you toward following your life's purpose, which in turn brings real happiness. I am reminded again of Joseph Campbell's famous statement, "Follow your bliss."


Eudaimonia might also correspond to one of the major ideals in Freemasonry, represented by the metaphorical stone of one's self. Through inner work and right conduct the stone is transformed and perfected. What was raw, wild, and unfocused, given to us as a gift by God and nature to carve into being, becomes something beautiful, real, and perfected. The challenge and the path for all human beings is to recognize that this work needs to be done. To leave one's stone, one's self, undeveloped and unknown is to abandon the great potential that we have been given. To only see the "outer layer of cheap pottery" and to mistake it as our true self is to waste our potential and only live within a superficial experience of being.