What is happening –
I'm watching a movie, a little disturbed by the violence, take a
break to pee... suddenly I'm aware, a pang of fear... the conceptual
reality-bubble I create to walk around in is burst,... I feel
vulnerable, I'm standing at the toilet but the greater world is just
beyond these walls, with its terrible indifference, its marauding
criminals, doppler sirens, terrorists and accidents roaming the
streets, major hostility... and cancer... and it's true “I” am
vulnerable, “I” understood as the passing personality, the
physical form, by all indications mortal, will
perish... how to identify instead with the eternal, the source out of
which temporality emerges and recedes?.... not in a conceptual bubble
but in reality, dancing uninhibitedly in joyous time tempo? Well,
Eckhart Tolle suggests being the observer is how you get there.
Notice thoughts, emotions, fear, dis-ease in this case... watch it
evaporate in the light of consciousness, replaced by awareness.
The great social critic, Michael Parenti, suggests that the imaging or connecting with the whole, ONE, referred to above, and in the writings of mystics, is just more self delusion, more conceptual bubble. I suppose he would say that we are conscious beings due to the complicated biological intersections of our DNA, bodies, brain and other organs, and when it dies, we die with it. He probably wouldn't object to characterizing the process as mysterious and profound, impressively, massively complicated, wondrously effective. BUT... I want to argue that interconnection is a word that attempts to point at a feeling we have, variously called mysticism, peak experience, harmony, groove, intuition, god, muse,... self-evident gestalt. It's self-evidently miraculous this being, and intelligent, and what energises us, is us. I can't accept that as illusion, much easier to accept physical reality, as in Eastern thought, as the illusion. Tolle's point is that becoming the observer brings into awareness the fact that we are that energy. Whatever the fate of the personality, very likely oblivion, “we” are that energy, our true self and somehow feeling it, knowing it, aligning with it, brings peace, joy and creativity.
Our thoughts, and “learning”, may tell us that in awareness we lose our protection, the story we tell ourselves, whatever it is, say middle class affluence, safety and predictability - that story drops away and we either flee back to our comfort zone or experience fear... until we recognize, feel, that that fear is just a thought/emotion, that there could be but isn't right now a threat to our safety (our in the limited sense of the personality). Even when we experience, say, a serious cancer diagnosis... even then, there is no threat right now, just a speculation about the future. Not that we deny it, we just put it in its place, the future and we've always known that we'll die someday so, though it might be eminent, it isn't NOW. As we enter into the final stretch, as the suffering begins, then we will have to cope, but not now. Now we can do what has always been at our beckon call - still the mind, enjoy being, go with the creative impulses that arise.
To ego, “I” am
everything. To ONE, “I” am nothing, well, a small blip on a
universe-sized screen. That is the personality but that “I”
is ultimatelly illusion, what animates is who “I” am, at root.
Not to belabor a
point but to start with what is known: we sense the world and we
think the world, we experience the world via sensory input and
thought. When we become, as Tolle suggests, the observer, when
thoughts and emotions are suspended, put in the background, we become
who he says we are, consciousness.
Cancerous Planet
Our beautiful and
fragile Planet has been suffering a lingering and growing malignancy,
the diagnosis in dispute, second and third opinions all over the map.
The recent U.S. presidential election is but one phase of a
chemo/radiation treatment, prognosis dire, chances of survival
questionable. What to do? Get centered, escape ego, diminish mind
chatter, get present. The answer to that “what to do” question
will then become obvious.
Footnote: The 1%
want you to hold certain opinions and they take some trouble and
expense to make that happen. Until you are willing to carefully
examine your point of view, comparing it to what their campaign
strives for, and deciding whether you arrived there independently or
by their manipulation, you are very possibly merely one of their
pawns, standing in opposition to your own interests.
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