Spiritual reading — light at the end of our personal tunnel; Tolle on humans as a bridge to the higher man

The inspiration for Eckhart Tolle’s second bestseller, A New Earth,

 

came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.

We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus.

Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. ‘A new heaven’ is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and ‘a new earth’ is its reflection in the physical realm.

(The Core of the Ego) – Chapter Three

[strongly edited and amplified by me, John de Nugent]

Most people are so completely identified with the voice in their head — the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it — that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind.

As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are.

This is the egoic mind.

We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought — every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion.

This mind thinks it is you, when it is not, but a tool gone out of control.

*** JdN I can hear some of my readers now:

“What fluff! Getting ahold of your mind? WTF? We need to be hating jews ‘n blacks more and writing more shit about them to each other!” 😉

No, first, conquer your mind, then you can use it as a razor-sharp tool, with others, to cut the diseased part out of this wretched world.

Would you want a brain surgeon fooling around in your brain while his is drifting  off to his last argument with his girlfriend? Can anything great  be done with an undisciplined mind?

 

***

This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patters that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself.

In most cases, when you say “I,” it is the ego speaking, not you, as we have seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you identify with as “me and my story,” of habitual roles you play without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance.

It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance,

long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure.

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same?

They live on identification with some thing here on earth and separation from others.

Neo-German car ad — successful white woman with snazzy car (and a muslim husband, so, umm, how is the daughter blonde?)

When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting.

So are your precious material goodies, your health and money.

Margi and I never thought a woman like her who never smoked or drank, was never overweight, and ate only organic could ever get throat cancer. Trying to fight it with natural therapies (since, as we found out ourselves, chemo and radiation can be devastating even if they work), used up almost her entire inheritance. Health and money, totally unforeseeably, were both gone.

So every ego, being fragile, is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself.

To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought, which is “the other.” The conceptual “I” (which is not the real you, an eternal soul, at all) cannot survive without having the conceptual “other” to oppose, look down on, compete with and feel resentment toward.

The others are most “other,” of course, when I see them as my enemies.

It all starts with, at one end of the scale of unconscious egoic patter, the egoic, compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others.

Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”

At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations.

“Get them krauts! Even the wimmin’n’kids are no good!” (Scene from “Hellstorm”) 

In the Bible, Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, and superior.

Complaining & Resentment

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.

Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference.

Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with — being neither good-looking, nor rich, nor educated, nor popular or powerful — easily survive on complaining alone. 😉

When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing.

Unconscious — asleep — unaware what you are doing, because YOU, the eternal soul that is the real you, are not doing it;  this egoic mind is.

Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern.

Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right and triumph over others: “jerk, bastard, bitch”–all definitive pronouncements that you can’t argue with.

On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done.

The ego loves it.

Instead of overlooking what is actually unconsciousness in others, not the real them, you make it wrongly into their identity, into “who they are.”

Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the egoic mind, reacting to unconscious in THEM, to THEIR egoic mind.

Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn’t even actually there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior.

At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. You blow it out of proportion. And what you react to in another, their ego, you strengthen also in yourself, YOUR ego.

Non-reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego.

But you can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from their egoic mind, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction.

*** JdN

When Jesus prayed on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” this was literally true. People are insane many times a day, doing things that their soul knows will hurt them, their loved, ones, their relationships, their job and their health.

I know a nice guy here in town who has gotten himself fired from two good jobs in one month, and not for bad work performance, but character issues. In a small town like this, where “the word gets around,” this is a disaster for him!

He harmed himself!

When you realize it’s not personal when someone acts like a jerk toward you, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

By not reacting to THEIR egoic mind, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned.

At times, however, you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies.

*** I am always armed and have been to the sheriff about several individuals.  I engage in no arguments with them, and I even nod respectfully at one of them, acknowledging that he is there.  (In prison, you nod in respect even at people you dislike, otherwise they feel “dissed” and “disrespected.”)

I never escalate it. I know his egoic mind is out of control, and is not the real him.

But were his egoic mind to flip totally out of control, and he attacked me, yes, I would very calmly use this, and it would be tough, practical love of him as well as me. I would be preventing him from committing a crime.

***

Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego.

Non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the egoic mind to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up–if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral.

But “How dare you serve me cold soup!?” That’s complaining.

There is a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a “me” that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn’t really want to change so that it can go on complaining.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the egoic mind, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought.

Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not that voice, but the one who is aware of it.

In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of that negative voice.

In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker.

In this way you are becoming free of the egoic mind, free of the unobserved mind.

The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is, strictly speaking, no longer the ego (meaning “I” in Latin or Greek) , but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern, an impostor, and not the real you.

Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while, because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.

“Are you not entertained?” The egoic, dark side of glorious Rome — the entertainment of watching enslaved men actually kill each other…

A new age is dawning, a neo-human is emergent within each one of us … fully conscious, authentically empowered, and one with the cosmic spirit that made all things!