Today’s Talk Quote on “Meditations on Eckhart Tolle”: “How “spiritual” you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness.” 

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What would life be like if you removed your beliefs? Of course, we spend most of our life trying to remove or diminish the beliefs of others, but what about you? Spirit means without form. Spirituality then is the end of dependence on form, the end of identification of form, so it’s the end of my believing I’m something, some form in time/space located on a map.

Not that it is wrong to be a form on a map in history, but it’s just that this is a surface view of life that has no depth. We just study the wrinkles in the sin of the orange instead of eating the orange.

I write here before the talk to generate some energy for the talk, and already the energy is being generated. If I were Joe Friday only interested in the bare observable facts, I would conclude that the purpose of beliefs is to create conflict with other beliefs, a conflict that validates my belief in who I am. If no one opposed my beliefs what would that feel like? Beliefs condition me. But what happens when the conditioned belief meets the unconditioned? What happens when I meet someone who doesn’t care what I believe, and yet cares about me? Do I exist beyond my beliefs?

If we want to go beneath the skin of the orange, we have to go deeply into ourselves, through the encrusted layers of belief. Maybe an onion is a better metaphor. Layers upon layers of beliefs, both collective and personal, protected me from the One Taste of the orange. What does the taste of the orange mean? Beliefs tell me about the meaning of my life and yours. So I eat the belief instead of the orange.