Today’s “Meditations on Eckhart Tolle” quote: “The moment you become aware of the ego in yourself, that emerging awareness is who you are beyond ego, the deeper “I.” The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.” 

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The seeing of the false is the seeing of the real….now that’s interesting. In other words, I am neither false or real, if both are the same. Did you catch that? There is no. either false OR real. There is no choice here. There is no Chose; there is no Decider. You don’t see Ego as something that is false, you as awareness see through Ego. Ego becomes transparent, but not to the real. In other words, there is no Real or False, two realities, one of which is real. This is a fundamental duality that creates a double-bind, for each reality is mutually dependent upon the other, yet they are separate. Seeing or Awareness or Knowing is transcendent of both the false and the real. This “emerging awareness” is a shift in identity from something as a noun to a verb.

Language fails us here because our language itself creates nouns and the separation of nouns. In our language, nouns or things are the doers. Nouns do something to other nouns. But Seeing itself is no thing. You as Seeing are no thing, so you have no fixed spot from which to see.

Wait a minute, what I’m describing sounds like psychosis. All guidance systems requires a fixed immoveable spot. A white out in a snow storm is when everything is snow and you can’t tell up from down. An instrument black out in a plane is when you have no reference to anything stable. This loss of reference, this loss of a fixed point, a lighthouse, creates panic. This is why we fear Alzheimers: there is no fixed reference to me as something with a history and a place. Is Awakening intentional Alzheimer’s, an invited psychosis? You would think so.

I just pulled up this Google image from a movie I need to see again. Getting lost never felt so good. In other words, having no fixed point of reference is the “cessation of suffering” according to Buddha. Our discontent, says the Buddha, is caused by Dukkha or separation, a split in the mind into two equal contradictory but mutually dependent halves. Then we are asked to choose which one is the Real Me. When a situation rises where we are in this double-bind of lose/lose, we feel a loss of center and orientation.

It is here that the opportunity rises to “become aware of the ego in yourself” says Tolle. As Cole Porter sang: “Nigh and day, you are the One.” You are, as Seeing, the eclipse of the moon and the sun. Seeing, your true One, rises when we can hold the moon and sun, the either/or of the Ego Chooser simultaneously, suspending judgment, suspending choice…just hold…just wait for it…wait….don’t run…don’t panic…wait….wait….Wait for the Eclipse.

As Joseph Campbell said, Modern man, having wiped the world clean of stabling mythology is now in free fall. That’s the opening logo of Mad Men, isn’t it. What is the Second Coming? What is the rebirth. I suddenly see Mad Men is all about the loss of center and the Second Coming, or restoration of Center that does not depend upon a fixed point, which for Don Draper was his self-loathing and his cover up. Don Draper’s self-loathing was his inner poverty, and it could not make it conscious, so it haunted him from the unconscious, popping up at inconvenient moments, sudden clues to his unraveling, clues to his descent and falling from the tower he had built. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

When the stabilizing mythology is the Middle Ages were erased by rationalism, instead of the Church being the stabilizer of consciousness, the Ego became the stabilizer, and like the Bible, the Ego was portable. These two movements rose together: the Reformation replaced the Fixed Church with the Bible in your pocket. Now you have the church in your pocket. And along with this portable church or mediator between and God you have the Ego as a fixed point that stabled incoming data into a conscious and stable world.

But Ego doesn’t stand along. Ego as an self image must not only be Unique as a separate sense of special self, it also must belong to something, so Ego belong to, identifies with the Nation, with your local church, with your political party, with your gang, with your family, with all these Russian Nesting Dolls, layers and layers of systems to which you can belong that stabilize the Ego. The Ego in order to fulfill its need to be Unique, will belong to a group that believe it is Unique. I and my Unique Group are One, says the ego, which can now obey the contradictory commandments of being Unique and Belong (not being unique) at the same time when the Group you identify with believes it is the One Unique group or people. You belong to the Group that is Chosen by God, because, of course, your God is the Unique One without a second.

And so the modern man stabilizes his consciousness through the portable Ego and its groups, little galaxies swirling through a universe of galaxies. The Dynamic Center of a group (tribe) gives it cohesive power. Trump and his base is a prime example of the Galaxy of Egos, planted orbiting around a Sun, or center held in place by the gravity or invested power in the sun/leader.

But when this center cannot hold, things fall apart. When threatened, the gravitational pull of the planets to their sun grows stronger, and in human affairs, more irrational, more absurd. The division between worlds grows greater.