Today’s Eckhart Tolle quote: “Whatever you learn. through psychoanalysis or elf-observation is about you. It is not you. It is content, not essence. Going beyond ego is stepping out of content.” 

Let’s pull this cotton ball apart this morning. When you know all about you, if you could lean everything about you, all you would have is the content of the cup, not the cup or the Knower of you as content, as experience. Are you knowable? Can you know the knower? When I say I know the knower, what I know is the Idea of knowing. The Knower is transcendent of the known. You are a transcendental being, the Knower of Being, which is anything you can experience.

I feel like I’m finding my “cup of soup” here. I learned something from this talk, and that is how I measure my talks. If the talk informs me as the student, then I find that it’s a good cup of soup.

Let talk about the movie The Shack, which I saw last night. The Shack is a metaphor, and metaphor point is opposite directions at the same time. A metaphor says that This is This and This is also That. But what is That? If you can see it, if you can experience it, talk about it, it is not That.

I AM THAT, says the non dual teaching of the ancients. But I AM is not a That. So the That is the cup that holds all the soup, but cannot be known as content of the mind, as experience. The cup or THAT cannot be known. Only being or this and that can be known, but the Knower is always beyond the known. Thous Art That.

So the movie as metaphor points to You as That, yet the movie like a reflection in a mirror is both a story that is something (and you can agree with it as something or not, you know, have an opinion about it) but as metaphor it points beyond story, beyond that to the That which cannot be known…and Thou Art That.

A metaphor is alchemy, a spiritual. metaphor like this movie or any art that points to the cup instead of the contents of the cup, that points beyond language itself, because language is the alphabet of the soup. Spiritual alchemy takes the base metal of this and that, of the material world, and through the magic of metaphor points beyond the material world of ITS. The selection of the mirror as metaphor point to the mirror that knows the reflection. And this Mirror is the One Knower that has no second, that cannot be known as an IT. Thou Art That.

The other point that came out in this talk is the non-dual teachings no matter what the tradition are metaphorical words that point in two directions: one finger points to something, information, content, concept, etc, and the other finger points to That which knows the teaching. Resonating with non-dual teachings is stepping out of the IT world into the Knower that has no second…you and the. Teaching become One Word, One Voice….you become the Big Bang as it is banging. This is the shift to the transcendent that one must stumble into, because you can’t make IT happen.