The End of Thought

June 29, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Monday with ET: “Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality comes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but seems very real while you are trapped in it.” E. Tolle from A New Earth
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Good morning. When I look back on the fruits of my years on the path and the last ten years of consistence meditation, the one thing that I can point to factually as a fruit is that I’m free from the tyranny of my own thinking. I still think, but thoughts are now helpful, like finding my keys, or a seed thought about what I’m going to write next.

I’m no longer plagued by mental monologues where thought tape loops like a snake eating itself. These mental vortexes are most devastating, and we think they are normal.

But all the chatter is now gone. It was a gradual retreat. All the incessant commenting on everything like I’m running a Facebook thread in my head…all gone. My mind is quiet and my eyes are open. When thinking subsides, Awareness rise like the morning sun. When a thought comes, it is like a small pebble in a still pond. I notice it, but it does not disturb my peace.

Don’t bend the soup

June 28, 2015 by admin 2 Comments

Sunday with ET: “Whatever you learn through psychoanalysis or self-observation is about you. It is not you. It is content, not essence. Going beyond ego is stepping out of content.” E. Tolle from A New Earth
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Good morning. Imagine you have a bent cup and everything you did was slightly off or bent, and it causes discontent in your experience because you know you are not complete. Yo always want more. So you begin to analyze the content of your cup: maybe it’s a cup of soup. You change brands, get lab reports, water it down, strengthen it’s concentration, get mad at it, feel guilty for it, and you even try to share it with everyone, even pouring it into another’s cup as you try to get rid of it. But no one wants it….And still the soup is still not right.

Wait…one day after a life-time of frustration, you realize: I’M NOT THE SOUP! I am not my thought!

A shift happens. Now you begin to notice the bend in your own mind that is the conditioned shape of your mind. And you also discover that when you notice without avoidance the bend in your mind, the soup of experience straightens out on its own, and the soup tastes pretty, pretty good. This becomes your practice of mindfulness: you become mindful of your soup. The bend may stay in the cup—for it is your personality after all—but it won’t make your experience taste bad anymore.

Eventually you see that the real You is formless Awareness itself. YOU are neither the cup or the soup.

Cut The Rope

June 27, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Saturday with ET: “If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who your are, then what’s left is who you are—the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. Give up defining yourself—to yourself and others. You won’t die. You will come to life.” E. Tolle from A New Earth
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Good afternoon…The final act of letting go of “who you are” is the death of one’s heritage, one’s story that holds personality and all its pain in place. This is an insane act. “One needs a little madness to cut the rope,” said Zorba the Greek. The rope is the hangman’s noose of definition. We are hung in slow motion by our belief that we are our past. Our whole life is the dance of death on the end of that rope. Cut the rope and drop free! We believe we will die, but quite the reverse happens.

Watch your Grammar

June 26, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Friday with ET: “There is no such thing as “my life,” and I don’t HAVE a life. I AM life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life? How could I lose something that I don’t have in the first place: How could I lose something that I AM? It is impossible.” E. Tolle from A New Earth
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Good morning…The paradigm of Suffering is the common sense view that creates a sense of self that is outside of its own mental and physical experience of the world, . Our grammar supports this view when language— and our language is out thought —creates a subject doing something to another object. We think the Subject is a separate stand along thing that does stuff and causes matter to move as an externally applied force.

When Buddha said life is suffering, it is this life of assumed separation to which he was pointing. The spiritual path is the questioning of this assumption that our grammar and our thought describes reality as it actually is.

The Choiceless Choice

June 25, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Thursday with ET: “The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of the ego. The ego can never be in alignment with the present moment, which is to say, aligned with life, since its very nature compels it to ignore, resist, and devalue the Now. ” E. Tolle from A New Earth
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Good morning. Of course, you must realize that the choice or decision to make the present moment your friend is the Ego, or a Bush called himself, The Decider. Since the Ego cannot be in alignment with the present moment, any decision to do so just continues the misalignment. The Perfect Trap, isn’t it.

What is necessary to make life your friend, however, is the heart felt soul yearning Intention to make the present moment your friend. That isn’t a sharp decision, but a yearning for God or the Truth of your existence. The Truth of your existence is the Present Moment…for God is this present moment as the Transcendent that shines though it.

When the present moment is your friend, God shines through it as beauty. Choice or decision cannot arrive at the present moment because choice is dual; one chooses between this or that. One cannot choose the present moment because there is nothing that Not present moment. There is no either/or. Truth is One; either/or is added by the mind.

If everything were the color green, you could not choose green. Everything is the present moment; you can’t choose it.