“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is not dependent upon things being a certain way, good or bad. Watch any animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is. Observe its surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being.” Eckhart Tolle (from A New Earth)___________________________
In some way or another I’ve been on a “spiritual path” since I read Thomas Merton in my early twenties while serving on a submarine. I’m now 81. Each decades is like a different chapter of the same unfinished book. The 60s was full of cracks in my psychic egg, the 70s intense guru yoga, the 80s psychic breakdowns, the 90s leaving the spiritual path, the 20s returning to the path of practice, and this decade tasting the fruits of the practice. I’m more creative now than I’ve ever been in my life. Mind is a steady clear stream without the contractions from reactions to conditions. Life is ironic: the more I see, the less I pee.
I don’t mind what happens now. This is not intentional, but it is just the way it is. Always in good humor, even with the flu or loss of money, life (the Now) just is what it is. My practice is unbroken, in the sense that I’m awake and aware of the present moment as myself. While I am a separate person, of course, I feel no alienation from experience and the world. My mind is always in a creative mode, connecting dots, having insight, and when I write insights flow out of a hidden well-spring.
This writing breaks with my normal stream of writing here on Facebook because I’m hesitant to suggest there is anything special here. When I read Tolle’s quote for the day, I cannot help but write: Well, this is where I’m at today….and today is all there is. The state of grace (as Tolle describes) is being free from the tyranny of future and its fears.
Tolle Teaching is all about letting go of our conditioned belief that time past and future exists in measured ticks. NOW does not exist in time; time exists in NOW.
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