“Whatever you learn though psychoanalysis or self-observation is “about” you. It is not you. It is content, not essence. Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. ” Eckhart Tolle (from The Power of Now)________________
Imagine a bowl made into some odd shape fill with alphabet soup. You are anxious and you don’t know why. Our Western first responders will come up with all kinds of strategies to analyze the content. What are those letter spelling. The cause of your pain is in the soup. What are those letter spelling beneath the surface. If we could dig deep enough, maybe get a glass bottomed boat you and your therapist could see what is in the unconscious. But, as Tolle says, this is ABOUT you as something, as an IT (fill in the blank).
This Western view point excludes the cup that holds the soup. No matter how long and expertly you search the soup, you will never discover the shape of the soup, which is the cause of your bend. You never see the self that is observing.
What is essence then? You are the whole cup, both inside and outside. You are not the letters (language/thinking) in the bowl of You. The shape of the soup is the outside of the bowl, and the outside of the bowl is the unconscious patterns or conditionality of you mind—which you can’t see through the alphabet in the soup.
The Shape of Water (soup). Haven’t seen the movie yet, but already I see a metaphor. Ego is what’s spelled by our language in the soup. Going beyond language “is stepping out of content.”
And how do you go beyond language: DUH….through metaphor, which is the picture language that is prior to our evolved phonetic language of thinking.
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