When you have tried everything to escape anxiety, the only thing left is to realize and accept that you can’t escape it. The caterpillar has no idea what the butterfly is, but he accepts there is no escape from the anxiety of being a worm; then the alchemy happens and the worm turns into a butterfly of freedom.
Anxiety is the tape-loop of human consciousness when it gets caught in a hall of horror mirrors: I’m anxious…I’m anxious about being anxious…I’m anxious about being anxious about being anxious…..Panic Attack! I’m going down the drain!
From the view point of spiritual resolution to this problem of consciousness, the double-bind of anxiety is really a portal. It is only when we are stuck tight and see that no effort will give release, is that we give up the anxiety of struggle and…discover release.
Anxiety is basically the wound of separation. You can fill in the blanks on what you are separated from, but the wound is separation, a division in the ONE that is you. Before we are two (me versus the world), we are ONE. Anxiety ends with the realization that: I am the world and the world is me. This is your face before your parents were born (Zen koan).
But this shift is ambiguous because you One, yet you are still in the world as two. But ONE has to be activated by….suffering, by anxiety, by the wound. This is the wound in the side of christ, the wound that won’t heal. When you realize it won’t heal, no matter how many good works you do, or what. you believe or practice, you accept your crucifixion, and in that willing acceptance of your wound, you are resurrected or healed, even though you still live in the world as two. But now…but now your reference changes from blaming the wound on something or something, to being ONE. This changes everything.
You go from the flat map of the secular rational world to the GPS navigator where your reference is always the First Person I AM. The first person, YOU is now alive and always at the center of the world, which is our birthright as the Son of Man…the only begotten ONE…but still the many..still one of many.
Tolle Teaching is an invitation to make this shift in maps from the flat land in which we wander looking for our lost center, to our true Center or Nature that is timeless because it has no form on the flat map. Our true center isn’t on the map of the IT world. And that’s because we are the world and the world is us. Each of us is the center of the world we create and live in.
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