Whew, I feel like this chapter, it all started coming together.
I’ve felt an awakening coming the last ten years or so. I knew there was more to religion than how American Christians teach and live. I’ve gone through many cycles of despair and joy; it’s a constant spiral of learning.
I feel like I’ve come back around to the mystic spiritualism of my youth from evangelical Christianity and seeking Truth.
I’ve grown on a path to inner healing despite all the outside forces trying their darnedest to keep me stagnant, comfortable, status quo. I lost so many friends and even family members in my quest for Being.
Some days it’s hard. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. I sometimes wish I could be ignorant, mainstream, basic: bliss. It’s often unpleasant seeing all the people around me living under capitalism, in their pain-body, striving to keep up appearances.
I know how far I’ve come from when my eldest was a teenager and would hurt me immensely with her words and behaviors. I would internalize it all and feel so bad, wondering what I did wrong, how could I make it better. Now that my third child is acting out in similar ways, I take it in stride, with so much more peace. I don’t take it personally. I know they are in pain and lashing out and I allow it and I wait for it to pass.
I like how Tolle differentiates between happiness and joy.
I mentioned last week I was also reading The Island by Aldous Huxley.
Lo, and behold, this allusion to the book is in this chapter of The Power of Now! It’s incredible to me that I just happened to decide to read these simultaneously. I often like to read a fiction and nonfiction book side by side. These two go well together.
There is a novel by Aldous Huxley called Island, written in his later years when he became very interested in spiritual teachings. It tells the story of a man shipwrecked on a remote island cut off from the rest of the world. This island contains a unique civilization. The unusual thing about it is that its inhabitants, unlike those of the rest of the world, are actually sane. The first thing that the man notices are the colorful parrots perched in the trees, and they seem to be constantly croaking the words “Attention. Here and Now. Attention. Here and Now.” We later learn that the islanders taught them these words in order to be reminded continuously to stay present.
Tolle alludes to The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism in various ways:
The First Noble Truth: There is suffering. Suffering should be understood. Suffering has been understood.
The Second Noble Truth: There is the origin of suffering, which is attachment to desire. Desire should be let go of. Desire has been let go of.
The Third Noble Truth: There is the cessation of suffering. The cessation of suffering should be realized. The cessation of suffering has been realized.
The Fourth Noble Truth: There is the Eightfold Path—the way out of suffering. This path should be developed. This path has been fully developed.
Chapter Nine: Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness There is Peace
Favorite quotes:
Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
And when you live in complete acceptance of what is — which is the only sane way to live — there is no “good” or “bad” in your life anymore. There is only a higher good – which includes the “bad.”
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment — allow it to be as it is — then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
For example, when a loved one has just died, or you feel your own death approaching, you cannot be happy. It is impossible. But you can be at peace. There may be sadness and tears, but provided that you have relinquished resistance, underneath the sadness you will feel a deep serenity, a stillness, a sacred presence. This is the emanation of Being, this is inner peace, the good that has no opposite.
“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?” This was written two thousand years ago by Marcus Aurelius, one of those exceedingly rare humans who possessed worldly power as well as wisdom.
Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.
You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person.
“No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict,” states A Course in Miracles.
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration.
The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked with the impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a central part of his teaching.
Whenever a major loss of one kind or another occurs, just become deeply unhappy or make themselves ill. They cannot distinguish between their life and their life situation.
Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain.
Many people never realize that there can be no “salvation” in anything they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realize it often become world-weary and depressed: If nothing can give you true fulfillment, what is there left to strive for, what is the point in anything?
A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness “buys” you what you want.
No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.
I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons.
Recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a message, as do illnesses.
Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power – not in someone else’s, nor are you run by your mind.
Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.
True relationship becomes possible only when there is an awareness of Being.
Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures.
One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: Die before you die. Go into it deeply. Your physical form is dissolving, is no more. Then a moment comes when all mind-forms or thoughts also die. Yet you are still there — the divine presence that you are. Radiant, fully awake. Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.
To have deep empathy for the suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or sympathy.
Just as the images in a dream are symbols of inner states and feelings, so our collective reality is largely a symbolic expression of fear and of the heavy layers of negativity that have accumulated in the collective human psyche.
Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identification with form.
Only those who have transcended the world can bring about a better world.
When you are fully present and people around you manifest unconscious behavior, you won’t feel the need to react to it, so you don’t give it any reality. Your peace is so vast and deep that anything that is not peace disappears into it as if it had never existed. This breaks the karmic cycle of action and reaction. Animals, trees, flowers will feel your peace and respond to it. You teach through being, through demonstrating the peace of God. You become the “light of the world,” an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate unconsciousness from the world.
To recognize the primacy of Being, and thus work on the level of cause, does not exclude the possibility that your compassion may simultaneously manifest on the level of doing and of effect by alleviating suffering whenever you come across it. When a hungry person asks you for bread and you have some, you will give it. But as you give the bread, even though your interaction may only be very brief, what really matters is this moment of shared Being, of which the bread is only a symbol. A deep healing takes place within it. In that moment, there is no giver, no receiver.
All evils are the effect of unconsciousness. You can alleviate the effects of unconsciousness, but you cannot eliminate them unless you eliminate their cause. True change happens within, not without.
Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world’s suffering is a bottomless pit. So don’t let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else’s pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
Remember: Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so you cannot fight unconsciousness.
Raise awareness by disseminating information, or at the most, practice passive resistance. But make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no negativity.
“Love your enemies,” said Jesus, which, of course, means “have no enemies.”
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