CHAPTER SEVEN
FINDING OUT WHO YOU REALLY ARE Gnothi Seauton – Know Thyself. These words
were inscribed above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi,
site of the sacred Oracle. In ancient Greece, people would visit the Oracle
hoping to find out what destiny had in store for them or what course
of action to take in a particular situation. It is likely that most visitors
read those words as they entered the building without realizing that they pointed
to a deeper truth than anything the Oracle could possibly tell them. They
may not have realized either that, no matter how great a revelation or how accurate
the information they received, it would ultimately prove to be
of no avail, would not save them from further unhappiness and selfcreated
suffering, if they failed to find the truth that is concealed in that injunction
– Know Thyself. What those words imply is this: Before you ask any other question,
first ask the most fundamental question of your life: Who am
I?
Unconscious people – and many remain unconscious, trapped in their
egos throughout their lives – will quickly tell you who they are: their name,
their occupation, their personal history, the shape or state of their body, and
whatever else they identify with. Others may appear to be more evolved
because they think of themselves as an immortal soul or living spirit. But do
they really know themselves, or have they just added some spiritual
sounding concepts to the content of their mind? Knowing yourself goes far
deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and
beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the
power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you
think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind.
Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating
around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of
lost in your mind.
WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your
needs and what matters to you in life – and whatever matters to you will have
the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a criterion to find out
how deeply you know yourself. What matters to you is not necessarily what
you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important
and serious to you. So you may what to ask yourself the question: What are
the things that upset and disturb me? If small things have the power to
disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small. That will be
your unconscious belief. What are the small things? Ultimately all things are
small things because all things are transient.
You might say, "I know I am an immortal spirit," or "I am tired of this
mad world, and peace is all I want" until the phone rings. Bad news: The
stock market has collapsed; the deal may fall through; the car has been
stolen; your motherinlaw has arrived; the trip is cancelled, the contract has
been broken; your partner has left you; they demand more money; they say
it's your fault. Suddenly there is a surge of anger, of anxiety. A harshness
comes into your voice; "I can't take any more of this." You accuse and
blame, attack, defend, or justify yourself, and it's all happening on autopilot.
Something is obviously much more important to you now than the inner
peace that a moment ago you said was all you wanted, and you're not an
immortal spirit anymore either. The deal, the money, the contract, the loss or
threat of loss are more important. To whom? To the immortal spirit that you
said you are? No, to me. The small me that seeks security tor fulfillment in
things that are transient and gets anxious or angry because it fails to find it.
Well, at least now you know who you really think you are.
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If pace
mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be
spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely
alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would
immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than
separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a a
response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small
me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would
make no person or situation in to an enemy.
The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long
about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to
you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges
arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
The more limited, the more narrowly egoic the view of yourself, the
more you will see, focus on, and react to the egoic limitations, the
unconsciousness in others. Their "faults" or what you perceive as their faults
become to you their identity. His means you will see only the ego in them
and thus strengthen the ego in yourself. Instead of looking "through" the ego
in others, you are looking "at" the ego. Who is looking at the ego? The ego
in you.
Very unconscious people experience their own ego through its
reflection in others. When you realize that what you react to in others is also
in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own
ego. At that stage, you may also realize that you were doing to others what
you thought others were doing to you. You cease seeing yourself as a victim.
You are not the ego, so when you become aware of the ego in you, it
does not mean you know who you are – it means you know who you are not.
But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly
knowing yourself is removed.
Nobody can tell you who you are. It would just be another concept, so
it would not change you. Who you are requires no belief. In fact, every belief
is an obstacle. It does not even require your realization, since you already are
who you are. But without realization, who you are does not shine forth into
this world. It remains in the unmanifested which is, of course your true
home. You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he
has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an
unexpressed potential. ABUNDANCE
Who you think you are is also intimately connected with how you see
yourself treated by others. Many people complain that others do not treat
them well enough. "I don't get any respect, attention, recognition,
acknowledgment," they say. "I'm being taken for granted." When people are
kind, they suspect hidden motives. "Others want to manipulate me, take
advantage of me. Nobody loves me."
Who they think they are is this: "I am a needy 'little me' whose needs
are not being met." This basic misperception of who they are creates
dysfunction in all their relationships. They believe they have nothing to give
and that the world or other people are withholding from them what they
need. Their entire reality is based on an illusory sense of who they are. It
sabotages situations, mar all relationships. If the thought of lack – whether it
be money, recognition, or love – has become part of who you think you are,
you will always experience lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is
already in your life, all you see is lack. Acknowledging the good that is
already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The fact is: Whatever
you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the
world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small
and that you have nothing to give.
Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality:
Whatever you think people are withholding from you praise, appreciation,
assistance, loving care, and so on – give it to them. You don't have it? Just
act as if you had it, and it will come. Then, soon after you start giving, you
will start receiving. You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow
determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you,
you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know
that you have it. This includes abundance. The law that outflow determines
inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: "Give and it will be
given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,
will be put into your lap."1
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you
are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without.
See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin,
the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a
succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the
sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that
abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within.
Then let it flow out. When you smile at a a stranger, there is already a minute
outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give
here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation." You don't need to
own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently
things will almost certainly come to you. Abundance comes only to those
who already have it. It sounds almost unfair, but of course it isn't. It is a
universal law. Both abundance and scarcity are inner states that manifest as
your reality. Jesus puts it like this: "For to the one who has, more will be
given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away."2
KNOWING YOURSELF AND KNOWING ABOUT YOURSELF
You may not want to know yourself because you are afraid of what
you may find out. Many people have a secret fear that they are bad. But
nothing you can find out about yourself is you. Nothing you can know about
you is you.
While some people do not want to know who they are because of fear,
others have a insatiable curiosity about themselves and want to find out more
and more. You may be so fascinated with yourself that you spend years in
psychoanalysis, delve into every aspect of your childhood, uncover secret
fears and desires, and find layers upon layers of complexity in the makeup of
your personality and character. After ten years, the therapist may get tired of
you and your story and tell you that your analysis is now complete. Perhaps
he sends you away with a fivethousandpage dossier. "This is all about you.
This is who you are." As you carry the heavy file home, the initial
satisfaction of at last knowing yourself gives way quickly to a feeling of
incompleteness and a lurking suspicion that there must be more to who you
are than this. And indeed there is more – not perhaps in quantitative terms of
more facts but in the qualitative dimension of depth.
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your
past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing
yourself. The fivethousandpage dossier is about yourself: the content of
your mind which is conditioned by the past. Whatever you learn through
psychoanalysis or selfobservation is about you. It is not you. It is content,
not essence. Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself
is being yourself, and being yourself is ceasing to identify with content.
Most people define themselves through the content of their lives.
Whatever you perceive, experience, do, think, or feel is content. Content is
what absorbs most people's attention entirely, and it is what they identify
with. When you think or say, "my life," you are not referring to the life that
you are but with the life that you have, or seem to have. You are referring to
content – your age, health, relationships, finances, work and living situation,
as well as your mentalemotional state. The inner and outer circumstances of
your life, your past and your future, all belong to the realm of content – as do
events, that is to say, anything that happens.
What is there other than content? That which enables the content to be
– the inner space of consciousness.
CHAOS AND HIGHER ORDER
When you know yourself only through content, you will also think you
know what is good or bad for you. You differentiate between events that are
"good for me" and those that are "bad." This is a fragmented perception of
the wholeness of life in which everything is interconnected, in which every
event has its necessary place and function within the totality. The totality,
whoever, is more than the surface appearance of things, more than the sum
total of its parts, more than whatever your life or the world contains.
Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession
of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a
higher order and purpose. This is beautifully expressed in the Zen saying
"The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place." We can never
understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we
think about is content; whereas, the higher order emanates from the formless
realm of consciousness, from universal intelligence. But we can glimpse it,
and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious
participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our
thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won't even
be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since
everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter. Only if we are
still enough inside and the noise of thinking subsides can we become aware
that there is a hidden harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order in which
everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what it is and the
way it is.
The mind is comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been
planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here
that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible
order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of
god and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it
when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to
understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of he sacredness of the
forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you
realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a
conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned
with the wholeness of life.
GOOD AND BAD
At some point in their lives, most people become aware that there is
not only birth, growth, success, good health, pleasure, and winning, but also
loss, failure, sickness, old age, decay, pain and death. Conventionally these
are labeled "good" and "bad," order and disorder. The "meaning" of people's
lives is usually associated with what they term the "good," but the good is
continually threatened by collapse, breakdown, disorder; threatened by
meaninglessness and the "bad," when explanations fail and life ceases to
make sense. Sooner or later, disorder will irrupt into everyone's life no
matter how many insurance policies he or she has. It may come in the form
of loss or accident, sickness, disability, old age, death. However, the
irruption of disorder into a person's life, and the resultant collapse of a
mentally defined meaning, can become the opening into a higher order.
"The wisdom of this world is folly with God," says the Bible. 3 What is
the wisdom of this world? The movement of thought, and meaning that is
defined exclusively by thought.
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
becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real
while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an indivisible whole in
which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in isolation.
The deeper interconnectedness of all things and events implies that the
mental labels of "good" and bad" are ultimately illusory. They always imply
a limited perspective and so are true only relatively and temporarily. This is
illustrated in the story of a wise man who won an expensive car in a lottery.
His family and friends were very happy for him and came to celebrate. "Isn't
it great!" they said. "You are so lucky." The man smiled and said "Maybe."
For a few weeks he enjoyed driving the car. Then one day a drunken driver
crashed into his new car at an intersection and he ended up in the hospital,
with multiple injuries. His family and friends came to see him and said,
"That was really unfortunate. " Again the man smiled and said, "Maybe."
While he was still in the hospital, one night there was a landslide and his
house fell into the sea. Again his friends came the next day and said,
"Weren't you lucky to have been here in hospital." Again he said, "Maybe."
The wise man's "maybe" signifies a refusal to judge anything that
happens. Instead of judging what is, he accepts it and so enters into
conscious alignment with the higher order. He knows that often it is
impossible for the mind to understand what place or purpose a seemingly
random event has in the tapestry of the whole. But there are no random
events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for themselves, in
isolation. The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars,
and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected
with the whole in incomprehensible ways. If you wanted to trace back the
cause of any event, you would have to go back all the way to the beginning
of creation. The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word cosmos means order.
But this is not an order the human mind can ever comprehend, although it
can sometimes glimpse it.
NOT MINDING WHAT HAPPENS
J. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher,
spoke and traveled almost continuously all over the world for more than fifty
years attempting to convey through words which are content – that which is
beyond words, beyond content. At one of his talks in the later part of his life,
he surprised his audience by asking, "Do you want to know my secret?"
Everyone became very alert. Many people in the audience had been coming
to listen to him for twenty or thirty years and still failed to grasp the essence
of his teaching. Finally, after all these years, the master would give them the
key to understanding. "This is my secret," he said. "I don't mind what
happens."
He did not elaborate, and so I suspect most of his audience were even
more perplexed than before. The implications of this simple statement,
however, are profound.
When I don't mind what happens, what does that imply? It implies
that internally I am in alignment with what happens. "What happens," of
course, refers to the suchness of this moment, which always already is as it
is. It refers to content, the form that this moment – the only moment there
ever is – takes. To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship
of inner nonresistance with what happens. It mean not to label it mentally as
good or bad, but to let it be. Does this mean you can no longer take action to
bring abut change in your life? On the contrary. when the basis for your
actions is inner alignment with the present moment, your actions become
empowered by the intelligence of Life itself.
IS THAT SO?
The Zen Master Hakuin lived in a town in Japan. He was held in high
regard and many people came to him for spiritual teaching. Then it happened
that the teenage daughter of his nextdoor neighbor became pregnant. When
being questioned by her angry and scolding parents as to the identity of the
father, she finally told them that he was Hakuin, the Zen Master. In great
anger the parents rushed over to Hakuin and told him with much shouting
and accusing that their daughter had confessed that he was the father. All he
replied was, "Is that so?"
News of the scandal spread throughout the town and beyond. The
Master lost his reputation. This did not trouble him. Nobody came to see him
anymore. He remained unmoved. When the child was born, the parents
brought the baby to Hakuin. "You are the father, so you look after him." The
Master took loving care of the child. A year later, the mother remorsefully
confessed to her parents that the real father of the child was the young man
who worked at the butcher shop. In great distress they went to see Hakuin to
apologize and ask for forgiveness. "We are really sorry. We have come to
take the baby back. Our daughter confessed that you are not the father." "Is
that so?" is all he would may as he handed the baby over to them.
The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news,
in exactly the same way: "Is that so?" He allows the form of the moment,
good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human
drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events
are not personalized. He is nobody's victim. He is so completely at one with
what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if
you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world
will determine your happiness and unhappiness.
The baby is looked after with loving care. Bad turns into good through
the power of nonresistance. Always responding to what the present moment
requires, he lets go of the baby when it is time to do so.
Imagine briefly how the ego would have reacted during the various
stages of the unfolding of these events.
THE EGO AND THE PRESENT MOMENT
The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your
relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that
is to say, what is or what happens. If your relationship with the Now is
dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and
every situation you encounter. The ego could be defined simply in this way:
a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. It is at this moment
that you can decide what kind of relationship you want to have with the
present moment.
Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, (and if you
are reading this, you almost certainly have), you are able to decide what kind
of a relationship you want to have with the present moment. Do I want the
present moment to be my friend or my enemy? The present moment is
inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship
you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present
moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: become
friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon
you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become
helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality.
But that one decision you have to make again and again and again – until it
becomes natural to live in such a way.
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, or devalue the Now. Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the
ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is
then concerned with past or future, and you sense of self depends on the past
for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety,
expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the timebound state
of consciousness.
There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment:
as a means to and end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy. Let us look at them in
turn, so that when this pattern operates in you, you can recognize it and –
decide again.
To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to
an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important,
even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is
therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you aren't
ever fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
When this pattern becomes more pronounced, and this is very
common, the present moment is regarded and treated as if it were an obstacle
to be overcome. This is where impatience, frustration, and stress arise, and in
our culture, it is many people's everyday reality, their normal state. Life,
which is now, is seen as a "problem," and you come to inhabit a world of
problems that all need to be solved before you can be happy, fulfilled, or
really start living – or so you think. The problem is: For every problem that
is solved, another one pops up. As long as the present moment is seen as an
obstacle, there can be no end to problems. "I'll be whatever you want me to
be," says Life or the Now. "I'll treat you the way you treat me. If you see me
as a problem, I will be a problem to you. If you treat me as an obstacle, I will
be an obstacle."
At worst, and this is also very common, the present moment is treated
as if it were an enemy. When you hate what you are doing, complain about
your surroundings, curse things that are happening or have happened, or
when your internal dialogue consists of shoulds and shouldn'ts, of blaming
and accusing, when you are arguing with what is, arguing with that which is
always already the case. you are making Life into an enemy and Life says,
"War is what you want, and war is what you get." External reality, which
always reflects back to you your inner state, is then experienced as hostile.
A vital question to ask yourself frequently is: What is my relationship
with the present moment? Then become alert to find out the answer. Am I
treating the Now as no more than a means to an end? Do I see it as an
obstacle? Am I making it into an enemy? Since the present moment is all
you ever have, since Life is inseparable from the Now, what the question
really means is: What is my relationship with Life? This question is an
excellent way of unmasking the ego in you and bringing you into the state of
Presence. Although the question doesn't embody the absolute truth
(Ultimately, I and the present moment are one), it is a useful pointer in the
right direction. Ask yourself it often until you don't need it anymore.
How do you go beyond a dysfunctional relationship with the present
moment? The most important thing is to see it in yourself, in your thoughts
and actions. In the moment of seeing, of noticing that your relationship with
the Now is dysfunctional, you are present. The seeing is the arising Presence.
The moment you see the dysfunction, it begins to dissolve. Some people
laugh out loud when they see this. With the seeing comes the power of
choice – the choice of saying yes to the Now, of making it into your friend.
THE PARADOX OF TIME
On the surface, the present moment is "what happens." Since what
happens changes continuously, it seems that every day of your life consists of
thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as the
endless succession of moments, some "good," some "bad." Yet, if you look
more closely, that is to say, through your own immediate experience, you
find that there are not many moments at all. You that there is only ever this
moment. Life is always now. Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now.
Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate
them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there is: this
one. Why does it appear then as if there were many
moments? Because the present moment is confused with what happens,
confused with content. The space of Now is confused with what happens
in that space. The confusion of the present moment with content gives rise
not only to the illusion of time, but also to the illusion of ego.
There is a paradox here. On the one hand, how can we deny the reality
of time? You need it to go from here to there, to prepare a meal, build a
house, read this book. You need time to grow up, to learn new things.
Whatever you do seems to take time. everything is subject to it and
eventually "this bloody tyrant time," as Shakespeare calls it, is going to kill
you. You could compare it to a raging river that drags you along with it, or a
fire in which everything is consumed.
I recently met some old friends, a family I had not seen in a long time,
and I was shocked when I saw them. I almost asked, "Are you ill? What
happened? Who did this to you?" The mother, who walked with a cane,
seemed to have shrunk in size, her face shriveled like an old apple. The
daughter , who had been full of energy, enthusiasm, and the expectations of
youth when I last saw her, seemed worn out, tired after bringing up three
children. Then I remembered: Almost thirty years had passed since we last
met. Time had done this to them. And I'm sure they were just as shocked
when they saw me.
Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now.
That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial
evidence for the reality of time – a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom
mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago – yet you
never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only
ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go
by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever
is.
ELIMINATING TIME
You cannot make the egoless state into a future goal and then work
toward it. All you get is more dissatisfaction, more inner conflict, because it
will always seem that you have not arrived yet, have not "attained" that state
yet. When freedom from ego is your goal for the future, you give yourself
more time, and more time means more ego. Look carefully to find out if
your spiritual search is a disguised form of ego. Even trying to get to get rid
of your "self" can be a disguised search for more if the getting rid of your
"self" is made into a future goal. Giving yourself more time is precisely this:
giving your "self" more time. Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the
false mindmade self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't
something that has an objective existence "out there." It is a mind structure
needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the
greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of
life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth,
accessible to you only through the portal of the present moment.
So instead of adding time to yourself, remove time. The elimination of
time from your consciousness is the elimination of ego. It is the only true
spiritual practice.
When we speak of the elimination of time, we are, of course, not
referring to clock time, which is the use of time for practical purposes, such
as making an appointment or planning a trip. It would be almost impossible
to function in this world without clock time. What we are speaking of is the
elimination of psychological time, which is the egoic mind's endless
preoccupation with past and future and its unwillingness to be one with life
by living in alignment with the inevitable isness of the present moment.
Whenever a habitual no to life turns into a yes, whenever you allow
this moment to be as it is, you dissolve time as well as ego. For the ego to
survive, it must make time – past and future – more important than the
present moment. The ego cannot tolerate becoming friendly with the present
moment except briefly just after it got what it wanted. But nothing can
satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs your life, there are two ways of
being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is
the other.
Whatever is or happens is the form that the Now takes. As long as you
resist it internally, form, that is to say, the world, is an impenetrable barrier
that separates you from who you are beyond form, separates you from the
formless one Life that you are. When you bring an inner yes to the form the
Now takes, that very form becomes a doorway into the formless. The
separation between the world and God dissolves. When you react against the form that Life
takes at this moment, when you treat the Now as a means, an obstacle,
or an enemy, you strengthen your own form identity, the ego. Hence the ego's
reactivity. What is reactivity? Becoming addicted to reaction. The more reactive
you are, the more entangled you become with form. The more identified
with form, the stronger the ego. Your Being then does not
shine through form anymore – or only barely.
Though nonresistance to form, that in you which is beyond form
emerges as an allencompassing Presence, a silent power far greater than
your shortlived form identity, the person. It is more deeply who you are than
anything in the world of form.
THE DREAMER AND THE DREAM
Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through
it, consciousness (spirit) is freed form its imprisonment in form. Inner
nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute
reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world
appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your
own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness
and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very
seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival,
and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality.
The many things that happen, the many forms that life takes on, are of
an ephemeral nature. They are all fleeting. Things, bodies and egos, events,
situations, thoughts, emotions, desires, ambitions, fears, drama... they come,
pretend to be allimportant, and before you know it they are gone, dissolved
into the nothingness out of which they came. Where they ever real? Were
they ever more than a dream, the dream of form?
When we wake up in the morning, the night's dream dissolves, and we
say, "Oh, it was only a dream. It wasn't real." But something in the dream
must have been real otherwise it could not be. When death approaches, we
may look back on our life and wonder if it was just another dream. Even now
you may look back on last year's vacation or yesterday's drama and see that it
is very similar to last night's dream. There is the dream, and there is the dreamer
of the dream. The dream is a shortlived play of forms. It is the
world – relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer,
the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the
person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which
the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the
absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in
and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself – who you are.
To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake
within the dream, the egocreated earthdrama comes to an end and a more
benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
GOING BEYOND LIMITATION
In each person's life there comes a time when he or she pursues
growth and expansion on the level of form. This is when you strive to
overcome limitation such as physical weakness or financial scarcity, when
you acquire new skills and knowledge, or through creative action bring
something new into this world that is lifeenhancing for yourself as well as
others. This may be a piece of music or a work of art, a book, a service you
provide, a function you perform, a business or organization that you set up or
make a vital contribution to.
When you are Present, when your attention is fully in the Now, that
Presence will flow into and transform what you do. There will be quality and
power in it. You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a
means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when
there is joy and aliveness in what you do. And, of course, you cannot be
present unless you become friendly with the present moment. That is the
basis for effective action, uncontaminated by negativity.
Form means limitation. We are here not only to experience limitation,
but also to grow in consciousness by going beyond limitation. Some
limitations can be overcome on an external level. There may be other
limitations in your life that you have to learn to live with. They can only be
overcome internally. Everyone will encounter them sooner or later. Those
limitations either keep you trapped in egoic reaction, which means intense
unhappiness, or you rise above them internally by uncompromising
surrender to what is. That is what they are here to teach. The surrendered
state of consciousness opens up the vertical dimension in your life, the
dimension of depth. Something will then come forth from that dimension
into this world, something of infinite value that otherwise would have
remained unmanifested. Some people who surrendered to severe limitation
become healers or spiritual teachers. Others work selflessly to lessen human
suffering or bring some creative gift into this world.
In the late seventies, I would have lunch every day with one or two
friends in the cafeteria of the graduate center at Cambridge University,
where I was studying. A man in a wheelchair would sometimes sit at a
nearby table, usually accompanied by three or four people. One day, when I
was sitting at a table directly opposite me, I could not help but look at him
more closely, and I was shocked by what I saw. He seemed almost totally
paralyzed. His body was emaciated, his head permanently slumped forward.
One of the people accompanying him was carefully putting food in his
mouth a great deal of which would fall out again and be caught on a small
plate another man was holding under his chin. Occasionally the wheelchair
bound man would produce unintelligible croaking sounds, and someone
would hold an ear close to his mouth and then amazingly would interpret
what he was trying to say.
Later I asked my friend whether he know who he was. "Of course," he
said, "He is a professor of mathematics, and the people with him are his
graduate students. He has motor neuron disease that progressively paralyzes
every part of the body. He has been given five years at the most. It must be
the most dreadful fate that can befall a human being."
A few weeks later, as I was leaving the building, he was coming in,
and when I held the door open for his electric wheelchair to come trough,
our eyes met. With surprise I saw that his eyes were clear. There was no trace
in them of unhappiness. I know immediately he had relinquished resistance;
he was living in surrender.
A number of years later when buying a newspaper at a kiosk, I was
amazed to see him on the front page of a popular international news
magazine. Not only was he still alive, but he had by then become the world's
most famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. There was a beautiful
line in the article that confirmed what I had sensed when I had looked into
his eyes many years earlier. Commenting upon his life, he said (now with the
help of the voice synthesizer), "Who could have wished for more?"
THE JOY OF BEING
Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet. What pollution is
on the outer level is negativity on the inner. It is everywhere, not just in
places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have
more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more
deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their
happiness, that is to say dependent on form. They don't realize that what
happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.
They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has
happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has
not happened but should have. Ad so they miss the deeper perfection that is
inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already there, that lies
beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the
present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and
untouched by time.
The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, can not come to
you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event – through
anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you – ever. It emanates form
the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one
with who you are.
ALLOWING THE DIMINISHMENT OF THE EGO
The ego is always on guard against any kind of perceived diminishment.
Automatic egorepair mechanisms come into effect to restore the mental
form of "me." When someone blames or criticizes me, that to the ego is a
diminishment of self, and it will immediately attempt to repair its diminished
sense of self through selfjustification, defense, or blaming. Whether the
other person is right or wrong is irrelevant to the ego. It is much more
interested in selfpreservation than in the truth. This is the preservation of
the psychological form of "me." Even such a normal thing as shouting
something back when another driver calls you "idiot" is an automatic and
unconscious egorepair mechanism. One of the most common egorepair
mechanisms is anger, which causes a temporary but huge ego inflation. All
repair mechanisms make perfect sense to the ego but are actually
dysfunctional. Those that are most extreme in their dysfunction are physical
violence ad selfdelusion in the form of grandiose fantasies.
A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the
diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I
recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example,
when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of
immediately retaliating or defending yourself – do nothing. Allow the self
image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep
inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had
shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner spaciousness that feels intensely
alive. You haven't been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You
may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly
diminished in some way and remain in absolute nonreaction, not just
externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been
diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no
longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of
identification with form, with mental selfimage. Through becoming less (in
the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for
Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then
shine through the apparently weakened form. this is what Jesus means when
he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek."
This does not mean, of course, that you invite abuse or turn yourself
into a victim of unconscious people. Sometimes a situation may demand that
you tell someone to "back off" in no uncertain terms. Without egoic
defensiveness, there will be power behind your words, yet no reactive force.
If necessary, you can also say not to someone firmly and clearly, and it will
be what I call a "highquality no" that is free of all negativity.
If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand
out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like
weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength. This spiritual truth is
diametrically opposed to the values of our contemporary culture and the way
it conditions people to behave. Instead of trying to be the mountain, teaches
the ancient Tao Te Ching, "Be the valley of the universe."4
In this way, you are restored to wholeness and so "All things will come to
you."5
Similarly, Jesus, in one of his parables, teaches that "When you are
invited, go and sit in the lowest place so that when your host comes, he may
say to you, friend, move up higher. Then you will be honored in the presence
of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be
humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."6
Another aspect of this practice is to refrain from attempting to
strengthen the self by showing off, wanting to stand out, be special, make an
impression, or demand attention. It may include occasionally refraining from
expressing your opinion when everybody is expressing his or hers, and
seeing what that feels like.
AS WITHOUT, SO WITHIN
When you look up at the clear sky at night, you may easily realize a
truth at once utterly simple and extraordinarily profound. What is that you
see? The moon, planets, starts, the luminous band of the Milky Way, perhaps
a comet or even the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy two million light years
away. Yes, but if you simplify even more, what do you see? Objects floating
in space. So what does the universe consist of? Objects and space.
If you don't become speechless when looking out into space on a clear
night, you are not really looking, no aware of the totality of what is there.
You are probably only looking at at the objects and perhaps seeking to name
them. If you have ever experienced a sense of awe when looking into space,
perhaps even felt a deep reverence in the face of this incomprehensible
mystery, it means you must have relinquished for a moment your desire to
explain and label and have become aware not only of the objects in space but
of the infinite depth of space itself. You must have become still enough
inside to notice the vastness in which these countless worlds exist. The
feeling of awe is not derived from the fact that there are billions of worlds
out there, but the depth that contains them all.
You cannot see space, of course, nor can you hear, touch, taste, or
smell it, so how do you even know it exists? This logicalsounding question
already contains a fundamental error. The essence of space is nothingness,
so it doesn't "exist" in the normal sense of the word. Only things – forms –
exist. Even calling it space can be misleading because by naming it, you
make it into an object.
Let us put it like this: There is something within you that has an
affinity with space; that is why you can be aware of it. Aware of it? That's
not totally true either because how can you be aware of space if there is
nothing there to be aware of?
The answer is both simple and profound. When you are aware of
space, you are not really aware of anything, except awareness itself – the
inner space of consciousness. Through you, the universe is becoming aware
of itself!
When the eye finds nothing to see, that nothingness is perceived as
space. When the ear finds nothing to hear, that nothingness is perceived as
stillness. When the senses, which are designed to perceive form, meet an
absence of form, the formless consciousness that lies behind perception and
makes all perception, all experience, possible, is not longer obscured by
form. When you contemplate the unfathomable depth of space or listen to
the silence in the early hours just before sunrise, something within you
resonates with it as if in recognition. You then sense the vast depth of space
as your own depth, and you know that precious stillness that has no form to
be more deeply who you are than any of the things that make up the content
o your life.
The Upanishads, the ancient scriptures of India, point to the same
truth with these words:
What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye
can see: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what
people here adore. What cannot be heard with the ear but that
whereby the ear can hear: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit
and not what people here adore .... What cannot be thought with the
mind but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be
Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore.7
God, the scripture is saying, is formless consciousness and the essence
of who you are. Everything else is form, is "what people here adore."
The twofold reality of the universe, which consists of things and space
– thingness and nothingness – is also your own. A sane, balanced, and
fruitful human life is a dance between the two dimensions that make up
reality: form and space. Most people are so identified with the dimension of
form, with sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotion, that the vital hidden
half is missing from their lives. Their identification with form keeps them
trapped in ego.
What you see, hear, feel, touch, or think about is only one half of
reality, so to speak. It is form. In the teaching of Jesus, it is simply called
"the world," and the other dimension is "the kingdom of heaven or eternal
life."
Just as space enables all tings to exist and just as without silence there
could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension
that is the essence of who you are. We could say "God" if the word had not
been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence.
Existence is form, content, "what happens." Existence is the foreground of
life; Being is the background, as it were.
The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in
what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed
in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is
beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by
time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their
destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
Some years ago when visiting China, I came upon a stupa on a
mountaintop near Guilin. It had writing embossed in gold on it, and I asked
my Chinese host what it meant. "It means 'Buddha' " he said. "Why are there
two characters rather than one?" I asked. "One," he explained, "means 'man.'
The other means 'no.' And the two together means 'Buddha'." I stood there in
awe. The character of Buddha already contained the whole teaching of the
Buddha, and for those who have eyes to see, the secret of life. Here are the
two dimensions that make up reality, thingness and nothingness, form and
the denial of form, which is the recognition that form
is not
who
you are.
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