12 okt What I like about Eckhart Tolle,

I am flipping pages with the same speed as I’m able to eat cookies, or so it seems. Book number twenty three. Another must read. One that’s not for everyone. Because you have to be ready. Eckhart, known as a contemporary spiritual teacher, took me by the hand into the woods of ego-land.

I really like him, I really really do

“This book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness.” And we need it, desperately. You, me, everyone! The actual why behind it .. Well, we live in an egoic world and I’m getting the impression that we’re drowning in our own waves of entitlement. Which I guess turns out to be the most dysfunctional part of humankind. Eckhart though, seems to be on a mission. He would like to see a world where the egoic state of consciousness in its insanely dysfunctional manifestations, both individual and collective, has dissolved or at least subsided, and where humans no longer create unnecessary suffering for themselves. 

Temporarily shift your own perspective,

Is that one of the things you master? Or do you just simply hug your ego in a way that is almost suffocating? I guess we all know that awareness is the greatest agent for change. So, are you aware of your ego? Because once you are, you’ll be able to let it shrink, or best practice let it diminish. “The diminishment of the ego gives rise to empathy and compassion beyond tribal, racial, national or religious affiliations. It is those qualities that make us truly human. As we no longer identify with our mental positions, we are able to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs and perspectives.”

Thoughts can spread like a virus

You think, I think, we all think, and thoughts have the power to distort our perceptions and cause us to act as if they are true, and so subsequently they manifest as our reality. As soon as you recognize it for what it is .. You’ll come to the conclusion that you’ve been living your life in a science fiction kind of way. Eckhart claims that in our civilization there’s a great deal of ignorance about the human condition, and the more spiritually ignorant we are, the more we suffer.

No real reason to be ignorant,

Is something I would say. But life is all about timing .. So I’ll push my ego aside. I do agree with Eckhart though. What stimulates the ignorance is that our civilization is lost in doing and knows nothing of Being. We are keeping ourselves busy. While in the meantime entertaining our ego. We work and therefor are able to buy things. Yes, we do live in a world of overconsumption. The big question is if you are able to defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality? As a twenty-five-year-old I couldn’t. For a short amount of time, I wasn’t able to rise above identification with form that kept my ego in place. I wasn’t able to rise above the identification with the mental position of being a manager, and so on. “Imprisonment in their own personality”, is how Eckhart addresses it.

A bottomless hole that could never be filled

Bron: Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth