So what is this power that events and situations have; that I could feel as if I had died somewhere inside me as a result and moments later see things with fresh new eyes? If they only exist or are relative to my attitude at a given moment, then how could they ever be called “real,” as we call things real?
They aren’t. The one, true data stream flows at only one point and that point is this very instant we call “now.” Eckhart Tolle wrote the definitive book on the topic, wherein he states a simple fact, so breathtakingly obvious that it stops the mind in its tracks. Our only portal with Reality is “Now.”
To illustrate, imagine two massive, perfect, shiny steel spheres, one resting atop the other. Call the bottom one “Past” and the top “Future” and now look to the immeasurably tiny point where they intersect. This is “Now.” Standing back to admire this mental image we (by that I mean, "I" have created, it is easy to see how something apparently so insignificant could be overlooked. This is what the mind does.
The past is the clay with which my mind fashions its future, with the instant of now merely a stepping stone or obstacle to getting there. But both past and future are illusions, easily proven. If I focus on it gently, it’s easy to see how the past isn’t real: it is merely a layered image I have built up of “now + now + now” with my mind inserting its own punctuation points in hindsight, to separate what is in reality a continuum. Be still for a moment and see if you can see the dividing line between this “now” and the next… Did you feel it? I couldn’t, and I’ve been trying very hard for some time, without a shred of success.
And it’s equally simple to comprehend that every single thing that occurs in my life happens “now” and the universe moves on. Things cannot happen in the past, they have already happened by then. It’s here and then gone. My memories are nothing more than electrochemical impressions, etched as rudely as Neolithic cave paintings, only to fade beneath later strata then disappear entirely when the power is eventually switched off.
They are not real. They are residue of a heavily filtered image of a reality I never quite apprehended – yet something far smaller, a perceived and fragmented facsimile, had apparently apprehended me and held me in an iron grip for most of my life.
This pervasive stench of history filled my palace built on sand and had the amazing power to determine so much about me: The places I go and others to which I return; what I do and do not do; the others with whom I associate or do not associate and the esteem in which we hold each other; my likes and dislikes and my fears and confidences. My history is layer after layer of smothering skin that utterly defines me in this world. The sense of “me” I have helped to inculcate in myself is its product, not the other way around. Yet it is not me at all.
But the future is equally ethereal and easier to understand that way because of the common belief that it hasn’t yet occurred. But my mind can easily draw a straight line from the past it clutches, through the present and from there extrapolate a future. Pundits do it all the time, with varying degrees of success, precisely because so many people are slaves to this illusion of past.
But with the retreat of my ego to lick its wounds, in the resulting vacuum has been revealed a much deeper awareness, compared to which mind is but a cheap, clockwork knock-off. My true center has at last been located and the journey into that I betray at the cost of the yearning to be one with it. My project is to document it, as a tributary trickle into what appears to be a widening stream of human awareness, as has been elsewhere testified to in a growing string of New Age texts, now in the mainstream of popular culture.
I used to gag smugly at such writings, but now pay humble tribute to the one secret I know them to hold. It is in great part these collective authors’ determination, often in the face of popular scorn, to share the truth of their respective experiences that has lead to my own awakening. My eyes have finally been opened to the truth they share with all the great spiritual works of our collective human history. I can see with growing clarity that they all have the very same thing at their core and their writers use their words to all point in precisely the same direction.
And dedicating my observations to the Buddhist admonition to “not confuse the moon with the finger pointing at the moon,” I have finally seen past the words, to glimpse a universe of silence that my mind cannot comprehend, a place where the questions just stop, where all babbling has been stilled. It is me.
Such knowing is not original and no longer elitist or enlightened, and it is now mine. And it might be everyone’s, by the taking of the tiniest, little step of merely accepting that it is there.
It is this knowing itself that is who I am. This thing in my head which does my thinking is not me, it is a tool whose primary function is to discriminate; to find difference and division, and which evolved to function in a material environment. It is a pinnacle of Earthly animal engineering, which breaks a singular universe into digestible chunks, starting with the immediate sensory division of "me" and "not-me" as its erroneous launch pad.
It is this primary division which gave birth to my ego and every ego around me. My life has been spent building upon and reinforcing this fictional self. And, having based all which follows on such a false assumption, to maintain that fiction my ego-afflicted mind goes on to make error after perceptual error based on that, building a fragile palace upon a foundation of very fine sand.
This palace has been the story of my life.
But my mind, in the thrall of its own creation, has for some time now been desperately aware that at its periphery looms chaos, like a financial basket-case who uses one credit card to pay off another, then another, then another... It saw its own death and became mortally afraid. To counter its fear it kept itself busy with its dramas, its tragedies, its pleasures and when it couldn’t make these there was always TV and other diversions. Anything to avoid that of which my mind has been most afraid: that it is not the alpha and omega; not the seat of my being. And it has no idea what to do about it.
Phenomena don’t have any meaning, save that which my mind attaches to them. They are just bits and bytes of the universal data stream. It is my mind which takes the bits it can see and spins then weaves them into what it calls events and situations, then within which I lose myself. It is my diseased mind that creates these phantoms, from what fragments it can manage to pare away from the singular universe, but it has been my belief in this mind as my very identity that has breathed life into them all.
If I am to be free of this prison of my own history then I must leave it, and the first step is to know that freedom is my very nature.
To know the fundamental indivisible nature of The One is to heal the mind of ego....or, maybe it's the other way around: to heal the mind of its affliction is to know The One?
Meaning: which my mind creates by seeing the One as many, is nothing more than a power I bestow upon phenomenon which it chooses to arbitrarily isolate and split off from the data stream.
I like it! I get it! …I'm doing it again…! :-)
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