The Seer

by Richard Rohr, OFM

“Although Eckhart Tolle is arousing great interest today, many think he is a novelty, New Age, or even non-religious. The process — and that is what it is — that he is teaching, can be traced through the Greek and Latin traditions of contemplation, the apophatic tradition in particular, and the long history of what was sometimes called “The Sacrament of the Present Moment” (Brother Lawrence, OCD, Francisco de Osuna, OFM, Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J.).

Eckhart Tolle is teaching a form of natural mysticism or contemplative practice. He is NOT asking you to believe anythin. He is asking you to TRY something! You will know if it is true, if you try it, and you will not know if it is true or false, if you don’t try it. No point in arguing it theoretically or in the abstract.

For Tolle, Being, Consciousness, God, Reality are all the same thing, which is not all bad, when you come to think of it. Of course, his very point is that you cannot think of it at all, you can only realize it. I would not call him pantheistic (all things are God) as much as panentheistic (God is IN all things).

I must join with Paul who in preaching to the secular Athenians, said “God is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and have our very being.” (Acts 17:28). That is an excellent foundation for trusting Tolle’s natural mysticism. We are also preaching to a largely secular world, and must find a language that they can understand and draw from, as Paul did, and not insist that they learn our vocabulary before we can even talk to them or hear them. “How else can we ever be ?all things to all people.” (1 Corinthians 9:22) or dare to think that we can “preach the Gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:16):”

~ To read Rohr’s complete article, >>>Click Here,

You can also hear Eckhart Tolle in a rare, recent interview on Namaste Radio. Some of the topics Eckhart discusses include: the current state of the world, living in the Now, how to raise present-minded children, sex and the pain body, what it takes to be a great leader and more. To listen, just >>>Click Here.

Question: How long does it take to become free of the pain-body?

Eckhart: It depends both on the density of an individual’s pain-body as well as the degree or intensity of that individual’s arising Presence. But it is not the pain-body, but identification with it that causes the suffering that you inflict on yourself and others. It is not the pain-body but identification with the pain-body that forces you to relive the past again and again and keeps you in a state of unconsciousness.

So a more important question to ask would be this: “How long does it take to become free of identification with the pain-body?” And the answer to that question: It takes no time at all. When the pain-body is activated, know that what you are feeling is the pain-body in you. This knowing is all that is needed to break your identification with it. And when identification with it ceases, the transmutation begins.

The knowing prevents the old emotion from rising up in your head and taking over not only the internal dialogue, but also your actions as well as interactions with other people. This mean the pain-body cannot use you anymore and renew itself through you. The old emotion may then still live in you for a while and come up periodically. It may also still occasionally trick you into identifying with it again and thus obscure the knowing, but not for long.

Not projecting the old emotion into situations means facing it directly within yourself. It may not be pleasant, but it won’t kill you. Your Presence is more than capable of containing it. The emotion is not who you are.

When you feel the pain-body, don’t fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into a problem – the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting. Anything else will obscure it again.

Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer. Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious. You become whole. You are not a fragment anymore, which is how the ego perceives itself. Your true nature emerges, which is one with the nature of God.

Jesus points to this when he says, “Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole.” The New Testament’s “Be ye perfect” is a mistranslation of he original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don’t need to become whole, but be what you already are – with or without the pain-body.

~ by Eckhart Tolle

• Think about all the things you have to do. Do this as you are going about your day. Go over your to-do list mentally many times a day, especially in the midst of doing something. Then talk about how much you have to do and how busy you are with everyone.

• Keep checking the time, and think about time a lot: how much time something took, how much time something takes, how much time something will take, how much time you have left. Tell yourself you don’t have enough time, or worry that you don’t.

• Constantly evaluate how you’re doing as you go about your day: “Did I do that well enough?” “Could I have done it better or faster?” “How did it compare with last time or with how someone else does it?” “How could or should I do it next time?”

• Say yes to every request from others that comes your way. Believe that you should be able to do it all — everything you think you need to do and everything everyone else wants you to do. Assume that everyone else is juggling all these things perfectly.

• Tell negative stories about life, yourself and your life, and other people: “I can’t do anything right,” “Life is too hard,” “No one will ever love me,” “I will never be happy,” and so on. (What do you tell yourself that causes you to feel unhappy and stressed?)

• Don’t take time to rest or do the things you’d really like to do. Don’t expect or allow yourself to enjoy life — just get things done, as much as you can fit in, in one day! Be efficient. Don’t make happiness, love, or peace a priority. Don’t make your Self a priority, but your goals or everyone else’s needs.

The good news is that all of this stress-creation is happening within your own mind! The reason this is good news is that you don’t have to believe everything that goes through your mind. You can learn to ignore the mind when it is producing thoughts that create stress, and when you do, you will no longer feel stressed. Stress is not caused by life itself, but by what we tell ourselves about life, by how we choose to think and what we choose to believe.

Thinking is nearly always bound to create stress because the voice in our head (also called the e called the egoic mind) is a primarily negative voice and a time tyrant. This voice keeps us tied to it with fears, worries, admonitions, judgments, and commands. It’s a tyrant that, with its constant evaluations and demands, keeps us unhappy.

We all have a similar tyrannical voice in our head, but we don’t have to give it our attention. Instead, we can learn to be very present to whatever we are doing, which is actually very efficient. But more importantly, being present to what we are doing results in enjoyment of life.

When we are present to what we are doing instead of to the voice in our head and its demands and judgments, we feel peace, love, happiness, and contentment. These states are not achieved by following the voice in our head, but by ignoring the voice in our head and simply experiencing life without the mind’s constant commentary. What creates stress? This ongoing mental commentary does. This is a great discovery because it means we have the power to free ourselves from stress once

~ by Gina Lake – from her blog at RadicalHappiness.com

“Learn to live without self concern. For this you must know your own true being as indomitable, fearless, ever victorious. Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone”.

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

This story illustrates the uniquely human ability to cling to the past by holding on to our stories.

When two ducks get into a fight, it never lasts long — they soon separate and fly off in opposite directions. Each duck then flaps its wings vigorously several times. This releases the surplus energy that built up in him during the fight. After they flap their wings, they fly on peacefully as if nothing had ever happened.

Now, if the duck had a human mind, this scene would go very differently. The duck may fly away peacefully, for a moment, but he would not put the fight behind him. He would keep the fight alive in his mind, by thinking and story-making.

The duck’s story would probably go something like this: “I can’t believe what he just did. He came within five inches of me. He has no consideration for my private space. He thinks he owns this pond. I’ll never trust him again. I know he’s already plotting something else to annoy me with. But I’m not going to stand for it. I’m going to teach him a lesson he will never forget.”

And in this way the duck’s mind spins its tale, still thinking and talking about it, days, months, or even years later. He man never see his adversary again, but that doesn’t matter. The single incident has left its impression and now has a life of its own deep within the duck’s mind.

As far as his body is concerned, the fight is still continuing, and the energy his body generates in response to the imaginary fight is emotion, which in turn generates more thinking. This becomes the emotional thinking of the ego. The emotions feed the story and the story feeds the emotions. Endlessly. Unless the duck chooses to recognize that the fight is over, unless he drops the story, he will suffer from the endless cycle of his mind’s creation.

You can see how painful and troublesome the duck’s life would become if he had a human mind. But this is how most of us live all the time. For the average person, no situation or event is ever really over and done with. The mind and the mind-made story keep it going.

Unlike the duck, we are a species that has the power to remember, which is both wonderful and problematic.

Our duck has an important lesson to teach us and his message is this: Flap your wings, which means “let go of the story,” and live your real life — here and now, in the present moment.

~ by Eckhart Tolle

The third-grade sunday-school class was discussing “prayer”, and the children seemed aware that the way you end a prayer was with “amen.” Does anyone know what “amen” means, the teacher asked. There was a long silence. Then one little boy piped up, with appropriate, computer-age gestures, and said, “Well, I think it means, like, “send.”

Probably the most effective prayer of all is when we’re praying beyond words — in the still inner sancturary of the heart.

Anyone can benefit from silent praryer. Gangaji suggests: just pause and recognize the pure silent awareness that is already present within. Take a few moments just to allow your mind to empty whatever concerns or memories or projections of the future may be occurring.

Just let everything come to rest. However easy or difficult it was, you are here now … in the presence of That which you essentially are. And you can receive what is here. To receive that, there’s nothing to do. There’s a time for giving, and there’s a time for taking. This moment is a time simply to receive … no need to send anything to anyone.

A simple question: Do you trust life? All you need to answer is Yes or No.

In life, we never know what’s coming next. As much as we want to know and plan our future, it will come as it is meant to come. So why fear? Why seek to control something we cannot control? The beauty of it is, we don’t have to know what’s going to be as we have a power within us that will create and attract whatever we may need in each moment.

Life is always ‘in the right’. It doesn’t matter if we agree with it or not, it simply is. Life will decide if we shall meet again or not. Life will bring us together again if it’s meant to be. Life will show us when it’s time to go. Life will let us know what is next. Life will guide us in the right direction. Life will bring us everything we need at the right time. Life will help us when we truly need help.

Life is more than we can imagine or ever understand. And most importantly: life is not separate from us. We don’t have a life, because we are this life.

Close your eyes and, with your hands on your chest, feel your heartbeat and breathing that has continued without fail since your birth. It’s always been there and guess what, you’re not controlling it! Have you ever realized this?

Without your hearbeat and breathing, there would be no life — these simple miracles are here to teach you to stop trying to control your life and to let it simply happen. Let life happen to you. And trust that whatever happens, is right because it is happening.

Notice that there’s something much greater within you than can be contained by your mind and body. This ’something,’ which is really not a thing at all, cannot be controlled and the more you accept this, the more life will flow — the more abundance and love you will experience.

And you will realize, that you are this love and abundance. You are life and your only responsibility is to trust this simple knowing of who you truly are.

~ by Jason Lee Mitchell

Why are relationships so challenging for most people?

Relationships are challenging because we bring so much conditioning to them. By conditioning, I mean hopes, fantasies, expectations, and desires. We have so much we want another person to do for us — fulfill our fantasies, expectations, and desires, and if they don’t, we are angry with them and feel judgmental and critical of them.

Those judgments prevent us from loving them and cause them to judge us back and not feel loving toward us. So, the root of difficulties in love and relationships is our conditioning — the desires we have for someone to be a certain way in order to please us. This is conditional love — right? “I will love you if you behave and look a certain way, and I won’t love you if you don’t.” Conditional love isn’t love, and relationships don’t work when love is conditional.

But our conditioning doesn’t have to limit love in this way. If we can see that our expectations, desires, and fantasies are not important — that we don’t need these met to be happy and to have love in our life, then we can experience the other person just as he or she is, rather than as someone who needs to look and act a certain way for us to be happy and feel loving.

When we can just meet others, free of our ideas about what we want them to be or what we want from them and free of judgments, then love has a chance to flow from us to them. And love is more likely to flow to us from them as well. So relationships are challenging when we’re trying to get something from others or trying to change them to please us, and they work when we’re not doing that, but just being present to them as they are showing up in the moment.

Conditioning is really the only thing that interferes with love because we are all, by nature, loving, but our ideas about what we want others to be like interfere with our ability to feel that love. Love is our natural state, and when we aren’t paying attention to our thoughts about ourselves and others, then love naturally flows from inside of us to whomever we are with.

~ by Gina Lake