“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.

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.” (From German Sermon No. 12.)

Eckhart replied by citing a famous passage from Saint Augustine about God’s intimacy with us. Not that it did much good, although the objectionable passage did not make it into the final list denounced by the pope’s bull of condemnation two years later and published a year after Eckhart’s death. For in fact, what he was teaching was not heretical, but ancient Christian spirituality.

But the Cologne censors also objected to a similar statement in Sermon 10, which makes the point even clearer if less dramatically:

“The nearness of God and the soul makes no distinction in truth. The same knowing in which God knows Himself is the knowing of every detached spirit, and no other. The soul takes her being immediately from God. Therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself,’ and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.”

Here again, Eckhart was citing Saint Augustine on the divine intimacy. In another sermon (German Sermon 5b), he put it this way: “God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.”

What Eckhart is getting at in all these koan-like passages is that our union with God is so intimate that it is impossible to distinguish the Lover from the Beloved. (The implication must have upset the inquisitors deeply: then why bother to?) For Eckhart, such total union with

God is both the original source of our existence and the final point of our destiny. Still, between our original unity in the eternal womb of the Godhead and our ultimate union with God , the goal of all our questing, the difference made by awareness is all-important.

In German Sermon 68, Eckhart said, beginning again with his favorite passage from Augustine,

” God is closer to me than I am to myself: my being depends on God’s being near me and present to me. So God is also in a stone or a log of wood, only they do not know it. If the wood knew God and realized how close God is to it as the highest angel does, it would be as blissful as the highest angel. And so a human is more blessed than a stone or a piece of wood because she or he is aware of God and knows how close God is. And I am the more blessed, the more I realize this, and I am the less blessed, the less I know this. I am not blessed because God is in me and is near me and because I possess Him, but because I am aware of how close God is to me, and that I know God .”

Eventually, however, Eckhart insists that we must go beyond even this awareness. As long as we are aware of the difference between God and our own selves, between the “I” and the “Thou,” we are not truly one. So Eckhart could say in all sincerity, as he did in Sermon 52, “I pray God to rid me of God.”

Eckhart never confuses God and creatures. But he denies that union with God ultimately admits of any experienced duality of Lover and Beloved.

It is like the ecstasy of lovers gazing into each others’ eyes, oblivious of anything except their love. True intercourse means forgetting any distinction between “your” joy and “my” joy, or love, or being, or presence, or anything else. Such awareness expands even beyond any awareness of “our” into an unimaginable and ineffable dimension of one-ness, what in Hindu teaching is called Sat-chit-ananda – “being-awareness-bliss.”

No wonder that Hindus think of Eckhart as a Hindu, Buddhists think of him as a Buddhist, and Sufis regard him as one of their own. He speaks the mystical language of the world’s greatest lovers, those who really KNOW .

~ Richard Woods , O.P. is a leading authority on Meister Eckhart. He is author of many books including Eckhart’s Way , a study of the life and enlightened understanding of the 14th century German mystic.

~ From: Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, by Alan Watts

“At first I was a humanist agnostic, then I saw the light!

I became an earnest seeker after truth, then I saw the light!

I became a theist, then I saw that Jesus was the light and became a Christian.

At first I went to the Anglican church, but soon I saw the light and brecame a Baptist.

Then I saw the light, got baptized in the Spirit and became a Pentecostal.

Then I really saw the light and became a charismatic Catholic.

Then I really, really saw the light and became an apophatic contemplative.

And now, at last, I see the true light shining directly from God’s throne in heaven and I’ve decided to become a Cistercian monk!!!

Please … I’d like to buy a pair of your strongest wrap-around sun-glasses.”

~ Cartoon

Understandably, with all this traffic, the house has become a little worn, so we’re taking the next month or so off to do some much needed renovations. Floors will be sanded and repolished, old carpets lifted or replaced, new curtains fitted and, of course, the place will be repainted throughout.

Adventurously, we’re going to attempt all this while still living in our home with our three dogs and one cat! It will mean shifting from one level to another while work is done in stages. Hopefully the outcome will be worth all the disruption and dislocation.

What this will mean for our community of friends, however, is that there will be no gatherings at Gurukula during September and into early October. Our first get-together back in the dojo is scheduled for Sat. Oct. 16th (Eckhart Teachings Group).

A revisedl listing of upcoming Gurukula activities can now be found by going to the Gurukula Calendar.

We apologise for this interruption of services, and, if you live in Perth, hope you’ll make a point of visiting us again to see the new upgrades when our gatherings resume.

The wall-hanging clearly depicts in stylized form, the whole tree — leaves, branches, trunk and even the exposed roots.

What is the hidden meaning of this symbolic tree? What deeper understanding does it offer us?

The way we see it, the leaves are the symbol of our individual identities. There are so many leaves and so many individuals on the tree of life.

If we see ourselves only as a leaf, we tend to live minly for ourselves and experience what could be called, personal love.

But, when as a leaf, we realize we are connected to a particular branch, we may move from an individual identity into a collective identity. This identity unites us with some and separates us from others, just as one branch is separated from another.

At this level, our love becomes collective
love. We live for our collective identity and may even be willing to die for our collective identity.

The trunk is the symbol of the universal mind. All branches and leaves are attached to the trunk, but at the same time it transcends them. Identified with all humankind, our love becomes universal and more like compassion.

The roots, however, are symbolic of Consciousness, Spirit or God. When ‘enlightenment’ happens, there is an unshakable identification with this inner presence or dimension and we experience what could be called, divine or unitive love.

Each of us is a leaf for we are a unique physical being. Each of us is a branch in as much as we belong to a particular nation, culture or tradition. And each of us is the roots in as much as we are one with the divine or absolute … whether we realize it fully or not.

To accept intellectually the truth that we are, right now, each grounded inseparably in and as the divine is one thing, but to actually see It, even briefly, is another thing, and to experience this unitive vision continuously is quite another altogether … and joy unspeakable.

There have always been a few such visionaries in every age whose lives seem to correspond with the whole Tree of Life … including the trunk.

These rare individuals serve the Tree by becoming mediators or conduits between the roots, which represent the unmanifest and the manifest branches and leaves.

The Buddha, Jesus, Shankara and Ramana Mahashi etc. could be described as ‘enlightened beings’, who lived for all humankind. They are the way-showers, the truth-revealers or the connectors, as it were, between the the roots and the leaves /
branches of their time.

We are fortunate to be served by a growing number of contemporary spiritual teachers who are fulfilling much the same function today. These are the teachers we respect and attend to at Gurukula.

No one is outside this Tree and no ideology, religion or belief-system is outside this Tree that is ‘Life’ Itself. There’s only one way, one truth and one life. This is the way of the Tree — ulitmately, there is no ‘other’.

The great transition or shift isn’t about an individual entering into a branch (belief-system) or moving from one branch (belief-system) to another branch (belief-system).It’s an invitation to make the leap in consciousness from leaf to branch to trunk and from there to the roots. Now that’s radical!

~ Sent in by Linley Anderson – thanks Linley.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

I’ve had a very slow internet connection over the last few days; so slow that web pages sometimes take a couple of minutes to load. The www.headless.org site has been no exception. Interestingly, as the page loads, instead of the top tabs reading “Home”, “Douglas Harding”, Experiments” etc., in the brief moments before loading properly, they all read “home”. And that’s how I feel just right now. I have found “home”. All my remembered life, I have had glimpses of the eternal boundless space, but, paraphrasing Eliot, “I had the experience but missed the meaning”

Climbing in the Welsh mountains, poised on a rock face, my boundaries dissolve and I am one with the universe. Every small plant, the sky, the rocks, are glorious and detailed, glowing with light and I am not separate from the sky, from the mountain goat who springs through the mist, from the misty valley below Walking up a valley in the Wiltshire downs one spring morning, suddenly it’s as if someone has switched on a glorious light I have never seen before. I am nowhere but everywhere. The spring flowers glow, the sky is a heavenly azure blue, bird song is the most delightful sound I have ever heard. I am not separate. I am the world, the universe.

In church on Easter morning at dawn, under flickering candles. Instead of reading a sermon, Robert decides to fling open the doors and we sit in silence listening to the sound of a solitary blackbird. I am no longer “me”, the identified me which is within this parcel of flesh and bone and skin. I am everywhere. I am unbounded space. The sounds of the bird arise from within the space and fade and rise again in a glorious ripple of notes and silences. In a retreat centre in Bleddfa, doing the washing of the feet meditation. I am transported. I am not me, I am Mary washing the feet of Jesus and knowing I am going to lose him. I am in that eternal boundless space but full of the grief of the world.

In literature, certain things have moved me and stayed with me for reasons I have never been sure of. At school, I particularly loved Edward Thomas’ poem :”Adlestrop”, with its simple and elegant description of those timeless moments. Similarly, Eliot’s Four Quartets (for reasons which seem obvious now) and that glorious line in Kahlil Gibran’s “the Prophet” which reduced me to tears when first encountered: “For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”

At one stage in my life I even longed for death. When confronted with cancer, I spent quite some time contemplating what death would be like, and far from finding it terrifying, eventually came to the point where death to me would be a reunion with the glorious boundless space. In my meditation as I “died” I felt myself distributed in particles of golden light back to join with the infinite, deep and tranquil unbounded space. Like a cosmic orgasm. On “return”, back to my body, I felt immensely sad and full of longing. Why did I have to spend more time away from this space? Why spend more years in my earthly body, when I could be part of the unbounded eternal space?

All these experiences which came unbidden have been transitory. I have revelled in the feeling of boundlessness, but know it will fade and I will be left lumpen in my solid and all too fleshy body, sad and full of longing for these glorious experiences. And as I think about them now, they have also all been experiences of losing myself completely in the boundless space… I no longer am “me”, but the boundless space (but if so, who is recognizing the experiences?).

I have, for the most part, conceptualized it as an either/or. Either I am “me” in my body, or I am the boundless space. The only real experience of anything other than this has been in Tantra practice, when I have had the experience of being both the boundless and infinite glorious universe surrounding me, and also at the same time, me. Shakti and Shiva, the giver and receiver, both at the same time… being in my body, and being the infinite space surrounding my body. Quite a glorious, but again relatively transitory experience.

Last week, by complete accident (or is anything ever a complete accident?) I found a link to the Headless Way website. It sounded quite whacky… but being a fairly experiential person, when I read the word “experiments”, and knowing I had some idle moments I decided to give them a go.

Exercise 1 — the pointing exercise. I point at the walls of my boat, at the table, at my knee, at my hand. I take in the shape and form, the edges and boundaries and the space between. I really look. And then I turn my pointing finger towards myself, towards my eyes. I feel my eyes going cross-eyed, trying to turn my eyeballs backwards to look at myself.

Then.. WHAM.. I’m looking into unbounded space. I am unbounded space (and apparently, everythng arising in it) — at this moment … and always!

~ by Carol Dent