Ben’s Blog

Weeding out the thoughts that we have accepted from outside of ourselves is one of the main tasks that we have as human beings in the “pursuit” of true freedom. Whether we accepted them voluntarily or not, and whether we accepted them consciously or not, doesn’t matter. We are ultimately responsible for everything that ends up in our personal sphere.

The focus of existence in this reality is our physical body. Our bodies are conduits of life. The more cluttered they are with obstructions, the less they can pass the vital life force energy. True freedom can be found in two forms related to this. You can transcend the physical body, achieving a consciousness whereby the physical body has relatively little importance in relation to your true self and your true life. This is the ultimate path of enlightenment as, in the end, the physical body cannot be counted on. It is always temporary. It’s something that we have to come to terms with.

The full expression of a human being would include the health and vibrancy of the physical body as well as that of the true self. In fact, having a healthy spirit, and an unhealthy body, is somewhat of a lie. Can you really have one without the other?

The second level of true freedom can be found in the body. You can relieve the sources of obstructions to its vital life force energy.

Most of us engage in bypasses to true freedom. We think we can outwit our destiny, and thus we seek shortcuts to bliss. We settle for false bliss in pleasure-seeking. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure and pain are enforcers of truth. The body, however, can be trained to experience true pleasure. It’s opposite, and typical manifestation, is addictive pleasure, those pleasures which we aren’t in control of. Of course, the mind will pretend that it is in control, and this obscures the addiction.

Denying the body is a form of trying to transcend the physical structure before you are ready. You are done with pleasure when you are done. Can you admit to yourself that you are a pleasure-seeker and that this is where you are right now?

Obsessively engaging in trying to remove obstacles to health in your personal sphere is also an avoidance technique. Health is important. It affects everything that you do. But, if your life becomes about removing obstacles, haven’t you lost a real life?

Most “problems” disappear when we get out of their way. In the West, where the mind is king, how do you accept the idea that, most of the time, all you really have to do is observe the situation? Your attention is ultimately all-powerful. It is the great solvent of your reality, a stream of life that flows down, in its own time, and cleanses all things.

Being present solves most issues. That’s because you are part of life. Life always works out. You can separate yourself from life to the extent that you engage in the identification with mental abstractions. Ultimately, though, life will fold you back in, and won’t take any consideration of your comfort.

Being present means facing our own foolishness, our own baggage. We’ve all done things that we aren’t proud of, and even that we can’t forgive ourselves for. But, facing these things is only a problem if we have accepted the notions of others into our personal sphere. The ideas and thoughts of other people become judgments in our own consciousness. Only your own ideas truly work for us.

At some point, we have to either kick out all of the notions of others from ourselves, or we have to transform them into our own ideas through full acknowledgment. In the latter, the foreign substance gets expelled anyway, as its nugget is freed in the fire of your awareness.

That judgment doesn’t work is a frightening concept for the Western mind. Conventional wisdom would say that without judgment, we would be surrounded by chaos and anarchy. That’s because the mind takes everything to be equal to everything else. Though the physical world and spiritual world mirror each other, they are not identical. You could restrain a violent person, because that is what works on a physical level, without being in judgment of that person. The physical action doesn’t change. The reason for the restraint does. This completely alters the quality of the encounter.

Judgment is pernicious. All the concepts that we have accepted from others, we unconsciously turn onto ourselves, and worse, onto those around us. We force others to live by the same set of rules that we feel forced to live by. “Everyone has to follow the rules.” “Everyone has to be treated the same.” Again, the mind takes a spiritual truth to be a global truth. You could certainly, for example, treat everyone as an emanation of the divine, without forcing them all to have a Spam sandwich for lunch.

Non-judgment is the great dissolver of ills. Your true awareness doesn’t contain any judgment. Judgment limits your awareness by denying you access to that which is interpreted as unacceptable. You become obligated to blind yourself to the full spectrum of life within you and around you.

Under the microscope of judgment, all of your personal history takes on a charge. This makes it difficult to allow things to be as they are. The things in your past deemed negative can loom large, hanging over you like a dark cloud. With just a moment of silence, you can hear the skeletons rattling in your closet. This is all thanks to judgment. Take away the judgment, and you have a patchwork quilt, a mandala, of almost infinite breadth, of indescribable depth and beauty. Behold the splendor of your true self.

The personal ego is nothing more than a collection of things that you identify with. It is this collection that wholly comprises your balance of karma. Your karma is that fun thing that you get to carry around from one incarnation to the next trying to understand and resolve.

From the Cartesian model, the loftiest goals for a Westerner derive from the idea that the mind is senior to any and all things around it. It is my ability to think that can solve any problem, remove me from any harm, create the most beneficial circumstances and provide me with the most freedom. With this as the loftiest goal, you’d be a fool not to identify with your ability to think, and that is, of course, exactly what we do.

Most Westerners don’t actually think, but rather just have thoughts. We have some thoughts that we’ve internalized from our life experiences, and we have a lot of thoughts that are channeled through us from the collective consciousness. Internalized thoughts usually come from traumatic personal events that precipitate in us making some kind of decision about ourselves and/or our world. Surprised by the “thoughtless” tyranny of our more powerful attacker, we repeat the thoughts about the event over and over in our minds. Thoughts from the collective basically boil down to a bag of rules, things that you should or shouldn’t be doing, the right things to do and the right times to do them.

In both cases, these thoughts stem from, or actually are, incursions from forces outside of ourselves. Does it really make sense to identify with this endless stream of foreign propaganda? Unfortunately, most of the things that we do, most of the time, we do unconsciously. This comes almost entirely from our fear for survival. One of the primary rules for survival is to go along with the group.

It’s astronomically easier for the collective to remain in control of you if you identify with the thoughts that are channeled through you. When you treat these thoughts as your own, as coming from you, you automatically become your own enforcer. You make yourself stick to the rules, even when it’s really not in your best interest.

For the Westerner, then, the mind and the ego are the same thing. What we identify with is our ego. We identify with our mind.

It’s a natural course of events, really, to become mired in the world. It’s part of the evolutionary path of a human being. Identifying with the mind makes it a much more complicated affair. We have become mired in a world that is almost completely conceptual. We put our life force energy into things that are representations of truth, and not truthful in and of themselves.

This is natural, too, this heightening of the entanglement with this reality. The stakes will always be made to go higher. Fortunately, as Eckhart Tolle says, “When you have suffered enough, you will be enlightened.”

The mind takes its energy from us. Without us constantly giving it our energy, it would not survive. That’s why the mind must constantly try to find a game for us to play.

The mind uses concepts out of the collective consciousness and sets up really fun premises like “You aren’t good enough”. If you aren’t good enough the way you are, then there are an unlimited number of things that you have to do to try to become “good enough”. It’s a never-ending game. Capitalism is a perfect match for a mind-based reality. There’s always something else you can buy to make yourself better, or at least to placate your insecurity.

Advertising is the perfect handmaiden for capitalism. “Product image” is often more important than the product itself. How many people can tell the difference between the functionality of a product and its image? How many people have stopped to consider that the image is just a concept, and isn’t real, but only a perception, a belief that has been sold to them?

Descarte’s “I think, therefore I am” was an expression of truth insofar as it perfectly expressed the symptom of our disease. We identify with our thinking process.

Those who actually use their ability to think can control their thoughts. Perhaps that is the draw, that there is something that we can control, when everything else seems beyond our control.

Unfortunately, most people don’t actually think their own thoughts. Their thoughts are provided for them by the collective consciousness. When we don’t think our own thoughts, we can easily fall prey to the mental images that fill the collective consciousness. For most of us, it’s really, “I have thoughts, therefore I am.”

If I am the thoughts I’m having, then a lot of things become true, and a lot of them are contradicting. That these thoughts aren’t your own, and that they contradict themselves, causes a drain of life force energy and lead to a life that is diffused in intention and purpose.

The Western mind is an entity unto itself. It is created by the concepts that we inherit that aren’t our own. The mind only has a life because we give it our energy. The mind is enforced by the collective consciousness, which is almost entirely a collection of rules, things which constitute right and wrong.

I say “collective consciousness”, but it’s really mostly collective unconsciousness. You can tell when someone’s speaking for the collective when they blurt out something that is supposed to be a truth for everyone.

I heard a young man suggest something to the effect, “Everyone knows that women have to shave their legs. Otherwise it’s just gross.” Apparently, a woman has to fit into a preexisting image of what she’s supposed to be. Is her body not good enough the way Mother Nature provided it?

I police officer once told me, “Taking any job is better than no job at all.” It’s a perfect thing for someone who is primarily concerned with order to say. Forget about soul searching, or trying to create a life truly worth living. “Just get back in the box so that my reality is as safe as possible.”

There is nothing wrong with physical care, safety and freedom. The problem comes with the overly simplistic, black and white, interpretations of the collective mind. “Being a good citizen means having a job. It’s part of being responsible, of not being a drain on society.” What if your job is unhealthy to you or to the environment? What if you hate your job? What if you’re passing your disgruntled obedience on to your children? Is a half-lived life better than no life at all?

In “democratic” societies, we consider ourselves to be free citizens, but we are almost completely controlled by the rules of the collective consciousness. At an alarmingly fast rate, these rules are also being turned into laws. We have begun to enforce morality.

Very few people have the audacity to ever question this bag of rules in any meaningful way. These people are often considered geniuses. They are also sometimes thrown overboard, their “wild notions” perceived as being too risky for the general populace.

Questioning the bag of rules is something that we should all do. It isn’t until we’ve made our own decisions about things, and about life, that we actually begin to live our own life, instead of just following that which has been laid out before us, and laid out mostly unconsciously.

Just when you think you’ve heard it all.

A woman came to the raw food potluck the other night claiming that she had suffered from “raw food poisoning”. She said that she had to be careful about the amount of raw food she ate. If she ate more than a certain amount, she would feel ill.

I don’t doubt the validity of this woman’s experience, but her choice of words lay clear her belief system about food’s relationship to her body. Two fundamental ideas are exposed, that raw food isn’t good for you, and that, somehow, it’s not natural.

I experience great humility as I’m reminded that human beings were on a raw food diet for over five million years before the discovery of fire and the subsequent use of it on food. Also, of the millions of species of life on our planet that consume food, only those that ingest cooked food suffer from degenerative disease, i.e., human beings, their pets, and other animals in captivity.

It’s such a simple idea that Mother Nature provides us with exactly what we need in exactly the right form. The human body is a product of this planet, and developed in synergistic harmony with all of the other forms of life around it. The modern diet is a perfect example of our continued effort to separate ourselves from nature by having to change everything that comes from it before we assimilate it. What does it take to realize that we’re already taken care of?

It’s amazing the massive amounts of time and energy that go into heating and manufacturing foods. Do we have a fear of the simple life? Like a variation of Occam’s razor, eating food in its least effort form is so simple that it must be true.

You simply can’t get “raw food poisoning”, unless your raw food is covered with poisonous chemicals or is infested with some kind of microscopic life which you aren’t used to. Usually, a person who feels ill after eating raw food is suffering from self-poisoning.

Self-poisoning is just another phrase for cleansing. When you eat foods that take less energy to digest, your body takes the opportunity to rid itself of some toxins that you had ingested in the past, that it had stored at the time to keep you from being inundated with toxins. It’s scary that a lot of cooked food meals are actually toxic events. That’s one of the things I used to “love” about eating junk food, the rush of my immune system being activated as a result.

The body knows the truth more than our minds ever will. It knows what is toxic and what isn’t. If supplied with superior nutrition, it jumps at the chance to rebuild the body with better building blocks, dumping older, weaker constructions as it does so.

A “true” body, one created with the best building blocks, in their most life-filled form, and operating with optimal nutrients, may look only subtly different from a “false” body, but the chemistry at work is a transformational leap.

This is why the body has to be trusted. Not with the “run away at the first sign of a symptom” mentality, but in the spirit that your body knows what it’s doing, and that if you give it the best fuel available, it automatically makes all the right choices.

It can take a lot of time for the body to make the transformation to actually operating properly instead of in immune system response mode. Cleansing can also be found to be an art form in itself. In all my experiences, I have found fresh, high water content, whole foods to be the best chaperones for cleansing. They seem to offer the best transportation for toxins out of the system, while giving you all the nutrition you need at the same time.

This woman’s blind spot may be her belief that she had always eaten very healthy. This could be preventing her from admitting to herself just how toxic her body is. And, of course, identifying with the belief of “this is how I am”, makes the condition very difficult to see, and thus to change.

Why choose, or seek, enlightenment at all? Let’s start at the beginning.

When spirit first started trying to embody itself on this planet, mystics have said that at first spirit moved into rocks. And then it moved into plants, and then animals, and eventually it came to inhabit human bodies.

Spirit is always becoming something. Beingness comes from nothingness, and seeks somethingness. We need somethingness to validate, to complete, our nothingness. When we take physical form, we make real what would otherwise just be pure potential. Potential that never gets used is worthless.

The problem is that often times when spirit becomes “something”, it then forgets what it has become. This is tragic. Spirit becomes somethingness to validate its nothingness, and loses its nothingness. It becomes stuck on the side of somethingness. This is death for spirit. Life then becomes a dry husk, pointless and meaningless. It has, as Jesus warned about, “gained the whole world, and lost its own soul.” This can lead to apathy, depression, loneliness and despair, and on the other side, greediness, disrespect for physical life, raping of resources and pleasure seeking.

So, let’s just say that this is of primary importance, as Jesus said, the idea of “being in the world, but not of the world”. This would be reinforced by his recommendation to “seek first the kingdom of God”, to make sure that we get our priorities straight at the outset. For what good is a lifetime if we lose ourselves? Sure, it happens. A lot of strange things can happen, and they’re all wonderful and beautiful, once you wake up from the experience. A party that never ends is not a party. It is hell. Ask any addict. If you’re stuck on the merry-go-round, it doesn’t matter how good the ride was to begin with. Once you’ve lost your perspective, you’ve lost everything.

There is nothing wrong with swinging from one extreme to another, from one state to another, from one level of consciousness to another. However, there is a particular beauty in being able to have it all, in the middle, as in the eye of a storm. You can keep the consciousness of your nothingness while experiencing the reality of somethingness at the same time. You could even be fully experiencing your nothingness and at the same time fully immersed in physical reality. You could call this enthusiasm, bliss, ecstasy or passion. You could even call it enlightenment, living a life that is full of light. Everything worth doing is worth doing full out. Why not?

So, isn’t this a paradox, being fully yourself and being fully immersed in the world at the same time? Yes. Spiritual truth is always paradoxical. Only a paradox can contain the truth. A paradox has an infinite number of solutions. The truth is always infinite. The two go together.

This goes against the black and white thinking of the mind, where everything is either good or bad, right or wrong. The truth is, every circumstance is always slightly different, the variables are always slightly different. No situation can be treated in exactly the same way. If a running back in football expected every hole that opened up in a certain location to always look the same, he would successfully penetrate the hole a very low percentage of the time. We can generalize about holes, and this helps for preparation and for planning. But during a game, all preparation must be subconscious and we must be fully in the game, in the moment, to successfully navigate the situations presented, each of which is completely new and different.

Children are often in a state of coming from their nothingness and being fully immersed in the world at the same time. Unfortunately, we train our children out of this state. It would be nice if for every grain of information we provided a child with about the world, we allowed them to enlighten us, to remind us, of the larger perspective of God-knowledge.

As adults, it’s not so much that we have anything to learn to find enlightenment, but that we have many things to unlearn.

Descartes nailed our current level of consciousness on the head when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a conceptual age, a mental age. Currently, concepts are as real to us as physical objects. Advertising relies completely on this fact when it tries to convince us that a certain product is “sexy”. This, of course, can’t be objectively true. A product can only have certain attributes and be lacking in other attributes. No judgement can ever be objectively true. It’s only when you buy into a concept that it becomes true for you. You make it true. As Jesus said, “As you believe, it is done unto you.”

The most important concepts to address are going to be the ones that you have about yourself. These are going to be the core concepts. They will affect everything else that you do.

After taking a physical body, we gradually begin to identify with it, with its traits, capabilities and characteristics, with its environment and privilege and with our personality. We come to know ourselves as sexy, beautiful, homely, nerdy, smart, stupid, exciting, boring, slutty, prudish or any of a million other types.

It’s really a lack of precision that gets us into trouble. Instead of saying, “I have the ability to think quickly on my feet” or “I have a good memory”, we say, “I am smart”, and this lends itself to becoming a stereotype, an embodiment of a concept, like “the brain of the class”. A stereotype is a very limiting, one-dimensional concept of self. Others include “the jock”, “the whore”, “miss congeniality”, “the stoner”, “the most likely to succeed”, etc.

Identifying with the physical body is really a trap. This is why people who get into serious accidents or develop serious illnesses and their bodies are disfigured in some way are sometimes very thankful when the event is over and things have settled down. They are relieved to not be stuck with the same limiting concepts of the body any more. They have seen the bigger picture. They have seen what life is about. They now know that the body is just a body. It is not them.

Identifying with something is great as long as you think you are winning. And therein lies the hook. The mind always thinks it is winning.

First of all, I’d like to thank Eckhart Tolle for translating Eastern spirituality and philosophy for the Western mind. I’ve seen quotes and passages, and read books on Eastern thought, but never really appreciated what it had to offer until Eckhart Tolle began clarifying them in a very simple and straightforward manner with his book, The Power of Now.

For over a year, I have been the leader of a weekly Eckhart Tolle Silent Local Meditation Group in Northern California. This has been a very fulfilling and rewarding experience. For me, Eckhart’s words are deeply steeped in the truth, especially those that describe the human mind. However, what I have noticed for myself over the last year is that I could use a little more detail about the mechanics of how to interact with the human mind.

I am one of those people that Eckhart has talked about that has been meditating for twenty years. Part of me, indeed, thought that it was very advanced, and that it knew everything there was to know about meditation (among other things). With the help of the Eckhart Meditation Group, and close personal friends, I’ve repeatedly had to face the reality that when it comes to the human mind, I’m an absolute beginner.

It’s one thing to hear the truth that my mind hasn’t been very effective in promoting happiness in my life and that I must disidentify with my mind to find happiness. It’s another thing altogether to do it. If I am identified with my mind, the honest question becomes, “How do I disidentify with something that I think I am?”

Eckhart woke up one morning and was no longer operating in the same way that he had been before. He experienced a sudden shift in consciousness. It took him some time to realize this, but what had happened to him was a permanent 80% reduction of what most people consider to be normal thinking. This is reminiscent of Gautama Buddha, who sat under a tree until he began laughing when he finally “got it”.

Perhaps the final step to enlightenment does always come in an instant. Eckhart admits, though, that most people will probably have a more gradual transition to it than he did. Unfortunately, Eckhart’s teachings don’t address very much of this transition period.

On his CD, Gateways to Now, Eckhart introduces us to the tools of the “inner body”, silence and acceptance. In other places, he talks about the “pain body”, the reactive body made up of mind and emotions. In other places, he also talks a lot about stillness, and presence.

Presumably, one could just practice using these tools and exercising their awareness of those things which Eckhart speaks about to eventually gain a strong sense of their true self and of the Now to gain enlightenment.

Eckhart also says that ultimately everyone comes to enlightenment when they have suffered enough. Though I don’t doubt the validity of this statement, it sounds a little painful.

Frankly, I would prefer a little better map of the scenery that I will be experiencing so that I have some idea of what to expect. If my identity is completely based in my mind, how do I “lose my mind” without losing my mind? What does it feel like to be my true self instead of being my mind? Is it possible to straddle between these two worlds, or must one always bounce back and forth? Even though my true self is beautiful and wonderful, how do I trust it when I have no groundedness in it whatsoever? Does it take faith?

This need for a road map is undoubtedly one of the mind. But this is the point of a transition. We want to gradually, and gently, let go of identification with mind as we move toward groundedness in being. We’ll also want to know what the surroundings look like, in case some kind of “leap” is necessary. This way, the mind can stay as our ally, or at least not turn into our enemy.

A little more clarification about the mechanics of mind and how one interacts with it would go a long way in enabling one to proceed a little more quickly and easily. This road map doesn’t have to be perfect. There may be no experts on this subject that care to fully elaborate and there may not be any absolute truths when it comes to the human mind. It doesn’t matter. Any map is better than no map.