10. The Mathematically Inevitable Collapse
11. The Largest Event In Human History
12. The Great Depression Is The Best Case
13. The Paths To Success
14. Aware and Prepared
…To Be Continued
Archive for January 17, 2012
Carol Tuttle’s talk at Awesomeness Fest 2010 in Costa Rica.
Having helped tens of thousands of people worldwide strengthen their chakras, internationally acclaimed energy guru Carol Tuttle locates our chakras and tells us how they impact our lives. Check out her presentation to find out what your chakras are like…
To learn more about Carol Tuttle and chakras visit: http://www.chakrahealing.com
I have talked in recent posts about the Buddhist teachings on self and soul, and most recently about Buddhist meditators’ tendency to “spiritual bypassing,” i.e. moving past the messy and often painful work of wounds, selfish tendencies, traumas, life problems and developmental needs to try to reach an imagined state of transcendence where all of that can be left behind.
A lot of that terrain can be summarized by the pop phrase “getting rid of the ego,” which many seem to equate with the goal of spiritual practice. This phrase, which has over 15 million Google hits, implies two things: first, that there is something intrinsically wrong with the ego, and second, that once gotten rid of, everything will be better.
“Ego” originally was a term from Freudian psychoanalysis, or rather an English translation of Freud’s original term Ich, which simply means “I” in German. I have come to believe that translations are a major stumbling block to understanding deep matters, whether it is Freudian or Buddhist or something else. For Buddhism, the words “ego-istic” and “self-ish” are more relevant than the words “ego” or “self.” “Selfish” and “egoistic” refers to behavior, whereas “self” and “ego” refer to identity. Selfish behavior is a problem; it causes suffering for oneself and others. Self or identity is just a feature of our existence. We each have an identity; even Gautama Buddha had an identity, as he walked the dusty paths of rural 5th century B.C. India offering his teaching to all and sundry. What the Buddha taught is not that we have no identity at all, but that our identity is not fixed; it keeps changing. It has no “own-being,” to use a technical term from the Heart Sutra.
“Identity” is perhaps a somewhat more workable term than “ego,” because most of us understand that our identity does change. When we are young, we have an identity as college students, or law firm interns, or brides-to-be, or new parents. We have a job, a family, friends, relationships — taken together this is our identity, which changes day by day, year by year. Because identity changes, it includes loss. We graduate from college and endure the loss of the dorm mates, the Fall leaves in the quad, the favorite professors — and move into an unknown new world. This is loss, and throughout life loss is always with us, just as the Buddha taught. But when we are young a job comes eventually, we rent an apartment, we find new friends and lovers. in youth, the renewal of our identity comes to us without huge effort. Even a failed endeavor leads to new chances. A failed relationship leads to a new one.
It is on the “downhill slope” of life that the losses to our identity begin to outnumber the renewals. If we lose a job, it is hard to find another one (somebody younger is competing with you for it). If we get divorced, it is hard to find a new partner; all the good ones seem to be taken. Loss hits us harder, and renewal requires more effort.
That is why I’ve come to feel that, as the ancient Hindus thought in their Four Stages of Life, the second half of life is a fertile time for spiritual inquiry and practice. Buddha taught that loss — dukkha — is embedded in the fabric of life. But it is when we are older that the truth of that fact truly hits home. I think the experience of loss is what brings people to want to study Buddhism, and the desire to understand and transform ours and others’ losses is what keeps us at it. That was true for prince Siddhartha and it is so for us.
There is no need to “get rid of the ego.” The ego, the self, the ever-changing landscape of identity — none of those are the actual problem. The actual problem is that when loss comes we clutch, we tend to respond fearfully and selfishly, with clinging and resistance; we become ego-istic. Paying attention to all of that, examining it closely over and over with the practices of precepts, mindfulness, and meditation, is the nub of Buddhist practice. It is the work of a lifetime. Loss is not all there is. The fundamental spiritual message of Buddhism is upbeat, not downbeat. Joy in the midst of suffering and loss is not only possible, but attainable. That is Buddha’s third noble truth: in the midst of suffering, there is release from suffering.
I actually don’t know what it means to “get rid of the ego.” But I have had cherished good teachers and wise spiritual friends who have transformed ego and identity into a vessel of awakening and compassion, and who dedicate themselves to continuing their spiritual efforts and working for the relief of suffering wherever they can.That is a good identity to have. It’s called “Buddha,” which means “awake.” Buddha is our deepest identity; it is always with us.
I have talked in recent posts about the Buddhist teachings on self and soul, and most recently about Buddhist meditators’ tendency to “spiritual bypassing,” i.e. moving past the messy and often painful work of wounds, selfish tendencies, traumas, life problems and developmental needs to try to reach an imagined state of transcendence where all of that can be left behind.
A lot of that terrain can be summarized by the pop phrase “getting rid of the ego,” which many seem to equate with the goal of spiritual practice. This phrase, which has over 15 million Google hits, implies two things: first, that there is something intrinsically wrong with the ego, and second, that once gotten rid of, everything will be better.
“Ego” originally was a term from Freudian psychoanalysis, or rather an English translation of Freud’s original term Ich, which simply means “I” in German. I have come to believe that translations are a major stumbling block to understanding deep matters, whether it is Freudian or Buddhist or something else. For Buddhism, the words “ego-istic” and “self-ish” are more relevant than the words “ego” or “self.” “Selfish” and “egoistic” refers to behavior, whereas “self” and “ego” refer to identity. Selfish behavior is a problem; it causes suffering for oneself and others. Self or identity is just a feature of our existence. We each have an identity; even Gautama Buddha had an identity, as he walked the dusty paths of rural 5th century B.C. India offering his teaching to all and sundry. What the Buddha taught is not that we have no identity at all, but that our identity is not fixed; it keeps changing. It has no “own-being,” to use a technical term from the Heart Sutra.
“Identity” is perhaps a somewhat more workable term than “ego,” because most of us understand that our identity does change. When we are young, we have an identity as college students, or law firm interns, or brides-to-be, or new parents. We have a job, a family, friends, relationships — taken together this is our identity, which changes day by day, year by year. Because identity changes, it includes loss. We graduate from college and endure the loss of the dorm mates, the Fall leaves in the quad, the favorite professors — and move into an unknown new world. This is loss, and throughout life loss is always with us, just as the Buddha taught. But when we are young a job comes eventually, we rent an apartment, we find new friends and lovers. in youth, the renewal of our identity comes to us without huge effort. Even a failed endeavor leads to new chances. A failed relationship leads to a new one.
It is on the “downhill slope” of life that the losses to our identity begin to outnumber the renewals. If we lose a job, it is hard to find another one (somebody younger is competing with you for it). If we get divorced, it is hard to find a new partner; all the good ones seem to be taken. Loss hits us harder, and renewal requires more effort.
That is why I’ve come to feel that, as the ancient Hindus thought in their Four Stages of Life, the second half of life is a fertile time for spiritual inquiry and practice. Buddha taught that loss — dukkha — is embedded in the fabric of life. But it is when we are older that the truth of that fact truly hits home. I think the experience of loss is what brings people to want to study Buddhism, and the desire to understand and transform ours and others’ losses is what keeps us at it. That was true for prince Siddhartha and it is so for us.
There is no need to “get rid of the ego.” The ego, the self, the ever-changing landscape of identity — none of those are the actual problem. The actual problem is that when loss comes we clutch, we tend to respond fearfully and selfishly, with clinging and resistance; we become ego-istic. Paying attention to all of that, examining it closely over and over with the practices of precepts, mindfulness, and meditation, is the nub of Buddhist practice. It is the work of a lifetime. Loss is not all there is. The fundamental spiritual message of Buddhism is upbeat, not downbeat. Joy in the midst of suffering and loss is not only possible, but attainable. That is Buddha’s third noble truth: in the midst of suffering, there is release from suffering.
I actually don’t know what it means to “get rid of the ego.” But I have had cherished good teachers and wise spiritual friends who have transformed ego and identity into a vessel of awakening and compassion, and who dedicate themselves to continuing their spiritual efforts and working for the relief of suffering wherever they can.That is a good identity to have. It’s called “Buddha,” which means “awake.” Buddha is our deepest identity; it is always with us.
I Have a Dream Speech
Martin Luther King’s Address at March on Washington
August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
5.The Pyramid
6. I Think?
7. What Are We Holding On To?
8. The Shift
9. Things That Cannot Go On Forever
To Be Continued…..
Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. This great soul was a visionary. What is a visionary? Visionaries are those rare and inspired individuals who see great promise and imminent potentials for human consciousness and culture that most of us haven’t even begun to imagine yet.
They see far beyond the present to a future that has yet to be created. For them, in a sense, that future already exists because their awareness is illuminated by inspiring and compelling images of the possible. Unless we, like Dr. King and other great spiritually awakened beings, invoke that same capacity to see and intuit beyond where we already have come, it is unlikely that our lives will be expressions of anything other than the status quo.
I was recently a speaker at a conference organized around the work of the great contemporary American philosopher Ken Wilber, known for boldly attempting to integrate all human knowledge into one coherent philosophical system. He is also known for the sheer volume of his work (his eight-volume Collected Works have been published in his own lifetime.) At one point during the conference, he was asked about his own creative process and he described how when he was a young man, he would get up at 3 AM every day and write for twelve hours straight without stopping, not even for food or to brush his teeth. It is difficult to imagine what would compel a human being to drive themselves that hard without being in touch with a vision that is inspiring them to reach way beyond the norm.
Dr. King, like Mahatma Gandhi before him, knew that his brave and heroic public challenge to racism and segregation would very likely lead to his assassination. But his vision of the possible–”I have seen the mountaintop”–drove him to keep pushing against all odds. A visionary is one who is no longer merely living to get and to have for him or herself, or tenaciously trying to preserve and protect what has already been. Visionaries are living for what has not yet occurred because their attention is riveted by the promise of the possible–that future is already radiant and alive in the field of their imagination. Because they experience that future–and feel its promise on a daily basis–they live in a state of perpetual discontent, simultaneously deeply inspired and ever-unsatisfied.
How many of us have the courage and the heart to live that way? To live for the future like those great souls who have given rise to the higher values of our shared culture means we must be willing to sacrifice a perennial illusion. That illusion is the promise of deep and abiding contentment in the present moment unsupported by the liberating power of transcendent ideals or aspirations. This is an empty promise that we keep alive by continually hoping to find happiness through the gratification of our personal desires and by knowingly or unknowingly allowing ourselves to conform to the superficial values of our restless and confused culture.
In our postmodern era–”the age of the individual”–spirituality tends to be more about “me” and “my happiness” than where we are going and what it’s going to take to get there. I think we forget that our spiritual heroes were almost always brave souls who were willing to make the greatest sacrifices because of what they saw in the eye of their spiritual intuition–their vision of the possible.
Without awakening to a powerful and inspired vision of what our shared world could be, I wonder if it’s possible to experience true happiness for more than a fleeting instant? Two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha told us that everything is changing all the time, and if we want to be enlightened beings, we mustn’t allow ourselves to be attached to anything other than that ungraspable emptiness that is the very ground of reality itself. But now, in the twenty-first century, what if, instead, we allow ourselves to become attached to a glorious and inspired vision of the possible, one that lies always beyond our grasp? One that is always pulling us beyond the present moment and beyond ourselves, to an ever-greater perfection at which, paradoxically, we will never ultimately arrive.
In an evolving universe, the goalposts are always moving forward, always moving upward. Great souls and inspired visionaries change and improve and enlighten the world because their attention is always riveted to those goalposts. That’s a new way to understand the traditional spiritual ideal of being “in the world but not of it.” It means we are very much in the world of time, space, and location but the attention of our inner eye, heart, and mind is utterly entranced by what lies far, far beyond it.
Dr. King’s infectious joy, compassion, and deep love for humanity was not only the expression of his “self actualization” as an individual, but more importantly, it was the reflection of what he could see for all of us in a future that hadn’t arrived yet. Just imagine how much love we would experience for each other and for our world in the present moment if our attention was illuminated by and focused upon what was possible in our future.
It’s not difficult to complain or feel overwhelmed by the challenges that we face as individuals and as a global culture. But how many of us are willing to stretch and reach beyond our normal boundaries in order to catalyze genuine breakthroughs to new orders of possibility and potential that most people can’t begin to imagine? Spiritual development in our brave new world might need to become less about being and more about seeing–seeing and imagining what’s possible, just like Dr. King did. And by having the courage to allow that vision to awaken us from the slumber of stagnation and small-mindedness, we can reach without restriction for a better world.
