01/11/09 Wake Up and Smell the Enlightenment

January 11, 2009

This is the first in a 5-part series on Echkart Tolle’s
book A New Earth, Awakening to Life’s Purpose. Each
week I will introduce 2 chapters and we will then, discuss them
in the home study groups during the week.

Many people, much of the time are walking around mentally and
spiritually unconscious. One of the evidences of that is the way
we address people - “Good morning”, “Boy it’s
cold today”, “How you doing?”, “Nice to
finally see the sun”. We aren’t really trying to engage
people in conversation, thought it sounds like it.

I don’t know how many times in the past 2 weeks I’ve
heard “Did you have a nice Christmas?” I never heard
anyone say no. Because it’s a rhetorical question that’s
just a different way of saying, “hello”.

What am I saying? That we should stop greeting people with these
niceties. No, just that it’s a sign of unconsciousness, and
it’s time to wake up. Wake up from what? Unconsciousness,
which Tolle says is our ego and not our true self.

It manifests in several ways:

* Sense of I/me/mine; equating having with being, wanting; like
the child who says, “that’s my toy.” The real
problem is not the things, but the attachment to them, identifying
with them. Tolle calls it the “gravitational pull of materiality.”

* Identification with form

“Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which
primarily means

thought forms. If evil has any reality – and it has a relative,
not an absolute,

reality – this is also its’ definition: complete identification
with form – physical

forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results inh a total
unawareness

of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with
every ‘other’

as well as with the Source.” (p. 22)

On a personal level this is saying, “I am this or that”,
identifying oneself

with gender, race, religion, body, profession, nationality, etc.
On a society or

global level it separates us into groups opposed to other groups.
We

recently saw the movie, Valkyrie, a story of an officer in the
Nazi army who

led a plot to assassinate Hitler.

While it is encouraging to know there were those on the “inside”
who

realized the travesty of the Holocaust, it is always painful for
me to think

about the things humanity’s collective ego has done: the
Crusades, the

Holocaust, the Civil War, the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr.

And I was recently reminded as I watched the black smoke over
the Gaza

Strip, that we continue to separate ourselves by identifying with
form. Tolle

writes, “…humanity is now faced with a stark choice:
Evolve or die.” (p. 21)

It is indeed time to wake up.

* Tolle says this is a result of “Inherited Dysfunction”.
He points out Hinduism calls it Maya: illusion/delusion; Buddhism
– dukkha; Christianity – original sin. He explains that
the word translated in the Bible as sin is the Greek word, hamartia,
which he defines as living unskillfully or blindly and thus, suffering
and cause suffering. In Unity we refer to race consciousness.

If the bad news is that this inherited dysfunction tends to take
us into ego, the good news is that it includes the possibility of
a radical shift in consciousness. In Hinduism this is known as enlightenment.
Buddhism calls it the end of suffering. Christianity’s term
is salvation.

The emphasis here is a “radical” shift. As he talks
about the evolution of the earth and its species, Tolle refers to
the crawling reptilians, who after being unchanged for millions
of years began to grow wings and feathers. “They didn’t
become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and
walking entirely.” (p. 3)

How do we approach this shift from ego to awareness, enlightenment?
The first thing is to smile we recognize we are functioning from
our ego. Don’t take ego too seriously, says Tolle. After all,
recognition is the beginning of awakening.

It’s important to recognize the alarm clocks in our life.
Suffering, a spiritual teacher, a job loss, a relationship ending,
a book (maybe even this book). Then, we must not “hit the
snooze button”. One of the ways we do that is by labeling
things. “The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental
labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless
your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality,
the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around
you.” (p. 26)

I would suggest it’s a simple (not necessarily easy) 2-step
process:

1) Let go – renunciation

“…you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness,
from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say,
identified with.” (p. 26)

Charles Fillmore puts it this way in The Twelve Powers,
“…there must be a renunciation or letting go of old
thoughts before the new can find place in the consciousness.”

2) Allow the real you to come through.

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding
the goodness that is already with you, and allowing that goodness
to emerge.” (p. 13)

In Genesis 21:9-19 is a story of Haggar who bore a child to Abraham,
but was sent away. Her ration of water ran out and she was sitting
on a rock bemoaning her fate and afraid her child would die. Then,
she realized there was a well right by her. God didn’t miraculously
provide a well. She awoke to what had been there all along.

Identification with form “…results in a total unawareness
of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every
‘other’ as well as with the Source.” (p. 22)

We often us the affirmation, “There is only one presence
and one power in my life and in the universe, God the Good, omnipotent.”
Tolle suggests one way to remember our oneness is contemplating
a flower. Jesus said, “Consider the lilies.” Flower
and other things in nature can become a window into the formless
and an awakening to our purpose.