Self . . . An 'Imaginary Center' as the 'Cause of Suffering'

"As LONG AS (one's subjective 'self') is centered in a phenomenal object, and thinks and speaks therefrom, (one's) subject is identified with that object and is bound."

"As long as such condition (applies), the identified subject can never be free—for freedom is liberation from that identification."

"Abandonment of a phenomenal centre constitutes the only 'practice', and such abandonment is not an act volitionally performed by the identified subject, but a non-­action (wu wei) leaving the noumenal centre in control of phenomenal activity, and free from fictitious interference by an imaginary 'self'."

"Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal center? As long as you do that you can never recognize your freedom."

Preface to "Open Secret" by Wei Wu Wei

 self / n., adj. & verb (pl. selves) 1 a person's or thing's own individuality or essence (showed his true self). 2 a person or thing as the object of introspection or reflexive action (the consciousness of self). . . .

ego / n. (pl. -os) 1 Metaphysics a conscious thinking subject. 2 Psychology the part of the mind that reacts to reality and has a sense of individuality. . . .

[Source: Concise Oxford English Dictionary.]

"(An) event," Wei Wu Wei points out, "only occurs in the mind of the perceiver of it, singular or plural as the case may be, and no event could be anything but a memory when we know it. No event is anything but a psychic experience. Events, or memories of events, are objectivizations in consciousness."

Our lives, our histories - personal and collective - the "who" we identify as, are manifestations of consciousness. Indeed, as many physicists point out, at the most basic level, the entire universe must be manifested (or "real-ized") through an act of conscious observation, through an observing consciousness. Some, like the late David Bohm, might agree with Gary Zhukav's conclusion that "modern physics has become the study of the structure of consciousness."

Buddhist teacher, Tulke Urgyen Rinpoche, would say that 'reality' ("as it is") - including the basic nature of a realized Buddha and that of ordinary sentient beings - is a fundamental and complete emptiness unified irrevocably with an infinite ability to 'cognize.' I suspect he would agree that the 'events' of our lives, and our 'memories' of those events, "are objectivizations in consciousness," albeit objectivizations that are misperceived because we are unskillful in realizing the unity of our empty and infinitely cognizant nature.

One must ask, given the 'misperceptions' of our own individual and collective group consciousness, just how functional we are as many billions of individualized 'selves.' How well does an overwhelmingly narcissistic, post-modern dualistic perspective work for us?

It is important, I feel, to realize just how much unnecessary mayhem, harm and suffering this misperception of separate individuality perpetuates if we are ever going to make the necessary efforts to be free of 'self.'

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"(I)t becomes obvious," writes spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "that the human ego in its collective aspect as 'us' against 'them' is even more insane than the 'me,' the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of the violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet 'normal' equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego."

Eckhart Tolle, best-selling author of
"The Power of Now" and "A New Earth."

"Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all-pervasive on this planet," Tolle observes. "When you don't recognize them as individual and collective manifestations of an underlyin dysfunction or mental illness, you fall into the error of personalixing them. You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group and you say: 'This is who he is. This is who they are.'"

"All this," he notes, "is enormously satisfying to the ego. It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other, whose 'otherness' has become manifested to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, not the rootedness in the one Life that you share with each human being, your common divinity."

And, he points out: "Fighting (such) unconsciousness will (only) draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconscious, dysfunctional egoic behavior can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Emphasis added.)

Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," pp. 73-75

As Wei Wu Wei asks: ""Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal center?" "As long as you do that," he points out, "you can never recognize your freedom."

Lama Surya Das: On the Dharma

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings. . . .

As the shadow follows the body,
as we think, so we become.

-- from the Dhammapadda --

"Dharma teachers," writes Lama Surya Das, "sometimes refer to the stream of consciousness of a person with an untrained mind (most of us, much of the time); as a continuous stream of delusion. This continuous stream is built up through years (or lifetimes) of deeply confused habitual and distorted thinking. We think so much, yet we truly know and understand so very little."

"A Tibetan saying," notes Das, "is that thoughts and concepts are delusions; awareness is wisdom. Self absorption acts as a veil of delusion that distorts everything."

[Lama Surya Das, "Awakening the Buddha Within," pp. 131-132.]

Like so many other spiritual teachers, in varied traditions, Das, notes the post-modern man and woman seem to be "narcissistic and self-absorbed," identified and ruled by the continuous stream of deceptive self-consciousness which is the human ego. Thus, he notes, "(t)o embody the Dharma, we have to learn to let go of self-deception and be honest with ourselves as well as the rest of the world. This level of honesty requires conscientious attention, discernment, emotional intellignece, self-knowledge, and sincere internal scrutiny."

"Everything," Das observes, "depends on motivation and intention. What you tell yourself about any situation reflects where you are coming from. It starts in your head, with what you tell yourself."

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"Right intentions . . . suggests to the spiritual seeker that it is in our own highest interest to be less selfish," Das notes.

"When our energies are taken up with thoughts of "me" or "mine," we are honoring neither our human dignity nor our innate Buddha-nature," he points out. "The Dharma urges seekers to develop an unselfish view of the world because the reality is that we are all interconnected; our fates are intertwined."

"It takes an entire community to raise a Buddha," he observes.

[Lama Surya Das, supra., p .135.]

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: On the Origin of Thought

My first meditation teacher - the only truly enlightened man I have had the pleasure of knowing personally - was grounded in his spirituality by Transcendental Meditation (TM), although his exploration, practice, and knowledge of various religious and spiritual traditions was extensive. He explained (as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder and first exponent of TM, as we know it, does in the attached video) that all thoughts rise and expand in the subconscious before they pop up, full blown, into the field of our consciousness. Both used the analogy of a bubble rising from a lake bed, expanding as it rises through the water column, before it bursts through to the lake surface as a fully-formed bubble.

The purpose of meditation, I was taught, is to feel the stirrings of the thought-bubbles forming in our subconscious, thereby allowing us to dissipate them gently before they breach the surface of our consciousness and thus disturb the equanimity of our mind. Learning to discipline "the thought-stuff of the mind" in this manner affords us a certain discipline over our thought, speech and actions.

In his commentary on the "Bhagavad-Gita," the Maharishi describes "the main principle" of TM in the following terms:

"The technique may be defined as turning the attention inwards towards the subtler levels of thoughts until the mind transcends the experience of the subtlest state of the thought and arrives at the source of the thought. This expands the conscious mind and at the same time brings it in contact with the creative intelligence that gives rise to every thought."

"A thought-impulse starts from the silent creative centre within, as a bubble starts from the bottom of the sea. As it rises, it becomes larger; arriving at the conscious level of the mind, it becomes large enough to be appreciated as a thought, and from there it develops into speech and action."

"Turning the attention inwards takes the mind from the experience of a thought at the conscious level . . . to the finer states of the thought, until the mind arrives at the source of thought. . . . This inward march of the mind results in the expansion of the conscious mind."

"It should be noted," the Maharishi points out, "that transcendental meditation is neither a matter of contemplation nor of concentration. The process of contemplation and concentration both hold the mind on the conscious thinking level, whereas transcendental meditation systematicaly takes the mind to the source of thought, the pure field of creative intelligence."

The Evolution of Consciousness: A Global Imperative

"Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival - this is humanity's challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet. Until very recently, the transformation of human consciousness - also pointed to by the ancient teachers - was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because it was not imperative."

"A significant portion of the world's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

"Evolve or die." These are strong words, but they capture the essence of the stark choice that we have confronted ourselves with as the result of an ever burgeoning scientific technology unchecked by effective religious, spiritual or moral insight and actions. While virtually all of our ways of life have been fundamentally altered by our embrace of the last several centuries of technological change, it appears to be only now that the need for a wholesale change in the very nature of our consciousness is becoming readily apparent - or an evolutionary imperative, as Tolle notes.

While there is a plethora of material out there (including Tolle's powerful first book "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment") describing what needs to be done to change one's level of consciousness, and how that might be achieved, it is by no means an easy challenge. Few truly evolutionary challenges are.

"If," writes philosopher Gerald Heard, "we are to advance through the evolution of consciousness beyond self-consciousness, to reunite consciousness now divided into the self-conscious and subconscious, and bring about a new and single quality of awareness and being, there is required of us a peculiar and rare quality of attention. It must be intense but without effort and strain. It must be that over-plus of evolutionary energy, which we call curiosity, and the German tongue calls Neuiger, the new appetite, raised to what Plato called illuminating wonder."

"Indeed," Heard observes, "because we are now so deeply prejudiced in favour of the assumption that it is only possible for one real experience to be presented to us, and that can only be the world of common sense, the necessary state of mind required for enlargement of consciousness must be one which is even without expectation."

"We are waiting for an experience of which we have no conception from the past," he points out, "and that being so, any clear expectation must distort or even completely inhibit a radically new awareness."

[Gerald Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 164-165.]

Fortunately, since Heard's time (he wrote those words in the dark days just before the onset of the Second World War), we have had breakthroughs in technology which have allowed those who have experienced equal breakthroughs in consciousness itself to intimately share their experiences (and methodologies) with us.

Below, are two teachers, the "neo-Buddhist" teacher Adyashanti and Tolle himself, sharing their integral teachings with us. Each shares the fundamental insight that there is an untapped, inherent state of higher consciousness within each of us.

Beyond Desire to Spiritual Awakening

"When a man surrenders all desires that come to the heart and by the grace of God finds the joy of God, then his soul has indeed found peace. He whose mind is untroubled by sorrows, and for pleasure has no longings, beyond passion and fear and anger, he is the sage of the unwavering mind."

-- The Bhagavad Gita, 2:55-56 --

"Spiritual experience," writes famed translator, Jose Mascaro, "is the only source of true spiritual faith, and this must never contradict reason, or as Shankara, c. AD 788-820, says in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita: 'If a hundred scriptures should declare that fire is cold or that it is dark, we would suppose they intend quite a different meaning from the apparent one!'"

"What," he then asks, "is the indispensable condition for this spiritual experience? It is very simple, and it can be very difficult: it is the absence of desires."

[Mascaro, "Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics)," p. li.]

But, the question remains: How will we know when we have mastered desires?

In his treatise, "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," author, William Irvine observes that when we have mastered desire, "(w)e will experience what . . . has been the goal of most of those who have thought about desire - a feeling of tranquility."

"This should not be confused with the kind of tranquility brought on be ingestion of a tranquilizer," he cautions. Rather, he notes, "(i)t is instead marked by a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living - that despite our circumstances no key ingredient of happiness is missing."

"With this sense," Irvine observes, "comes a diminished level of anxiety: we no longer need to obsess over the things - a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen - that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly," he points out, "if we master desire, to the extent possible to do so, we will no longer despise the life we are forced to live and will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead, we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."

[Irvine. "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," pp. 6-7.]

The "desireless realm" described by the Buddha, and so many others, is thus, a universal spiritual state of being described in all of the world's great wisdom traditions. In the New Testament, for example (at Matthew 6:27-34), Jesus addresses our overwhelming desires and worries, observing:

"And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"

“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

"(T)he time and effort we spend trying to master desire," Irvine suggests, "are probably considerably less than the time and effort we will expend if we instead capitulate to our desires and spend our days, as so many do, working incessantly to fulfill whatever desire floats into our head."

"Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires," says the Gita (at 2:48), be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same."

Carl Jung: Religious Experience and the Unconscious

According to the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung - the "Einstein of the mind" - the individual is born with an inherent disposition that becomes masked by the ego as he or she matures. And it is only by penetrating through the ego's mask that he or she discovers what and who she is. The danger, however, is that in doing so one will inevitably find a certain kind of madness.

In the lengthy video interview, attached, Jung observes that

"Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it." 

"We are only deeply unconscious of these facts" Jung notes, "because we live all by our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. And when a man discovers it, in our days, he thinks he's crazy . . . and really crazy."

Jung's view was that without some real, inner religious experience, the madness of the human ego could and would drive the individual actor to the depths of madness, a view that is readily understandable given the collective insanity witnessed by Jung during the first half of the twentieth-century. In candid correspondence written in the last year of his life, Jung observed:

"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouse so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible."*

Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961)

The existential question for Jung, then, was: "Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving into the crowd?"

"To this question," he remarked, "there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself, but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration of his own human dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness - that is, towards the unconscious, the only accessible source of religious experience."

"This is not to say," Jung cautions, "that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self, pp. 101-102]

* Letter from Carl Jung to Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), dated January 30, 1961. Jung died on June 6, 1961.

Tolle and Adyashanti: 'The Voice in the Head"

Adyashanti

Meditation is not a goal, and a meditative practice is not the end, says the enlightened neo-Buddhist spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. In fact, he says, it can be counter-productive if we mistakenly identify ourselves with our thoughts about meditation.

"If it's thought only as a means to an end" he says, "then its is overvalued."

"Because, he says, we think, 'You must do this in order to achieve a certain end.' Meditating (is then seen) as a means to get to a spiritual goal. Then we tend to adhere to ideas that say we must meditate a certain amount, and a lot, that it's sort of the highway to enlightenment. But that is to turn (meditation) into a goal. And, as soon as we turn it into a goal, then it is trapped within what I call the 'dream state' - a state of consciousness that is dominated by the mind (and) which is created by the mind."

"The 'dream state,'" he explains, "is just another word for mental consciousness, actually believing the mental noise in one's head, which is the common state of consciousness. The common state of consciousness of humanity is one in which human beings believe the mental noise in their head. And because of that, human beings have this compulsive relationship with thought. They think compulsively. Its like an addiction. As if you would sort of cease to be if you didn't think."

"In a very simple manner of speaking, its all awakening is - our consciousness going from this 'dream state' in which we are caught in the compulsive nature of thought and its world-view, and its 'self-view' - and going from this which is itself a 'dream state' created by thinking, and going from that to the state of consciousness which is not proceeding from thought."

"Whenever thought is no longer compulsively moving and, therefore, we are not deriving our sense of self from it, our sense of reality from it," says Adyashanti, "then we are free of the ordinary 'dream world,'" from the ego's consciousness and the suffering it causes.




This simple yet profound teaching is similar to that of his colleague, the spiritual teacher and best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle.

"Most people have a voice in their head which is the usual thought processes that they are usually identified with," says Tolle. "So for most people that is their basic reality, that 'voice in the head'. And, they are so identified with these continually arising thought processes," he notes, "that they don't even know that they are identified with every thought that comes to them. They don't know that there is a 'voice in the head' because they are the 'voice in the head.'"

The 'Hard Problem' of Consciousness

Dr. David Chalmers: "There is more to
consciousness than a physical process in
the brain. You could know all there is to
 know about the physical processes in the
brain and you wouldn't know all there is 
to know about consciousness."

From the time of Newton and the rise of positivism, scientific empiricism has tried to 'objectify' the world, eliminating all subjective views of what we and our world are all about. This approach falls short, however, when it comes to the 'hard problem' of what consciousness itself is, observes philosopher, Dr. David Chalmers, director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australia's National University. After all, how can we deal objectively with a subject matter - consciousness - which is inherently the essence of subjectivity?

"We're so hooked on the idea that to do proper science you have to be objective, you have to eliminate anything subjective from the picture to build up a scientific framework," says Dr. Chalmers, "that every last remnant of consciousness, of subjective experience in the data, gets eliminated. In the scientific theory, for example, of heat or light, you give a theory of molecules moving fast in a hot object. One gives a theory of everything it seems, all the objective aspects of heat, (but) one leaves out the very central subjective aspect of 'hotness.'"

"Science," Chalmers observes, "is actually built up on the idea that one has to eradicate the subjective to give these objective theories. If so, then when . . . it comes to giving a theory of consciousness itself, which is the paradigmatically subjective phenomenon, it may be that the methods of science have to be expanded."





"For the most part, people don't talk about it," Chalmers notes, "at least until very recently. And, in recent years people have actually started to talk about consciousness a little bit more centrally. And some of these problems are being brought directly into people's attention."

"Now," he observes, "I think were coming to a point where we are going to see a concerted effort from a number of people from different disciplines."

In a related video (below), Dr. Chalmers goes further into the hardest, of the 'hard problems' in science - what consciousness is, why it arises and what its 'qualia' is.

Echoing other leading voices in consciousness studies, such as Alan Wallace and Rupert Sheldrake, Chalmers observes that, "(t)here is more to consciousness than a physical process in the brain, because you could know all there is to know about the physical processes in the brain and you wouldn't know all there is to know about consciousness."

Falling from Grace, Falling into Grace

"Thinking without awareness is the main dilemna of human existence," Eckhart Tolle observed in his great book, "A New Earth." Similarly, in his newest book, "Falling Into Grace," the neo-Buddhist spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, notes that "one of the greatest reasons that we suffer is because we believe the thoughts in our head."

In short, says Adyashanti, we are taught to believe that the world we create in our head is the real world, a mental error that has prompted ancient and modern teachers alike to warn us that the world we live in is 'maya' - i.e., an illusion, or a dream.

Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

In one of their many dialogues, the late, great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the theoretical physicist, David Bohm, took up the question of just why men and women came to believe in, and then identify with, their thoughts:

"DB:   Yes. It is important to bring out this point - that rationality is limited, and, as you say, the fundamental fact is that more generally (people) cannot be rational. They may succeed in some area.

K:   That's right. That is a fact.

DB:   That is a fact, though we don't say it is inevitable, or that it can't be changed.

K:   No. It is a fact.

DB:   It is a fact that it has been, it has happened, it is happening.

K:   Yes. I, as a common human being, have been irrational. And my life has been totally contradictory, and so on, which is irrational. Now can I as a human being change that?

DB:   Let's see how we could proceed from the scientific approach. This would raise the question, why is everybody irrational?

K:   Because we have been conditioned that way. Our education, our religion, our everything.

DB:   But that won't get us anywhere, because it leads to more questions: how did we get conditioned and so on.

K:   We can go into all that.

David Bohm (1917-1992)

DB:   But I meant that line is not going to answer.

K:   Quite. Why are we conditioned that way?

DB:   For example, we were saying the other day that perhaps man took a wrong turning, established the wrong conditioning.

K:   The wrong conditioning from the beginning. Or, seeking security - security for myself, for my family, for my group, for my tribe - has brought about this division.

DB:   Even then you have to ask why man sought this security in the wrong way. You see, if there had been any intelligence, it would have been clear that this thing has no meaning.

K:   Of course, you are going back to taking the wrong turn. How will you show we have taken a wrong turning?

. . .

DB:   Also it would have to be made clear why, if thought is so important, it causes all the difficulties. There are the two main questions.

K:   Yes. I think the wrong turn was taken when thought became all important. . . . That is fairly simple. So thought has been made king, supreme. And that may be the wrong turn of human beings.

DB:   You see, I think that thought became the equivalent of truth. People took thought to give truth, to give what is always true. There is the notion that we have knowledge - which may hold in certain cases to be true. There is the notion that we have knowledge - but men generalize, because knowledge is always generalizing. When they go to the notion that it would always be so, this crystallized the thought of what is true. This gave thought supreme importance.

"Why is it that we do this?," asks Adyashanti. "Why do we believe the thoughts in our head?  We don’t believe the thoughts in someone else’s head when they speak them to us. When we read a book—which is nothing but the recording of somebody else’s thoughts—we can take them or leave them. But why is it that we are so prone to grasp at the thoughts that occur within our own mind—to hold onto them and become identified with them? We don’t seem to be able to put them down even when they cause great pain and suffering."

"The capacity to think and utilize language has a shadow side," notes Adyashanti, "that, if left unattended and used in an unwise way, can cause us to suffer and experience unnecessary conflict with one other. Because after all, that’s what thought does: It separates. It classifies. It names. It divides. It explains."

"Again, he notes, "thought and language have a very useful aspect and they are therefore very necessary things to develop. Evolution has worked very hard to make sure that we have the capacity to think coherently and rationally, or, in other words, to think in ways that will ensure our survival. But when we look back upon the world, we see that the very thing that has evolved to help us survive has also become a form of imprisonment for us. we’ve become trapped in a world of dreams, a world in which we live primarily in our minds."

Thus, through identification with our very random thinking we fall out of grace. However, through mindfulness and the sort of radical self-enquiry advocated by Krishnamurti and the long line of spiritual teachers before him, like Sri Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi, we have the opportunity, as Adyashanti makes so clear, to fall once more back into grace.

And, at a time when we face global warming, rampant pollution of the environment, widespread deforestation, mass extinctions, soaring population growth, energy shortages and an ever-growing threat of mass hunger, there is an urgent imperative for us to seek the answers within that will lead to answers in the world.

But, to paraphrase the great 12th-century Sufi poet, Rumi: "We may need more grace than we thought."

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 In the attached video, Adyashanti explores mindfulness, compulsive thinking and our relationship to thought.

The Ending of Ego-Addiction: "A Pathless Land"

". . .. (T)he annihilation, cessation, and overcoming of bodily form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, this is the extinction of suffering, the end of disease, the overcoming of old age and death."

"This, truly, is the Peace, this is the Highest, namely the end of all formations, the forsaking of every substratum of rebirth, the fading away of craving, detachment, extinction, Nibbana."

("A Buddhist Bible," Dwight Goddard ed., page 32.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Perceptions, mental formations and consciousness." Over 2,500 years ago, the Buddha identified these three mental phenomena - or, perhaps, noumena, to be more precise - as the root cause of suffering. In growing up we are conditioned by the people in our lives and our culture to regard so-called "normal" perceptions, mental formations and consciousness as being our "reality."

Few even think about these concepts, much less question whether our "reality" is so "real" after all. In a very literal sense, it could be said that we are "addicted" to our thinking, and the perceptions, ideas, inner narratives and identities that we take to be who we "are."

But is that so? And what can "we" do about it?

A modern enlightened master, Jiddu Krishhnamurti would ask us to question these propositions for ourselves; yet, his life's work points us to the truth that there is a near universal addiction to the ordinary  human consciousness. We are, he would likely say, overwhelmingly ego-addicted.

"When one makes an abstraction in thought, one moves away from 'what is,'" Krishnamurti writes in his book, "The Wholeness of Life." And that, he observes, has both ethical as well as psychological implications for the individual, suggesting that our propensity to think without an awareness of what we are thinking, is a life-long 'habit.' A 'habit' we should probably quit, as it interferes with our deepest psychological functioning, the ability to love.

"That movement of abstraction," he notes, "becomes a condition according to which one lives, therefore one no longer lives according to facts. This is what one has done all one's life; but one will never know what love is through abstraction, will not know the enormous beauty, depth and significance of love."

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
". . . Truth is a pathless land . . . "

"Why does man put up with this suffering," Krishnamurti asks, utilizing his customary method of inquiry:

Why does man put up with this suffering? . . . What is it that suffers? When one says "I suffer," who is it that suffers? What is the center that says "I am in agony of jealousy, of fear of loss"? Is it the movement of thought, as time, which creates the center? How does that I come into being, which, having come into being says, "I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely". That I is never stationary, it is always moving: "I desire this, I desire that and then I desire something else", it is in constant movement. That movement is time, that movement is thought.

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  152.]

Such 'desire,' along with 'anger' and 'ignorance' is, of course, one of the "Three Poisons" that the Buddha identified as the root of our human suffering, our addiction to self, our ego-addiction. End desire, end anger, end ignorance and one will end suffering is the essence of the Buddha's "Third Noble Truth," the noble truth of the end of suffering.

The Buddha suggests a comprehensive eight point methodology to end this addiction to ego-centric thinking (his "Fourth Noble Truth," the noble truth of the eight-fold path to the end of suffering), all of which is set out to stop the 'thinking without awareness' that is the root of ego-addiction. Krishnamurti, for his part, suggests rigorous self-examination and inquiry to overcome theses thought processes

"Thought identifies itself with the name and with the form and is the I in all the content of consciousness," Krishnamurti observes. "(It) is the essence of fear hurt, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all the content of consciousness. . . . If one runs away from it, one has not solved it; but if one remains with it, not identifying oneself with it  - because one is that suffering - then all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that happens. . . . (W)hen one observes suffering in oneself, not escaping from it, but remaining with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, without any alleviation, comfort, but just completely holding to it, then one will see a strange psychological transformation take place."

And that transformation? Is it the end of "self," or ego death? One will, of course, have to find the answer to that on one's own? It was the Buddha who said, in effect, "do not take my word for it, do not worship me, find out for yourself if these truths are not real." Or, as Krishnamurti famously said to a crowd of his "followers" before setting out on his radical course of lonely self-inquiry:

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. . . . Because I am free, unconditioned, whole -- not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal -- I desire those, who seek to understand me to be free; not to follow me . . . Rather they should be free from all fears -- from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself."

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  153. Emphasis added.]

To end this addiction to thought, to end 'ego-addiction,' therefore, one must follow one's own inner path of self-inquiry and self-examination as one travels through this inner, "pathless land."

"Fragments" from Bohm's "Implicate Order"

“. . . If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For what we know is incomplete and what we prophesy is incomplete. But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will be done away with.. . . Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully . . ."

(I Corinthians 13:8-12)

David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

David Bohm, the renowned physical theorist - who was at once the contemporary, colleague and friend of both Einstein and the renowned spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti - proposed that there is a for-now imperceivable "Implicate Order" within which our perceivable universe (the "Explicate Order") unfolds. "I would say," he wrote in his treatise, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order," "that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment. . . ."

Over and over, Bohm observes that the basic problem we have in understanding ourselves, each other, and the basic nature of our 'reality' - particularly in the West, which is still in the grips  of a more-or-less 'classical' Newtonian worldview - is that we tend to break up or "fragment" the universe, the world, mankind, and even our thoughts, in order to 'understand' them, rather than trying to obtain a holistic vision of what we perceive.

"Being guided by this view," he observes, "man then acts in such a way as to try and break himself and the world up so that all seems to correspond to this way of thinking. He therefore obtains an apparent proof of his fragmentary self-world-view." (This echoes Einstein's comments about the commonly held world-view that he described as a sort of cosmic "optical delusion of [man's] consciousness.") It is a world-view that has grave implications, according to Bohm:

"Fragmentation is . . . an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. . . .

When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first - his own person, his own group - he can't seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. Even if he does try to put mankind first, he will perhaps think of nature as something different to be exploited to satisfy whatever desires he may have at the moment. Similarly he will think body and mind are independent actualities. . . . Physically this is not conducive to over-all health which means wholeness, and mentally, not to sanity which also has a similar meaning."

In a five-part 1989 interview (hosted on SeekerAfterTruth.com) that was filmed at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Bohm lucidly - given his vast knowledge, wide yet cohesive interests, and keen intellect - holds forth on a wide range of interrelated topics.  These include the relationship of the quantum and relativity theories to a holistic spiritual or metaphysical view of our 'reality,' the interconnectedness of all 'things' (including humankind) in a 'Wholeness,' the conflict between Western and Eastern worldviews, and the underlying 'deep roots' of the world's looming environmental problems - problems which stem from our treating world resources as separate "fragments" instead of the interrelated parts of a larger whole.

The "must-see" Bohm interviews capture one of the great minds, as well as great spiritual seekers, of the past 100 years at the height of his understanding of the "inter-relatedness" of all 'things' in the universe and our tendency to perceptively and conceptually break 'everything,' including (perhaps most importantly) our human interactions into 'fragmentary,' unrelated pieces.