The Happy Snowflake Dance blog; a daily exercise in openness meditations. The 21-day Happiness Experiment has morphed into a 21-day Openness Experiment. My Mission: a daily journey into openness through meditations, words, actions and being.
I’ve been busy with home schooling, tutoring, producing videos for online church, recording vocals, and making music with not only the Saint Mark’s Praise Band, but also with a fantastic group of musicians (mostly retired) who are calling themselves, “The Second Act”. I’m loving every minute as I learn to accept what is in this moment, let go of all judgments, and be at peace with what is. As I do, I am able to let go of judging myself and others, even when we do act out of “ego” or “unconscious patterns of behavior and mental patterns or emotional pain-bodies” as Tolle would call them.
I am more at peace than I have ever been in my life, as I “practice presence” or get in touch with the Spirit who is at work in me. My attachments to ideas, belief systems, political positions, thoughts, even the way I think “things should be done” are fading away... That’s not to say that I have completely learned to stop reacting or defending my sense of self at all times. Sometimes I still react to others. But I am able to recognize those “slip ups” of reacting and defending my ego self more quickly. I find most of those come from my interactions with family...after all, who is most efficient at “pushing our buttons” than the people we are closest to?
As I go for my evening “Stroll with Tolle”, as I call my nightly reflective walk, I listen to Eckhart reading one of his books or listen to one of his many talks. I take the time to reflect back on my day’s interactions. I do this as a teaching tool, not as a way to beat myself up for “failures” or to rehash the past or even to pat myself on the back, that would just be another exercise in boosting my ego-self. I simply ask myself: “Where was I irritated or upset or reactive? Why do I disturb myself? Is it worth getting irritated over little things? And if I reacted to someone else’s speech, mental position, or ideas, was I reacting or defending my ego self? That is just a false sense of self. The real me is eternal, spirit, presence. Now is the only moment. Can I be present now? Can I let go of this day’s events or what someone else said or did? Of yesterday? Am I focused on tomorrow? Or the next moment or some imaginary interaction with someone else? Can I see Christ in everyone and everything? That is my true calling. To embrace NOW and to see Christ in all.”
And as I practice living now, letting go of past failures, successes, or moments, and future ambitions, I begin to feel peace, overwhelming love, joy, and creativity. I feel the oneness with all of creation, as the Holy Spirit reveals life in me.
In the past two weeks, I’ve read and listened to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks (again and again), Practicing the Power of Now, and The Secret of Happiness- Discovering the Source of Contentment, Peace, and Joy. I’m listening to The Secret of Happiness for the second time on Audible. This is POWERFUL, simple, yet elegant. If you are looking for entertainment and constantly need bells and whistles, you won’t get it. You’ll say, “Oh, he is too boring. He speaks too calmly. I’m so bored.” If you are really ready to find peace, you’ll stick with it. He is humorous, he is kind, he has a very gentle way of speaking the truth. But if you need to be entertained at all times, then you are not ready to break out of your mind set, your mind-made self. And that’s okay. When you are ready to be broken open and see reality now, you’ll find your way back to these very simple ways of being in the world.
I suppose if I could summarize what Tolle is simply communicating: I would say (and I recognize that these are just words, forms, temporary pointers, possibly even just mental positions- which Tolle would might not endorse)...but I would say to my friends who are suffering right now...and we all know people who are suffering. I would ask:
1. TIME: Can you be present NOW? Can you accept that time is an illusion, a form, a temporary structure which, yes, we find helpful for practical things like setting appointments, but which really only ever exists NOW?
2. SPIRIT: Can you accept that there is more to you than just your circumstances or your thoughts or your self-image or personality or career or possessions? I think most people would agree that they are much more than those “things”. Can you sense that who you really are is so much more, something eternal. Tolle calls it Presence, Stillness, Space, the space between words, Spacious Acceptance, Consciousness, Awareness, Life Itself, Being... there are many words or forms to point to this aspect of ourselves. Some call it spirit, some call it Christ in us, some call it Soul. Whatever word or phrase resonates with you, can you accept (not just mentally), but can you feel that there is something way bigger than your “little self” or egoic self to you? You may have noticed that your egoic self is that part of you which is almost always complaining or whining or irritated or griping about someone or something... It is never satisfied for long. It always needs more. It always needs something else to fulfill it, to make it feel complete. For me, the word “being” starts to get at this eternal, formless self. This is the “I am that I am” within you...something (not really a thing) which defies definition. Remember, when God revealed himself to Moses, he/she said, “I am that I am”, you can’t name me, I am more than a name, I am, you can’t put me in a box or try to make me in YOUR image, I am formless, beyond words. And when he appeared to the Israelites, he took a formless form (smoke and fire), lest they try to worship images of “him”.
3. LETTING GO of ATTACHMENTS: once we understand, and this not just with words or as a mental exercise, but once we sense that our egoic self is just a temporary form, not meant to last forever, even illusory in some ways, we find that letting go of “who we are”, “dying to self” is so much easier. When we can accept what IS in this moment, we no longer need to fight against what is. This situation is what it is. It is not an attack on me personally. Can I be at peace with what is? Can I be non-reactive? If we need to change something in this moment, we are the change that we want to see. If we want to see peace in the world, we ARE the peace. Instead, when we come from a place of Conscious Awareness, or being led by the Holy Spirit, we no longer bring judgments to our situations or the people we are interacting with. It changes the way we interact with everyone and everything. When we enter into NOW, allowing the spirit in us to rise up, quieting the monkey brain or constant chatter of thought, we are able to address our situations and others from a place of peace, of non-judgment, of non-reaction.
Now that we “see” that psychological Time (Tolle’s term for the past and the imagined future) is illusory, that our sense of egoic-self is illusory, there is no more need to defend a mental position, a sense of who I thought I was, a political position, a belief system, roles which I have held, judgments, wants, likes, dislikes, desires, goals, dreams, possessions, things to which I have attached my sense of identity... None of those things are bad. Dreams and goals can be very useful tools. But when I attach my sense of identity or selfhood to those things which are only temporary, I confuse who I am with what I do.
Tolle might call this the balance between HUMAN BEING. HUMAN is the DOING part, the part in which I have lived most of my life, the madness of the HUMAN conditioning of the mind with all its desires and ideas, mental patterns, social structures, emotional reactions, thoughts, suffering, the part which I often confuse as my real self. Then there is the BEING part, which is eternal, formless, Spirit, not defined by thought, idea, form, concepts, or beliefs, but recognized as joy, peace, creativity, and abundant life. The questions I wish I could ask my friends whom I see suffering are: Can you let go of your preconceived ideas of your life and your situation long enough to feel the presence of God in this moment? And be at peace with what is now? Can you let go of your list of “how things should be or not be” long enough to allow peace to well up inside you?
The call of Christ was for humanity to be reconciled to wholeness again, to be restored to God, to be reunited with God is to be WHOLE. The original sin was the knowledge of good and evil, right? With it came this sense of “SELF” as separate from God. Adam and Eve suddenly knew that they were naked, they were self-conscious. What is hell? When I grew up, hell was defined as separation from God. We’ve been living our entire lives in hell, thinking that we were separated from him. But Jesus came to show that we are in Christ. This is not just a mental check list. Believe that there is a God? Check. Believe in your head that Jesus lived and showed the way to live and die? Check. Believe that he is fully human and fully God? Check. Okay, now I’m going to heaven. NOPE! In fact, Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is here now. Heaven is not in some distant future. Heaven is not far away, up there somewhere. Heaven is here now. You just have to open your spirit to “see” it, to be whole in God again.
Jesus did not come to earth to START A NEW RELIGION! Or even an exclusive, Members-only club. He came that we might see that EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS HELD TOGETHER IN HIS BEING, that Christ is and always has been in ALL and through all. When we stop being blinded by the forms we see in front of us, be it in the form of an irritating person or the form of a life circumstance, and we see that Christ is also in that person (maybe hidden behind ego) or that situation (because everything in the universe also has God in it), then we begin to get why Jesus said “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Because you are your neighbor. Your neighbor is part of you. What you do to others, you do to yourself. You are not separate. This is why Jesus said to love your enemy. Why? Because your enemy is you. You are your enemy. This is why Jesus could die to self, not defend himself before Pilate or the Sanhedrin. Why? Because he had already let go of his attachment to this temporary form (his body, his ego) years before! When we see that this physical universe is only a shadow of the eternal, infinite, formless, indescribable reality, we realize that we are not at war with people or even ideas or even beliefs or situations. This world will pass away.
Now we understand what Paul was starting to get at in Ephesians 6- The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God. We do not fight against flesh and blood. In fact, we don’t fight. But that’s another chapter for Tolle to explain. The person in front of you is not your enemy. The situation you are in is not your enemy. It is as it is. Seeing Christ even in the most hateful person, knowing that “they know not what they do”, knowing that they are controlled by the mind, mental patterns, emotional pain-bodies, they have not awakened to “Christ in us- the hope of glory”, means there is nothing to forgive. True forgiveness comes when I recognize that others just have not awakened to Christ yet, but that Christ is in there, too. Some never will awaken until they die. But in the end, every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is LORD (Yahweh), the I am that I am, the formless, eternal Creator God, in whose being the entire universe is sustained and held together (Hebrews 1-2).
Our job as followers of Christ is to find the Christ in everyone and everything. To not be put off by the temporary forms in front of us. You know that YOU are not really your body or your possessions or even your career or status or lack of status. You are not the labels you or others put on yourself. YOU know that you are MORE, so much more. YOU know that you are spirit temporarily clothed in the form of a physical body. Guess what? So is everyone else. Yep, even the most despicable person you can think of.
When we begin to realize this (and again, this goes beyond words or ideas), when we begin to move in spirit or “be led by the Spirit”, this changes how we are in the world. It changes who we are in the world. It changes everything. The world is not a problem to be fixed. People are not problems to be fixed. I am not a problem to be fixed. You are not a problem to be fixed. Oh, but I need to change so much about myself, you say. I’m not the person I want to be. I need more time! It seems like that, doesn’t it? But now that we know that time is illusory, and NOW is the only time that actually ever exists. We don’t have time. Some imagined better me in the future does not exist. Instead of avoiding this moment, I now embrace this moment. And when I am still, shushing the mind with its myriad thoughts, I can feel spirit rising up, bubbling up...joy, peace, beauty, life, creativity begin to overflow. Now when I do something, it is from a place of peace in Christ. And I see Christ in others.
As C.S. Lewis said, we see the “weight of glory” in others. Lewis challenged us in his famous sermon. If we could see the glory that God put in all of us (yes, even THAT guy) from the very beginning of the world, the glory that has always been there, but we were too blinded by our thoughts and mental ruts to see, if we could see others as Christ sees them, clothed in glory, we would be tempted to bow down and worship them as gods, like the stories in the Old Testament of when angelic visitors interacted with humans...This is the way Jesus showed us. This is how he could claim to be the way, the truth, and the life. And his prayer for us? That we would be one, even as he and the Father are one. That we would see that “others” don’t exist, but that we would see our connection to all, to God. This is what it means to “be in Christ” or to “live by the spirit” as we claim to do. This is not about some mental check list of beliefs, but a radically different way to BE in the world. To be in Christ, is to be whole in God, to KNOW in your spirit, not just in your head that you are Christ’s and Christ is in God, and Christ is God.
THIS is the ministry of reconciliation, not convincing people that they are bad and need to believe all the right things (and by default, none of the “wrong things”) to get into heaven, but to see Christ in all and through all, to see that our wholeness comes when we let go of the self-made identities and reconnect with the still, small voice that is already in us, calling us to wholeness in Christ. Reconciliation to God happens and wholeness is restored when people are able to quiet their mind-made selves long enough to feel the connection with God once again. Remember, in Adam (an archetypal figure) sin came into the world, in other words separation from God, but this separation was man-made, a mental construct for this world of forms, a temporary world in which words and labels have a practical function, but which convince us that we are separated from God.
God has never left us. David once wrote Psalm 139-
“7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths (some translate this as hell), you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.”
There is no place in the universe where I am separated or disconnected from God. How is this possible? Because when God breathed himself into us, he put a part of himself in us. We are always connected. Our minds just don’t want to believe it. So we spend our whole lives, living out this nightmare reality, where we think we are somehow separated from the OMNIPRESENT, omnipotent, omniscient God. How can we be apart from “something” that is in every particle of the universe? If God is ever-all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing, how is it that we think we can be lost from him?
So the Secret to Happiness is a misnomer. Happiness is a fleeting, temporary feeling. You might feel happy if things go the way you expect or want or think they should be. You might be unhappy if things do not go your way. Happiness is a temporary form, an illusion. Happiness is dependent upon all your external desires falling into place. Happiness tends live in the realm of past and future, rarely in the now, and even then it is short lived.
But peace, contentment, joy, abundant life, BEING, wholeness—- these are formless, eternal, internal qualities which are a deeper part of us when we are in Christ, when we hush the mind-made self, when we accept what is in the now, and sense our deeper connection to the Creator of all.
Disclaimer: These are my words and interpretations of both scriptures and the teachings of Tolle. In no way should anyone assume that this is what Tolle says. I suggest you read his books or listen to his teachings for yourself. Please, find out for yourself if this resonates with you.
