Mindfulness Is What We’re After
The adventure of being alive.
To be identified to your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. — Eckhart Tolle
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The constraint we confine ourselves to, psychological time — the past and the future — serves no other purpose than to lead us away from where we are. This is the illusion. The one part being who we could’ve been, and the other representing who we could be. But these realities do not matter in the way we think they do, and our essence shouldn’t or ought NOT to be attached to them, regardless of what conditions we are capable of conforming to. Unfortunately, many still live there. And maybe you’re there, too.
By “there” we mean this:
- P (person) searches only to stumble upon what might be the answer it was looking for. But it never finds it, despite how close the closest objective feels or appears to be. The thoughts never stop, and the mind always seems to be its worst enemy. It eventually finds a way to move on. Yet, the mind always seems to lead it astray. And like before, the conditioned mind dumps it as it always does, and it’s back were it first began.
This is the ego — the conditioned mind — doing its job. The ego is the beggar and it begs because that is what it is conditioned to do. It ran P in every direction because P let it. But this is the conditioned part. And the condition part is not P.
I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am. — Eckhart Tolle
Yes, good thing Eckhart is suggesting an alternative. The destination of a timeless, formless reality is, as you guessed it, the present.
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
Indeed. Here, time is infinite and remains with us for eternity. Now will be the only time to do anything — anything at all — because the rest of our life will never be any other time than right now.
Meanwhile, the egoic mind, under the constraint of illusory time, searches and begs and hopes to one day fulfill its obligation to the conditioned mind. Eventually, though, the unconsciousness of the conditioned mind will squeeze the body shut depriving the identity of whatever it had left to identify to. But all that appears to be left is whatever it had originally: nothing but itself. This is essentially the layout of the ego. Not a promising place to be if you ask P.
When you detach yourself from the ego, you make time infinitely more meaningful.
The past and future are an illusion. They roam in the presence of psychological time, and psychological time rejects the Now. There is no need to be there; our purpose is here. Here in the Now!
Like there.
And here…
This is a slight glimpse at what it actually feels to be you (or me, depending on the observer) at any point in time if we were to be detached from the mind. The present moment is where the egoic mind can’t be. It is time to let go, and let be what is.
The Now is where we can begin to fathom our role in existence.
Our thoughts are just this: labeled identities. The comforting thing about this is once we get here, we begin to realize that our minds are just intricate machines — machines that can create or fix whatever happens to be out “there”. This machine, however, is only one tiny aspect of us. Therefore, the formless, timeless Being is what signifies who we are. Our machine doesn’t fix and create here; it fixes and creates there.
It can’t be negated that we use thoughts, ideas, personas, emotions, and so on in the present — but we don’t say that we let them run themselves, aimlessly so, whenever or wherever they want. And we surely don’t say that we identify them as being fulfilling or being the Being that we are. Instead we say that when we observe the egoic mind, we are using our conscious presence to direct the output of the egoic mind. It simply lets it be and in return, it does what intelligence purports to do: solves and creates. And it does this with all the other things that the mind can do, but it’s conscious awareness that produces the results. When we let it roam in the conscious role as described — identifying with nothing outside of itself — we are being driven by the presence of a clear and strategic instrument: the mind itself. We are, in essence, all that the conscious is.
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
When we let our presence operate unconsciously, particularly when it is directed by the ego, the mind and body become slave to the conditions. This is referred to as the mind-body relationship. Here, the mind has become corrupted by the illusion of meaning in psychological time. If we were to identify with these tiny parts of us, and were to say that these are, in fact, who we are, we would be making a very careless assumption about our essence.
I have met many intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. — Eckhart Tolle
We are not identified by the content of our mind or our labeled identities or even the mind for that matter. We are identified by our presence. We are that which is autonomous. Free is what we are.
Resistance to who we could be or who we weren’t means absolutely nothing in particular about the nature of who we are. We won’t ever be who we could be or who we weren’t because that would be impossible! And we most certainly wouldn’t be questioning who we are now if we lived within the now!
Let me explain. You can act out what your mind thinks or wants, but it won’t ever be what you really are, in its pure essence. (This is an important distinction to be clear on.) Your essence doesn’t change when you act out your attachment. The fact of the matter is that you are not living out who it is that you are. You are living through something else because that is what your egoic mind is conditioned to do. The same Being that was manifested from the beginning is still here now. Observe the mechanics of your mind at work, and see for yourself. You are free and you always have been free.
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is?
— Eckhart Tolle
So what does one do when they notice they are wearing an identity? Be present. Be aware of the ego at work and reinforce your awareness. Focus on the person that is rather than the person that isn’t.
This should not be happening; I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
We have evolved with the capacity to be sane in the most chaotic of scenarios. But the peace of being sane only arrives when one is conscious of their ego at work. So when an identity is put on, realize we are not the sane part of us, or even the same person at all. We will be reactive, imbalanced, and conflicted from within. The identity that one identifies to is fragile. This is not even remotely who we are. We are the inner light and energy that emits from our presence now. Regardless of whether or not we recognize this, it is exactly who we are. Our essence is a radiation of presence, stillness, comfort, love, and so on. And it is all right here within us. We didn’t search for it. We didn’t receive it as a gift. It is just there. Here. Now!
Those that don’t know us, however, might see us as dangerous territory. Is this who we are? Are their thoughts who you really are? Of course not!
Nonetheless, if we see ourselves through the egoic mind, then it will most certainly appear to be rational to see ourselves as hostile, invaluable, and maybe even dangerous, too. In other words, we will think and feel as if we were at least some of those things that they were thinking or saying. And if we live through the egoic mind, it most certainly will turn out to be true. Our essence will become corrupted by the very thing that we are not: the lens of reality.
Tip: The conscious presence, however, receives the initiation of dysfunction as just an ego attempting to attack another ego. For this reason we can say how this threat assessment is comparatively lower in falsifiability than if we were to assess it as an attack on our so-called identity. And even if they were attacking this so-called identity of ours, the heightened state of awareness will prove to resolve such dysfunction if there is at all any condition to be resolved.
Many won’t accept this because they are reluctant to be attune to their clearer sense of self. And if the possibilities aren’t obvious to them, it is reasonable to assume that this is a strategy to be vulnerable rather than to be resilient. Although this is NOT similar to the conflict of a plant and a functional human. A plant is defenseless. An enlightened human is not.
It is similar, however, to an egoic animal that is both unconscious (referencing presence) and attached, in relation to another animal that is both conscious (referencing presence) and has no form of attachment. The egoic animal, in fact, is quite sophisticated and knows quite a bit about its apparent self — but it is wrong to suggest that this animal is aware, at least in the same manner as the non-egoic animal.
The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.
— Eckhart Tolle
Imagine for a second that these two animals, relatively civil animals — cat and dog — meet each other. The egoic dog reacts and calls for a relatively normal disturbance in the nonegoic cat. And so the cat becomes aware of this disturbance and lets it be. The dog, however, still seems to be controlled by the dysfunction of the cat’s response. As neutral as it was, the mind made it to be anything but. Upon this, the dog charges at the cat. Which of the two has the upper hand?
Yes, you guessed it! The cat. Why? Well, the dog’s initiation was not taken as an attack to the cat. Nonetheless, the cat was ready… An unpredicted agile side-step maneuver and the dog would be cast vulnerable to the world. Again and again the dog would fail to see the predictability of his initiations. The cat, rightfully so, saw it as exactly what it was: an initiation of dysfunction.
*Of course, this would be a horrible example to prove who would actually have the upper hand. The factors weren’t provided because the point isn’t about who would win the physical challenge, but rather who would win the Being challenge or the challenge to remain in control of the self.
When you diminish the ego, you open space for your awareness to flourish.
“Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. it is being “wholly” and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.” — Bruce Lee
The egoic presence can be used to protect us. But notice that it can be used either with or without awareness. It seems intuitive to think that in some cases an appropriate response would be of something that resembles the reactive component of this analogy. Be careful here and realize that the conscious presence can prove to be highly effective and strategic in some, if not most, worst-case scenarios — but only if it is allowed the space to do so. The odds are not exactly in our favor if we were to identify with the ego. We end up being run by that rather than being run by this. I think you’d agree with me that that it’s not the preferable choice, given a second glance. When you diminish the ego, you open space for your awareness to flourish.
The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego.— Eckhart Tolle
In view of the fact that we can misuse our mind, we ought to reason with ourselves that other ideas should be given, at the very least, some careful consideration.
