LiberationFeed

David and Goliath and the True Radical

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-06-03T10:28:49-04:00

I didn’t have a history that I could separate from death, destruction, hatred, and, in the end, just empty space - empty space where once there was life - singing, loving, caring, and so, so many memories. ...And the Nazi holocaust was just one genocidal event in an incredibly dense procession of massacres, pogroms, slaughters, and brutally draconian laws perpetrated against jews for over 2,000 years in every part of the world where jews lived. I read that there was a pogrom (an organized killing operation against jews) in Poland in the 17th century that killed almost the same percentage of the world’s jews as did the nazi holocaust and that event killed about 50% of the whole world’s jewish population - about 6 million! ...One rabbi explained to his congregation that the term “the chosen people” quite specifically refers to a decisive passage in the Hebrew Bible that the jews were chosen by god to suffer as a moral testimony to all other people in the world. ...With Israel’s aggressions against the Palestinians, It is the Davids that have morphed into becoming the Goliath and it is the Palestinian who has become the Davids. ...Despite the red hot hatred that emanates from the Muslim world toward Israel, the country has granted full citizenship to over 1 million Arabs who live with more freedom and economic stability than arabs in most of the muslim world. ...But let us look a little deeper and we will see that both identities - David and Goliath - have become so murky that their relevance as metaphor no longer matter. ...The only way to peace is peace, but that is a message that has been lost amid the generations of history whose shadow falls so deeply in this part of the world. ...For I say to you, that he who is consumed by race, culture, and history is indeed Goliath and he who is filled with the loving heart of the true radical is David. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Real or Unreal or In Between?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-06-02T14:23:45-04:00

How many have you read that enlightenment is waking up from the dream of the self and the world? ...Once we are awake we know the dream to have been just a dream, except that in real awakening the dream is what you and I take for the real world; the world where we eat, sex, read, and shit. ...Of course the Advaitan negates the real as unreal, since what is perceived by the mind as solid is really only awareness, which is ever-changing and ungraspable. ...I ask you this: what would motivate you to find and explore a philosophy whose whole purpose is to negate the real? ... There is nothing wrong about challenging the information recorded by our senses, but to negate as unreal is to undermine the world in preference to a trance-like and self-negating philosophy of elevated words. ...Is it not true that suffering is real and that there is someone who truly suffers and on account of that suffering we seek out philosophies that will enable us to transcend what we find painfully disturbing and painful? ...I should say as a proviso that there are many Buddhists, Taoists, and Advaitans who have seen beyond the strict and life-invalidating points of view that I am exploring in this post. ...Is that what you would like to say is only a dream - unreal and ephemeral? ... We can be like nearly everyone else who lives life as wanly real or we can be like the pure Adivaitan who negates the real as a dream or we can take the boldest step of all - to live life understanding that it’s all real. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Meeting of the Spiritual and the Political

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-06-01T11:51:15-04:00

I suspect that there are people who have rejected this blog as unspiritual because it enters territory that spiritual people tend to think of as unspiritual - such as politics. And I believe there are people who define themselves as political who have rejected this blog (and perhaps my book) because it’s overly spiritual. ...For the purposes of this post, I don’t want to get involved in the Advaita understanding that that which sees all happenings is unchanging and utterly non-dual and thus unites everything that happens in the universe as the one. Over-emphasis on this point of a point of view that is culturally Indian and therefore reflects that culture’s distinct perspective, has the effect of negating individual experience by minimizing the vital reality of personal experience whether it happens on the level of a rock or a human being. ...We are now open to question those killing and deathly principles of our time; such as we need to exploit the planet’s environment ceaselessly to maintain this culture where personal value and merit is so closely aligned to how much stuff we own and control. ...When I use the term “spiritual”, I am not referring to the divisive world of organized religion where one god must play one-upmanship with every other god, where merit comes to she who is most apparently ‘religious’ in nature. ...This is a heart and head centric life where emotion and intellect come together as one in understanding, appreciation, and love of the world just as it is. ...I can, but it’s quite hard to imagine in this world so polluted by the material - the pursuit of endless consumption - this world that depends on the utter and total exploitation of nature to keep it going. ...Until you find that living space and live your own life as the Authentic Self you truly are, you will miss the wondrous connection that brings the political and spiritual together as one. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Why I'm Not as Popular As Wayne Dyer

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-30T12:15:51-04:00

I have, in fact, asked myself why I’m not as popular as Wayne Dyer and I think it’s an important question. ...In my view, my book Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and For All is a better book than anything written by Wayne Dyer. ...But there are two great differences between Dyer and myself; 1 - Dyer ignores, completely, the effect on the human persona that history and environment inevitably effect and that is an essential point of view expressed in Liberation; and 2 - Dyer fails to identify and explore the underlying invalidation story that all of us carry with us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Until we see the vast sweep of cultural history and how it gave birth to the universal invalidation experience, we will continue spinning our wheels going from this book to this teacher to this video. ...Dyer provides an open invitation for everyone to get into his self-improvement regimen, while I make it perfectly clear at the outset that Liberation is only for those with the bravery and rigorous self-honesty to seriously question their most sacred beliefs and thoughts. ...Dyer is almost always an “up” experience, while Liberation is, initially, a “head” experience that journeys to the core of the fragile human heart. ...For those of you who have read this book, I urge you to recall the Navajo story of the Hero Twins and how Monster Slayer went out in the times prior to human beings and slew all of the terrible monsters that prevented human life to take root on the soil of the earth. ...Even the great power of Monster Slayer could not make the world perfectly safe for human beings, but he did make it safe enough, it’s just that human beings must now deal with the very monsters that even Monster Slayer could not kill: depression, frustration, hopelessness, and hunger. And it is the Hunger Monster that Liberation is directed to - the hunger to dig deep into the depths of our fragile consciousness and find the light that resides their still in your and my Authentic Self. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Resist! and Be Yourself

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-29T09:10:22-04:00

When we work to integrate the words of another into our own personality, we are, one believing that these high sounding words actually reflect their writer (or speaker) actual self and, more important, we use these lofty phrases as ways to protect our own vulnerability. Because we are afraid to actually be ourselves without any crutches we use the philosophies of others to model our life. ...A better question to ask is this: what am I so afraid of? ...Until you are willing to walk out into the light of life itself as who YOU are, you will continue running to the words of others as a crutch and support. ...This is why the Zen Buddhists say, ‘if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ ...Georges Seurat the artist who drew the picture of the lead image in this article as well as the painting below, for which he is best known: ...He learned his craft from others, but developed an approach to art that was uniquely his own. This is what it means to believe in the genius of one’s self. ...

How Should I Live My Life?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-28T13:28:03-04:00

Before getting all tied up in knots, consider the following: if we cannot determine the right from the wrong, then maybe using these terms is not the best way to respond to this question. ...And even in the second case, what we actually wind up doing, is often not related to how we reflected on a decision. ...It leaves us with a very important realization; that the question itself is meaningless. ...It leaves us with the realization that what we call life is usually meant to mean “my life” and we must realize that how we carve out “my life” from all the rest of life is the very essence of separation and duality. ...By “tossing it out” I mean to fully negate its reality - that the expression “my life” is an illusion - utterly without merit or reality. ...Doesn’t the mind get anxious seeking a place to attach itself - a story to create out of the seeming nothingness of THIS??? ...*Also please notice that the act of watching and observing life is also another act happening in your life. ...But let’s get back our current journey - what then is changed when we intentionally negate the concept of “my life”? ...You know exactly how to live your life now, but it might have eluded you because you believed in the concept of “my life”. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Gulf Oil Spills Silver Lining

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-27T07:43:17-04:00

As oil has become increasingly scarce, its sources of exploitation have become proportionately more technically challenging, as well as posing much greater threats to the planet’s rapidly deteriorating environment. ... But unlike every other of the world’s great extinctions, this current extinction event is caused by the actions of only one of its species; human beings and oil is a very large part of that cause. The age of economic reasoning is dominated by the most powerful economic actors: namely the largest corporations and their partners in government. ...Thus countries like the United States with its cheap food and access to an unrivaled quantity of stuff are thought of as the best places to live because an American can own the most stuff. ...The BP Gulf Oil catastrophe shows us in the most graphic terms how this way of life is killing the planet. ... We can continue to buy the corporate/political line that the oil based way of life is our only option, or we can evolve in the direction of wisdom and we can stop and reflect on how this way of life is not only effecting the whole array of life on earth, but how it enslaves people to the universe of stuff and garbage. ...This will mean that we must take to the streets and do what needs to be done to move the locus of control from the hand full of corporate warlords to the masses of people who love and care for the earth. ...Those responsible for the killing of the planet, those that sell us the idea that life is fundamentally about acquiring stuff, those must pay for the consequences of this philosophy. ...If this spill motivates us to finally do the right thing, then will all of its pain, it will have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

I'm a Great Guy and I'm an Asshole

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-26T14:34:52-04:00

I am a great guy. I feel great and I do great things. A lot of people have really been impressed by what I have done in my life. ... It probably doesn’t, because you probably think I’m smart and evolved and cultured and so many other wonderful things. ...I feel shitty and I haven’t done crap in my life. So many people know that I’m an asshole. This probably doesn’t surprise you. I assume that you know that I’m a total bullshitter and a big phony. ...Life is really going to open up for me. ... I’m running out of money and I am so fucked.

The Root of All Evil or Maybe Not

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-25T10:27:02-04:00

People like to say that money is the root of all evil, but I’m starting to think that oil might be the real root of all evil. ...Any animal that has the misfortune of having to ingest it or respirate it into their bodies will get sick and die. ...From nylons to plastic bags to the computer keyboard I’m typing on, it’s all resists natural degradation and it’s all made of oil byproducts. ...Oil is the legacy of plants and animals that lived on this earth over 100 million years ago. ...But man is really quite unique, because his intelligence opens up avenues of exploitation that are more varied and aggressive than any other living thing. ...It is also evident that the energy that goes into killing it is many times greater than the energy invested in conserving it. ...It might make us feel better to blame the giant oil companies, but they are just doing what we really want them to do. Sure they make mistakes - sure they take short-cuts - sure they try to leverage their advantage - but who doesn’t do all of that in their own life. ... Don’t worry the big DJ of the universe will change the song, but until then ... well, until then ... we’ll just keep on dancin’ ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

A Master of the Universe Writes a Personal Letter to a Dear Friend

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-24T10:18:06-04:00

As you and I know, there are few people in this age that vainly characterizes itself as the age of information, have the vaguest clue of what we do. ...And those that didn’t want to play, well those we either bought outright or, much better, made them to appear like ranting fools through our countless think tanks, whoring universities, foundations, and banal TV. ...We’ve profited handsomely on the rapaciousness of these ever-so-eager young well-groomed men and curvy ladies who come to our posh offices in glorious Manhattan willing to do anything for a nickel and I mean anything. What goes for rape in the outside goes for career advancement where I spend my mornings. these ambitious men and women come to us with their magnificent ambition and as long as we keep em’ scared, then we know we’re in the game. ...They give us more money than anyone could possibly imagine in their little brains and then we turn it around and lend it back to them at a higher interest rate. ...I’ll give you hundred to one odds that they will come crawling back to us on their filthy bellies with their empty begging bowls. ... And then we might kick in a few well chosen teeth, because soon it’s going to hard ball time and we gotta to be ready for that. ...Sometimes the money just pours in a little too easily and if we don’t watch out some son of a bitch we’ll knock us off our thrones. ...Storms don’t last forever and I suspect that the sun will shine even brighter on the other side of this one, even if we have to do a little street mopping. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Exhaustion

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-23T14:07:29-04:00

Only until we become this exhausted with our apparent selves are we ready to allow life itself to become the magic carpet of our lives. ...Because the underlying theme is nearly always self-deficiency, we are always seeking opportunities to gain in life or, conversely, to avoid loss. ...It is this very win/lose quality to life to which we must, one day, become weary of. Again to put it another way, we opt out of the game of our small selves. ...This is the essential exhaustion of the self that will always precede awakening to the light of this moment. ...Conditioning has its own momentum, but now instead of falling for it and doing our usual psychological routines, their power to control our behaviors and mental life is greatly reduced. The real test of self-exhaustion occurs in those situations that really engage us in either a very positive way, where the ego perceives an opportunity for very substantial gain or negative way where the fear of personal loss is especially vivid. Authentic self-exhaustion will even cancel the emotional charge that these situations have had for us. ...When this happens we embark on the literal wings of life and allow ourselves to be guided by the substance of life rather than the substance of ego. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Waking Up

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-21T08:15:48-04:00

There should be no sense of "I" or "me" to this sub-impression essence (we will see that the "I/me" sensation consists entirely of the nature and quality of passing thoughts/feelings). ...The sub-impression self that existed prior to the fears and prior to the dreaded event came out of each of these processes unscathed and unchanged (despite the near constant ruminations of the mind, nothing whatsoever has the power to change our essential selves). ...If nothing can touch our essential being, knowing that nothing whatsoever, no matter how terrifying and awful it might appear, can affect our essential being, then: ...That there is nothing to anticipate with the thought that nothing projected as positive will affect us in any way either. The essential self has utterly no relationship with what the Mindbody perceives as negative or positive. ...All that changes is the Mindbody - the essential self never changes no matter what is happening in the world. ...Notice how all such interpretations refer to the Mindbody's sense that is has gained something or avoided something "bad". ...There is nothing to fear and you have nothing to look forward to that will enhance your essential self. ...Notice that the "observer" prior to full awakening is only the Mindbody assuming the role of observer. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Agendas

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-20T12:25:53-04:00

What’s your agenda? If you’re fixed on your agenda then you’ve moved out of the flow of life. There are only two agendas; yours’ and life’s. When you’re fixed on your agenda, indifferent to that of life, then you can’t help but be contracted. But if we are open, we can live life’s agenda and, in doing so, our own agenda will emerge in the moment; fresh and alive. This might be the only choice in life you will need to concern yourself with. Right now - ask yourself, Am I living my agenda or am I alive to life just as it is right now. When you ask yourself that question, you have opened yourself up to the living immediacy of this life - your life. ...

The Real Energy Crisis

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-19T12:05:14-04:00

Along with the impending crisis represented by crossing the line defined as peak oil, the world we think of modern civilization is grinding to a noisy and destructive conclusion. What began with the quiet but crucial development of primitive technology in the very ancient Middle East now grinds to its spectacular conclusion. ...Consider the remarkable reality that those societies with the most technology and the largest number of formally educated people are now incapable of solving any important social problem. Every challenge that is faced by this society appears unsolvable, whether it be access to quality medicine, ending the onslaught on the natural world, job creation, raising educational standards, ending poverty, reviving rotting central cities or providing decent housing - our society fails in every respect. ...We are addicted to doing business the way we have always done it; by sustaining the belief that the only thing that matters is growth. ... And it is because we fail to question this one core ideology that we fail as nations and we fail as people. As the core resources that maintain the precarious lives of 7 billion people on this increasingly fragile planet become increasingly depleted (water, oil, and soil), the probability of constant conflict and war rise substantially. The one energy that grows in such times is fear and it will grow like a cancer across national boundaries. ...It is to reduce demand, to conserve, to learn to cherish and give value to those elements that make life possible for the many (non-human) as opposed to only focusing on the needs of corporations and their political partners. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

America Careening to Collapse: Enjoy the Ride Down

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-18T09:51:59-04:00

The mega-banks that received trillions in bail-out funds are now loaning it back to the government at higher interest rates and thus win on all sides of the crisis, while millions of Americans loose their homes and their jobs in large part on account of the byzantine investment strategies of these same firms. While it was the biggest banks that brought on the current economic crisis, they have somehow benefitted the most throughout this crisis with top executives receiving even bigger bonuses. ...While blasting candidate Palin for pushing for off-shore oil drilling, President Obama approves one of the largest government deals on expanding the nation’s off-shore drilling on weeks before the BP Gulf Coast drilling disaster. Meanwhile, the US is noted for having some of the lowest standards for off-shore drilling rigs, a condition which is directly related to what will become one of the greatest environmental disaster in world history. ... • Stage 2, the excesses of Stage One lead to depression and the creation of a regulated capitalist state - where focus moves from enabling laissez faire corporate interests to protecting workers financially and physically (it is in this stage that a large “middle class” is created). • Stage 3: where corporations literally purchase government and the pendulum swings back to the control of the biggest enterprises who then sap the society of all of its resources through perpetual war and an all out assault on individual rights and needs (one of the key purposes of perpetual war is to insure that individuals are kept scared about their safety and their future and to invest their vain hopes for safety and security to those same corporations that are sucking their money and lives through their subservience). ...The corporations assume the role of the national leeches whose task it is to suck every remaining dime out of the country’s coffers through war, control of healthcare, and finance. ... But since their power and control is never seriously threatened or even questioned, they have nothing to fear until the host nation (the US) dies. ... Like any bloodsucker, they live on the idea that capital is mobile, so that when the nation finally dies in a violent, chaotic implosion of rage and blood, they will be able to move to their next host. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

See Through the Illusion of Weakness

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-17T10:49:20-04:00

Of course through experience, our mind will accumulate more knowledge about the world - but we can also see how this knowledge, if we allow it become stale and unchallenged, inevitably becomes out-of-date and often just plain wrong. ...But if we can dig a little deeper, we can truly see that our essential self, that which can see the knowledge and assess its quality and relevancy in the moment in which it is recalled, that essential self never changes. ...If absolutely nothing has the power to change the essential self, then absolutely everything we have thought that is essential to manifest the changes we craved to see in ourselves is completely unnecessary. The moment we can get a real taste of this essential self and, after careful review, see that it never changes, then all of the seeking can be seen as pointless. ...Now that you realize that you are not this perceived self and that what you truly are can never be seen or touched - the personal identification with this self can be severed here and now. ...What we see is this: when we are identified with the fear fleeing self - then everything that happens in the world is filtered through this single process; fear. ...When we see that we are the foundation for everything, then the need to resist anything is seen to be rooted in the delusion of the false-self. ...We can still fight for the integrity of the environment, we can struggle for social justice, we can create art, we can explore the cosmos through science, we can become the fantastic moms and dads we might have dreamed we would have had - but whatever unfolds in life is just life as it is. ... We can only truly understand this when we have seen through the false clothing of the self that is nothing but thought/feeling and image. ...But the moment that we see that we never have anything to risk or gain, then we can truly manifest power in our lives.

Power is Not of the Self

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-15T16:13:35-04:00

Our desire for power is really an expression of lack and will, inevitably, assume the physical form of force (yesterday’s post). ... We want someone to love us, but because we fail to trust the moment, we impose some force to coerce, gently or otherwise, that person to be and do as we wish them to be and do. ...This is so different from employing force where we are, in essence, saying, “You must do as I say or the planet will die.” ... While the earth doesn’t consciously plan, its history has shown time and again that the best thoughts and most profound insights have really said very little how the world has actually evolved and changed over time. ...We do this best when we realize our total and complete connection to the same nurturing universe that also gave birth to the mountains, rivers, and clouds. ...The world drastically changed 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula wiping out the dinosaurs and many thousands of other kinds of now extinct animals and plants. ...This is its power and it is this power that is without limits, for we can never know where and when it begins or where and when it ends. ...The power of our lives is something all together different from how it is conceived by our all to conditioned minds. ...When we live each moment as our power exactly as it is, we are freed from the lack-based demands of the always deficient hungry self. We give ourselves to this moment as we are and this becomes the great current of our lives connecting everything to this place of wonder.

Power

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-14T16:51:14-04:00

It is the craving for power the creates ugliness in the world, for that which craves power believes that it lacks power and will use force to obtain what it believes it lacks. ...When people, groups, and even nations experience the pain of believing that they need power but lack it, then they will use force to obtain what they believe they need. ...It is an idea born of separation where one entity seeks to hurt and control another. ...Yes, it may hurt, yes it may temporarily control the superficial aspects of life, but it is inherently unstable and unsustainable. ...The seeking to understand or get power has nothing to do with the actual manifestation of power. ...Thus the more we are identified with powerlessness to that same extent we are weak and feeble in this world and to ourselves. ...Force, in contrast, is a movement born of an ego/lack identity that is learned through invalidation and self-negation. ...See through the myth of your (or group) negation and the need to horde and use force will disappear. Then the power of the world will be available to you when it is called upon. ...In its denial you will use force - whether it is to control another or to achieve enlightenment.

More Free Downloads

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-14T14:03:13-04:00

More Free Downloads Today I’m adding a bunch of free downloads - these taken from somewhat older blog entries. I’m going to continue to add free downloads for the next several weeks. I hope you enjoy them and, as always, I invite your comments. Just click here or on the navigational menu to find these.

Intermezzo: Assholes and the Cycle of Life

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-13T11:40:40-04:00

The Cycle of Life - First I was just an asshole, then I opened my eyes and saw the values of kindness, then I became a "nice guy", then I saw things really opening up for me, and I became even nicer - truly loving, then the world became radiant, then I decided to wage war against everything that wasn't loving and I became an asshole. Hey - everyone needs a break. And in the spirit of the day I put up another free download from my book on the essence of true Compassion. Check it out on the downloads page.

Liberation NOW!: The Soulful Revolution Part 1

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-12T08:14:52-04:00

He would tell those on the tour that for every house of privilege and wealth there were 10,000 living in dire poverty, slaving away in sweat houses to make this way of life possible. ...The more identified a person is with deficiency, the more aggressively he will seek to satisfy his desire. And the more identified with deficiency a society is, the more aggressively it will seek to satisfy its desire. The United States is a country powerfully identified with deficiency and thus it is addicted to endless war for it is addicted to the need to be powerful and all-controlling. ...It is the life of what Buddhists call the Hungry Ghost; constantly on the watch for any threat, as well as identifying opportunities to increase its control, power, and wealth. ...When you do this you will see that the world you believed in as real - was just a dream, for when we are identified with deficiency, our fear filled projections construct a world of danger. ...Right now know, to the very depths of your being realize that everything you believe about yourself and your world that points to lack and deficiency is an outright lie. ... Everything about you and your world that manifests as a consequence of deficiency and lack is a lie. ...What should happen as your realization of completeness deepens and flowers, is a soft, radiant joy will begin to emanate from the deepest depths of your being. ... This is who you are (the belief that one can always overcome the deficient self is part of the deficiency belief system - the lack behaviors will always revisit us - but that is another story for another post).

The Soulful Revolution: Introduction

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-11T11:55:42-04:00

Before a blink of an eye, the age of industrial civilization - the age of stuff - will begin to collapse; a victim of its own weight. ...The industrial world is like an immense leech, sucking the blood of the earth with an appetite that only grows every day. ...We must wake up to the absolute fact that we are direct accomplices in the killing of this increasingly fragile world. We must see our addiction to power, supremacy, and stuff as a kind of fist that crushes the soft flower of the living earth, for we are nothing less. ...Despite the shining, ugly glory of this civilization, this world that glitters with its cathedrals of commerce, it is really a very shabby place filled with workers with their bodies glued to the engines of production and pointless commerce. It is a polluted place, where our solace is so often banal theater like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. ...But there is an answer and it is at the one place where we have failed to look; it is us! ...And the esoteric is to come awake to the trance of the Stuff Civilization and how it is, literally, killing the planet. ...This series will present a plan and strategy for how to re-make our world through the philosophy of Liberation. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Purpose and Power of Ego

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-10T14:59:46-04:00

Just a quick note about ego. So many of us struggle with what we believe is the problems caused by our ego, but this idea flashed through me moments ago and I suspect that some of the readers of this blog might enjoy this flash. The needs and desires expressed by ego are responses to the Lack belief. What the ego wants - what the ego craves - we already possess! The ego and lack are two sides of the same Thought coin. Thus the beautiful purpose of ego is show us, in the most powerful terms possible, what is utterly false in our thinking. Everything we want - we already have, but the harsh noise of ego covers that understanding. ...Let ego show us the Way. ...

Mother's Day

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-09T14:38:48-04:00

As very young girls were cut off from their Authentic Selves by needing to become "little home-makers" and not full, equal human beings, so as to supply many more workers and soldiers for the ruling class, the need arose to mark their enormous sacrifice; hence Mother's Day. The validation and acknowledgement they were forced to give up in becoming baby-makers and man pleasers was made all right through Mother's Day. The validation that this day brings to women is greatly deserved and intrinsically right, but only if we also acknowledge the downfall in the status of women as equal human beings that civilization engendered. ...For this reason, individuals whose Fear-Selves have a public focus are haunted by the fear of humiliation and shame, which evoke the pain they suffered at the formation of the Wound. ...Children who do not live up to their parents’ standards and expectations often are subject to parental anger and rejection because of the underlying message about their parents’ abilities (or lack thereof), which a child’s failure communicates to the world at large. ... However, the women who are gender-role pioneers have been afforded some protection from these Fear-Selves, since the women attracted to gender-busting roles tend to be evolved and well-adapted individuals.   Every Fear-Self contains elements of our Life Force, and some identities are an outgrowth more of a person’s authentic passion than of a need to serve the Fear-Self. ... The more conventional a role is by gender, race, or class, the more likely it is to be occupied primarily by a Fear-Self, because when we opt for the tried and true simply out of dread of any other path, we have stepped firmly into the Fear-Self world. This is as true for the stay-at-home mother as it is for the female CEO who has broken through the corporate glass ceiling; as accurate for the man who fills a traditional male role such as soldier or scientist as it is for one who opts to spend his days as a homemaker and parent.  ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Liberation the Next Step: Celebrating the Outcast

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-08T14:37:34-04:00

It’s now time to usher in the new age of authentic liberation. We have seen how the whole of the “deficient” self is an inevitable outcome of the system’s requirement to debase the child and re-create him as a compliant, fearful human being designed to take orders and do what he is told. We have seen how the child is debased by the family and how the systems of formal education continue their essential mission to further weaken us through a war of fear and the demand for obedience. We are told, right from the get go, that if we fail to do what we are told, that we will fail in life, and that if we fail in school, we will become outcasts. ... It is she who has seen through the many veils of fear. ...It is time to come alive to who we are - whether it be a dancer, a scientist, or a revolutionary. This is the liberation of love for if I love the body and what the body can do, then I might want to dance, if I love the complex interplay of energy and matter, then I might become a scientist, and if I love the planet as a living organism, then I might want to foment revolution. ...Yes there are times for grave seriousness, but there are also times to sometimes just see the absurdity of the linear type of mind that believes that if we only do this, then we will have finally arrived. ...Getting a feel for the current, knowing when to surrender to the flow, knowing when to make waves - are all a part of the game. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

We Are the Light

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-05T14:35:40-04:00

When we are identified with the light, rather than the content of consciousness, what we discover that our struggle to find a secure anchor in this life, to be "somebody", and to get enlightened - all of these struggles become completely beside the point. ... But more importantly, they are based on a concept of a needy self that was a fiction in the first place! This person who sought security in an insecure world, who sought to become "somebody", who craved to become enlightened - this very person is seen to be the source of all of our problems. But this leaves us with a interesting question, is this same identity, this conceptual being, is this person also the source of all of our joy? Suffering and joy that are linked to personal attachment disappear in realization or are mere echoes of their past primacy. The suffering of the conceptual human being, as well as her joys are, indeed, two sides of the same coin. So, in a way, there is some truth that when we see through the that quality of excitement fades. ...To see the false as the false, a phrase that Krishnamurti was fond of using, is really no sacrifice at all. ...So, if we truly are the light and we are not everything we think of ourselves (handsome/ugly - smart/dumb - brave/cowardly - spiritual/material, etc) then what is next? ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

We Are the Light - Life and the Open Hand

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-07T14:30:06-04:00

This post says all that I can say on this challenging issue and it has all that anyone might need to follow the path of her or his liberation. ...Previously I have noted that our essential nature is the light which sees content (you can find these posts here, here and here), but is not the content itself. ...But the personal identification with the content is likely to continue for most of us and now I would like to talk about one of its most common manifestations. ...Thus attachment to transcendent states, as well as craving them, is no different from any other form of attachment to content as opposed to the light that see it. ...Good and bad experiences must resolve around their common Sun - the Wound that gives birth to all of our Fear-Selves - those compensatory psychological constructs adapted to address the challenge of fear and pain. You can see a lot more about the Wound here, but due to its complexity I invite you to check out the book on which this blog is dedicated. ...We will always continue to have experiences, but how we respond to them (as well we must) is seen as references to a self that is unreal - adapted to address psychological fear and pain. ...We simply stop seeking any experience designed to make us feel “good” and instead, are open to whatever happens in our life as process and not as a fixed experience. ... The moment the duality of good and bad experiences fades from our Fear-Based psychological self (and I ‘think’ that it never fully fades - but that’s okay too - we always begin by embracing ourselves exactly as they present themselves to us), then we are liberated from being slaves of the vast lake of fear that forms the center of the psychological self. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

What if Awareness and Consciousness Were Fictions

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-05-05T13:56:00-04:00

What if all there is is objects with no one seeing anything? Everything is an object perceived by no thing whatsoever. Thus no observer, no awareness, no consciousness at all. Just stuff happening. That means the only thing that is real in the universe is the universe itself. Isn’t this universe as itself that which people like to refer to as enlightenment means?

Why is it So Hard to Find One's Self

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-30T13:54:02-04:00

It is the one question that can reveal to us what has been overlooked. ...Do the birds I hear chirping and singing this morning; do they work on their elusive identity? ...Do the nomadic tribesman of Australia or Brazil wonder who they are? ...The problem of who we are is found to be only a problem for people raised in relatively recent civilization. So the question evolves to this: what is it about modern civilization that creates this crisis of identity? ...It’s a place where we grow up with the understanding that this is a place with few winners and many losers. We must strive to win, for it is in winning that we obtain the validation from others and ourselves that we need to justify our self-worth. Losing is for losers and that is to be avoided in all costs. Even the spiritual game is one of very few winners and many, many others. ...Born as sacred beings we are ill-equipped to compete on the battlefield of modern civilization.

The World According to Me

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-29T13:53:08-04:00

So much spiritual searching and self-improvement is founded on the premise that I don’t like myself as I believe I am and need to use these proven methods to produce a brand new me. ...For those of you who have read my book, even the vast cultural structures of civilization are dependent on that exact same belief. ...No matter how well intended, no matter how earnest we are in our prodigious efforts at meditating 8 hours a day or conjuring up the most banal fantasies, we will never be Ramana Maharishi or even Napoleon. ...Consider that possibility - that if you were to become very famous, there would be many thousands of people “out there” working day and night to become like you. ...All of this seeking, all of this needing to be someone different from who you are is, once it comes to conscious attention, the primary place of sustained discomfort in your life. ...Once we begin to relax into our primal nature, which is the very essence of our existence and getting very familiar and comfortable with that feeling - even the anxiety - if it’s there - the energy that has supported the self-contempt and the seeking that self-contempt gave birth to begins to dissipate. ...You see that all of your aspirations to become someone you are not have all been symptoms of self-rejection. Moreover, this self-rejection is a perfect echo of all the self-rejection we have received from other people and organizations in our lives - starting with our well-intended parents. Again, you will probably need to read the book to fill in all the gaps that I cannot cover in this short post, but, just for now, please take my word for it. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-28T12:28:52-04:00

There is a very common error that runs threw much of what is called spiritual teaching (I gag ever so slightly with the phrase – sorry). And that is the idea that passion, excitement, enthusiasm, sarcasm, irony, and joking are somehow a problem. These same teachings also tend to make the claim that sorrow, sadness, and introversion are also often a problem. Their many claims against the healthy behavior of human beings are based on the idea of attachment. That when our attachment to things and people is finally severed in the blazing light of enlightenment, we will be free of these all too human passions and we will, instead, burn only the cool even light of pure awareness. I say to these people – “get thee to a nunnery (or monastery).” ...On one side are all of us defective people and on the other are these very few enlightened beings radiating light and living pure and perfect lives. The instant they got enlightened, their days of illicit thought came to a screeching halt. Our bodies are built for passion – passion of all kinds. Those that aspire to be passionless are those who are frightened of their own humanity.

Let's Get Real

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-27T12:25:50-04:00

Bliss – joy – contentment are closer to us than our thoughts. ... Today I’m going to shout my understanding of this conundrum ‘to the rooftops’. The basic error is this: We believe we are the thinker. This one core belief draws us away from the joy and contentment we so sorely want. Our experience their absence within our lives is the very call to truth that we are currently not living consciously. Thus the lie is this one, solitary belief – that who we are is the thinker. And so we do this endless spiritual dance. ... We are the portal of life. ...The problem with each of those sentences is that they bring us back to being a “something”. The moment we are a “something”, we bring to life our core belief.

The Now is New

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-26T12:24:21-04:00

One of the first lessons of Zen is to see everything as if for the first time. The problem with that sentence is that we actually do see and hear and touch and taste and smell everything for the first time – there’s no as if about it. ... Of course the zen teachers know this, but they also know that we need to traverse the universe of “as if” prior to realization. But what is seen/heard etc. is not new to the mind. The mind operates in the world of knowing. Of course, it is limited to its “knowing” and when we are tethered to the mind, we are also bounded by the same limits – for we live “as if” we are the mind and only the mind. Think about the building (house/apartment) you’re now living in. Most of us will create a picture of this building with particular lighting, angle, and distance. ... Now go outside and actually look at the building. ...See the rest of this post here.

Get Liberated

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-23T14:21:11-04:00

I struggle with the challenge of expressing the meaning of liberation into the clearest language possible. And one of the reasons why I continue contributing to this blog is exactly that very challenge. But a recent conversation with someone who recently finished reading Liberation from the Lie motivated me to put the core meaning of liberation in an entirely new way. Liberation means freedom from the attachment to any belief that is, prior to awakening, unseen. Until we are liberated from all beliefs, we will have much in common with robots. The ultimate and final belief is that you believe you are who you think you are. Liberation means to be liberated from that belief. ...You are the presence and the creative light of this moment. When you are open to the living flow of that – utterly unconnected with your psychological self – you are free. ...Do you choose to be yourself or are your behaviors, ideas, and ways of doing things and outcome of your conditioning and your culture?

What to Do With Painful Feelings

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-21T12:18:41-04:00

I sense a sad mood. ...Then I remember the central teaching. I am not my sadness. Rather sadness is just an object of consciousness. It is a state of mind that is visiting me today. So I, as an object of consciousness, and sadness are one and the same. Thus I am not I for that I is a temporary object of consciousness. I am that which sees or, to be even more precise, I am that which sees the seeing, hears the hearing. Is there a who or what that I am? ...Find the whole post here.

The Big Bang

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-22T07:25:27-04:00

It is only in reflection that the belief that the world should be different from what it is arises and that reflection is also a part of this irrefutable life. ... And, it is a very temporary refuge for if we can depend on nothing else, it is that the storms of life will assail exactly those self-created walls that we so depend of for safety. ...What these scientists were hearing (In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic background radiation while conducting diagnostic observations using a new microwave receiver owned by Bell Laboratories.[26] ) was the actual sound of the Big Bang - the origins of the observed universe. ...Fear - the vast reservoir of underlying fear - expressed as insecurity, uncertainty, and just free-floating fear - is precisely like the buzzing static of the Big Bang. It is real to the extent that it’s exists as part of our psychological selves - but is it real of the world itself? ...It is, literally, the wall that your infantile self constructed to protect its very vulnerable self against the pain of its own being. ... Ever since our primal Wounding, it has been the task of the Fear-Self to keep you insulated from the pain and terror of that event. You will probably need to understand this whole argument on a deeper level - and I therefore recommend you to read my book (I truly wish I was in a position to give it away, but I too have bills to pay and put food on the table). ...If you can fully absorb the content of this post, you will see that the whole thought/concept of the self is, itself, a fear expression! ...See the very, very young you in her/his bed at night, all alone and vulnerable to all the terrors that the night and separation make possible.

How Do You Feel About Life?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-22T07:24:46-04:00

For those of you who have been following my many posts, you will know that the themes I emphasize the most most are invalidation and the resulting inadequacy beliefs that inevitably become primary to our unseen and underlying sense of self. ...In a very small nutshell, when we are persistently invalidated by well meaning parents and then told that almost everything we do is wrong or bad, except those behaviors that entertain our parents, we must loose contact with our authentic selves. ...We learn the very harsh lesson that love is not a birth right, but is something we must earn by conforming to their expectations about what is good and right. ...This belief expresses itself in countless ways, but the one I would like to focus on in this post is how we feel about the world. ...Remember that the Wound is fear - persistent and underlying fear that will burst into actual life under any circumstance that connects what is presently happening in our life with the the primal Wound event. ...But when we are closer to our Wound (the primal invalidation event), we are more likely to be in contact with overt fear. The first response (above) is also a fear based response, but it is a life construct that is designed to address fear by engineering what we believe to be a happy life. But when we are closer to the Wound, we are more likely to see the world as holding the potential to re-express the actual trauma of our very early childhoods. ...If we are true to a real spiritual path, the primary purpose of that path is to bring the unseen to light and what is unseen is usually this free floating underlying fear and the behaviors it nurtures. ...The benefit organized religion has over intellectual analysis is that it provides a community of like minded fearful people to enjoy their spiritual superiority and separation from the masses of less evolved people.

The 3 Keys

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-19T11:36:18-04:00

Then we realize what was once inconceivable and unthinkable: that only I am it and I could never have been any different from what I am or what I was. The journey must end precisely where it began but with one decisive difference: there is nothing to seek and no one who would gain. ... It can be said that every thought of personal gain or loss, EVERY one is rooted in an underlying thought, which is the thought that I am not okay as I am and it is precisely the inadequate self that is projected outwardly as real. So every thought of personal gain or loss is a gift because it points exactly in the direction of that which most urgently calls for healing and recognition. ...Once it is seen that there is nothing to seek and that every belief we have about the world and, most importantly, the self, is absolutely and utterly unreal, then we must weather the storm. ... And as we weather this storm, we need to rest in the awareness of the storm itself. ...But please consider this statement: a thing is never a thought - so no thought can tell us anything about the world or our life or about who we are. ... Thus when there is someone who believes in a thought, she is experiencing, both the thought and the believer both of which are thoughts and, therefore, unreal. ...So when we weather the storm, we need to allow both the thoughts as well as the believer in the thoughts to rage on. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Let's Make a Monster

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-17T11:43:34-04:00

To make a really good monster, it needs frequent reminders of how bad it is. ...You see a real monster needs to believe that it is just a piece of shit. ...They made the Germans pay for the whole of the war, even though when they surrendered they were on French soil. ...It would really be helpful if we had just a bit of foresight and realized what kinds of monsters we are creating in the world. ...We are like cowed puppies - domesticated, submissive, and just too beat up by their parents, their schools, their jobs, and their desperate need to get by. We do it all by ourselves for we have been trained well in the school of self-contempt. ...If we know how to create monsters and zombies, then we should also know how to reverse the action - how to heal what has been hurt. ...We do that and are doing that all of the time. ...I think the time has come when we can fairly say that the choice truly is ours’. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The World is Inside You

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-16T16:23:24-04:00

Paths to the Authentic Self: A Summary

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-14T12:35:19-04:00

Those of you who have already read Liberation from the Lie will probably get more out of this post than those who haven’t, but I think there are those who will intuitively get what is said here. ...Thus inner conflict, painful repetitive patterns, lack of resolve, too much resolve and anything which resists what is real and seen are manifestations of the Wound in daily life. ...Rush (this is a subtle one - when we are rushing to get someplace out of unnoticed habit and conditioning, we are playing the very old game of goal seeking, i.e., life sucks in transit from one place to another, so I need to rush to repress that pain. ...These are short term maneuvers, but there is a much larger category of Fear-Based responses, which are, the story of our lives. ...You’ll see that these lack based needs will find realization in our partners, career choices, angry confrontations with those who inadequately validate us (often parents and our children), and showing the world how great and wonderful we are in any number of ways. There is yet a third category of behavior which is also rooted in lack/insufficiency and this is persistent depression (self-contempt). ... 2. with the collapse of the Fear-Selves, we are brought in much closer contact with our primal Wound and it is in the seeing of the Wound that our Fear-Based personalities begin to dissolve all on their own. ...All such projects are expressions of the very lack/inadequacy that sustains the whole cycle of moving from one Fear-Based behavior to another. ...So in seeing the patterns of Fear-Based behavior and the Fear-Selves in our life and in allowing ourselves to sink into the scary world of the Wound is exactly what we need to do if the whole edifice of fear to lose its power over us. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Interview with a Dinosaur

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-13T11:24:00-04:00

Hi my name is Howard Cosell and I’m here at the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary line (65.5 million years ago) from the far distant future, even your future dear reader, for time machines do not yet exist in your time. ...HC - Well, let’s say that I’m from a very far away place and I’ve been told more than once that I taste like very spoiled Plesiosaur - so do don’t say you weren’t warned. ...HC - Well about 185.9 million years ago one of those asteroid hit the earth and killed off almost 90% of all life on the planet. ...Because if that asteroid hadn’t hit the earth, well scientists say that you dinosaurs and your marine and flying reptile buddies would never have evolved. ...HC - Well, you should know that one of those asteroids is, right now, heading straight toward earth and will hit in what will be called the Yucatan Peninsula sometime tomorrow. ...Sooner than you can blink a geologic eye, the mammals will become the dominant species (such as yours’ truly) and some of these mammals are so cute that it would raise an archaeopteryx’ feathers. ...People, who can be creatures of habit, not unlike you know who, will insist on calling them birds, but you and I know them as dinosaurs. ...It’s going to create an explosion that will knock your socks off if you wore socks, which I know you don’t, and will send up a huge crapload of dirt into the atmosphere, which will make it really very dark and cold here for more months than I care to mention, and, well, you know the drill, nearly all of the dinosaurs, T Rex included, and all of your flying and marine reptile buddies will go the way of the mesosaurus. ...So when I blab on about people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, know that the sands of history blow every which way, but the dust always settles only to get blown on again. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

You Are Enlightened

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-13T08:30:44-04:00

Last night the last veil parted. What Bankei called the Unborn Buddha Mind opened for me and it can open for you. Feel free to ask me any questions. you would like.

What is Religion? A Post the Can Change Your Life

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-12T11:01:49-04:00

Going into this work I knew that not only were Navajos relatively traditional compared to many other Indian communities in North America, but they were also going through a revival of core traditional values. ...About 10,000 years ago, in the part of the world we call Iraq and Iran people figured out how to harness the power of nature through intensive agriculture. ...But something much bigger also arose in the development of intensive agriculture, permanent towns, city-states, the ruling class, and war; and that was the development of life as suffering. ... They worked from dawn to dusk to make sure that the people had enough to eat and that the ruling class could live in extraordinary luxury and that their armies could be powerful and well armed. Thus the workers who did all of the hard labor of civilization also died in its defense as the various rulers planned and carried out wars to increase their power and control - for unless we nurture our need for power and control that power and control would just wither away. Women, who were once key to their group, now became baby makers for many more people were needed to work the farms and staff the armies. ...It declared that this life is indeed suffering, but that a much better life awaits us all after death ... if we are obedient to the authority of the church/temple and to the ruler who is the son of god, if not god himself (I intentionally used the masculine pronoun). ...They started from a place that adored this world and were profoundly connected to its rhythms and touch and evolved to a place where this world was just one of endless toil and insecurity. ...If we are ever to find our Authentic Selves we must first understand our own culture, which includes all religions that reinforce the underlying beliefs that we far too often take for granted as normal. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Sarah Palin and the Celebration of Hate: The Theory of Liberation Proven Once Again

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-11T11:05:31-04:00

When we look back on history, we can see that it has its own power and thrust. ...The Wound refers back to our primal invalidation; an experience that leaves us with a persistent sense of lack and dis-ease. How it manifests in each of us is always unique, but it must find expression and most often it finds its expression as fear. ...Every chapter guides the reader to see the manifestations of the Wound in our daily lives - for through our seeing of it, we are able to bring the healing energy of light and understanding to what is unseen. ...It must resolve its own inner agony by reflecting itself outwards - as well as to find identity with those who possess a very similar internal Wound. Thus the Palin followers must hate those who reject them - the liberals, the gays, the non-whites, the intellectuals, the socialists, the big city people, the animal lovers, the environmentalists, the vegetarians, the progressives, the jews, the .... ...Sarah Palin, through her small-town hucksterism (aw shucks), her suggestion of sexual availability, and her brazen self-confidence built on a ramshackle structure that is proud of its contempt for complexity, brings this hate together. What was a disorganized energy that festered in the small towns and places of stress in america, she has been able to bring together as a movement. ...Until we bring what has ruled a universe of darkness to light, we must pay the price of our own self-contempt for the propulsion of history will express itself as it will. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Weight of Deficiency and Its Undoing: Verse 44 of the Tao Te Ching

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-09T14:52:40-04:00

Remarkably, it is this very belief that both creates our self-misery, as well as provide the essential fuel that leads to our awakening. ...If we obtain what we believed will make us happy, the very quality we sought will not only become bland, but will, one day, be taken from us. So when the Tao asks, “Fame or self - which is dearer?” - it is pointing us to what both comes and goes as well as to what is always available. ... We can spin our wheels chasing what we believe we lack - a chase that only lasts a life time or we can see what we are really doing and return to the root - the source of our being. ... Every moment presents this decisive choice - but with realization the challenge of choice vanishes, for the mind as been tamed through clear seeing and the wisdom it imparts to us. ...When we gain, we will need to look over our shoulder worried that we will loose what we have struggled for, for riches come and go. ...But when we see that gain and loss are completely external to our essential beings, we can allow them to come and go. ...When we fall in love to anything external to ourselves and establish it as a need that we must possess and control, we make ourselves into a slave. ...With this knowing we can allow the contentment that is not only our birthright, but our essence to flower. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Is the Expression of Political and Cultural Views Antithetical to the Awakened Self?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-08T11:42:44-04:00

3. waking up to the realization of our immediate and profound connection with everything; ... 5. waking up from the false-selves we effortlessly create to compensate for the underlying deficiency belief; and 6. waking up means that the belief and force that drives seeking exhausts itself in the realization of the essential - true Self. ...When we realize (not think) that we are connected to everything, we become intensely alive. ...Thus when we see and read about the destruction of the environment through production and consumption, the destruction of life through war, the horrible ways we treat animals to make cheap animal protein, and the lies the powerful propagate to keep the less fortunate living a life of suffering and pain, we understand that all of this is us. We are not removed from the immediacy of life through the veils of thought and prevarication. Instead we are alive to the vast play and drama of the world that unfolds before our eyes and hearts. ...It has absolutely nothing to do with making a “better me” that people will respect and love because I know that underneath it all I am not deserving of their respect or love. ...It does not yield a vast field of zombies, but a field of diverse, alive, and connected energies intimately engaged in life as it unfolds everywhere. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Haikus

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-07T11:41:22-04:00

my mind says this is scary across the way friend smiles ...I just can’t get it- no way ...Inside my heart sad and heavy ...Crows squawk, shriek, and caw How annoying they can be ...It takes me back to the root Got to make the bed. ...The high plains I yearn ...Me and this small room.

It Takes Two to Seek: The Cure for the Common Spiritual Bug

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-07T11:37:02-04:00

This is a painful itch and it’s an itch that needs to be scratched, so he goes out into the world to find a partner. ...There is a cure, but it’s not something you can obtain from a book, class, or teacher (guru). ...Know, to the very depths of your being, that it cannot provide relief for your itch. ...Have you ever taken an over-the-counter nasal spray when suffering with a cold? ...The problem with all of such sprays is that after two days of use, you will get a rebound effect. The spray will actually cause your nasal passages to swell even worse and your breathing problem is now worse than ever. The same applies to spiritual seeking that goes outward to cure the itch of deficiency. The only answer to this problem is to stop grabbing the spiritual nasal spray. ...We have to go through what the mind believes to be the insane darkness of utterly not knowing. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

No Thought, No Feeling, No Place Can Make "It" Happen

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-05T11:18:29-04:00

Know that no thought, no insight, no experience, no special practice, and travel to no other place can invoke awakening. There is no where to go and nothing to do. The whole energy and motivation to seek comes to a crashing halt. What is left when this is truly realized? Know this to the bottom of your heart, mind, and soul. There is simply nothing you can do. Once that is known and once it is truly known, your journey is done and you will have found yourself.

No Action: Verse 43 of the Tao Te Ching

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-09T11:11:07-04:00

If I travel west, it wouldn’t be long before I would enter the world of the gently rolling hills of the Appalachians. ... Yet geologists have shown that 100 million years ago these unprepossessing hills were towering, craggy mountains not unlike today’s Rockies in Colorado. ...Thunder and Bolt often met together in the lands of PrimalDark, and PrimalDark was always a most gracious host. ...The mind takes its snapshots of Life and when any of these snapshots are judged as bad, the mind seeks to whip the self into action. ...How many times has something we have judged as bad been later seen to have been a wonderful gift? Even those who suffer with terminal illness have often said how it is has re-awakened a dormant love in their hearts and has brought them closer to the fleeting beauty of this life. ...It is, rather, seeing the danger and often the foolishness of judging this moment as if we ‘know’ it. ... Have you ever said something really hurtful to another, perhaps your own child, and, as a result, caused unnecessary suffering and resentment. ...Instead of parsing it into bits and pieces, this one good and this one bad, why can’t we just relax into it with a heart full of trust knowing that in the larger view we really are now are embracing the flow of LIfe just as it is? ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Our Journey Together: A Personal Statement

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-04T11:05:43-04:00

While much that brings us together we possess in common, there is also a part of us that is unique and thank goodness for that. ...I believe the book offers a resource to all seekers, as well as those suffering from periodic or persistent depression and unhappiness to find a way out of their hardship. I know this book “works” from the great reviews it has received at Amazon and the many letters I have received from readers. ... It uses ideas culled from these traditions as well as those from modern psychology and my own direct experience training with Navajo (Dinè) traditional healers. ...It is my way of sharing my own experience and perceptions in a way that I try to make interesting, engaging, and even fun. I know that I really need to work on the fun part, since the tone of so many of these posts is altogether too serious. ... The highest of all emotions is (per my Navajo friends) laughter - but often the portal to this place is grief. If you knew me personally, you would know someone who is very prone to laughter and never takes himself all that seriously. ...And I invite you to this same path, for this is really only your path. ...I don’t receive many comments on this blog, but I am always open to your experience and your perspective.

What it Means to Awaken?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-03T15:55:08-04:00

Both body and mind are real appearances on the field of the seen - but there is no personal possession of them. ...Both the body and the mind yield a personal story, which, we believe, belongs to us and us alone. It tells us our place in the world, it tells us who we are, it tells us who we have been, and it tells us who we will be. ...The moment it is clearly seen that this is a belief based on conditioning and habit, we awaken free of the story. ... As the light of presence, nothing is done by us and everything perceived is seen as a vivid happening on the plane of presence. ...Sometimes we are free of the narrative and the network of beliefs that keep it together and sometimes we fall back into the story of which we contend we are both author and victim. ...We see that the narrative, to which we are so attached, is just a story - a happening, no different from any other happening. ...We just depend on our seeing and, in particular, our clear seeing of belief that we are (or are not) the body/mind. Once we see that this belief that we are the body/mind is founded on nothing but conditioning, and habit, it slowly ebbs away. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Child as Savage

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-02T13:42:21-04:00

If you have been following these posts, you will already know that the key to understanding our search for purpose, meaning, and even awakening, is fueled by an underlying belief in our own inadequacy. ... If we are ever to find our Authentic Self, that energy that is always there even underlying the Wound, we need to see these processes first hand in our own immediate life. ...If we believe that all children are savages, then their transformation into civilized, moral beings should simply be a matter of teaching them the ways of civilization. ...When the Pilgrims were starving during their first, long New England fall and winter, not only did the “savage” Wampanoag Indians feed the “civilized” European newcomers, but they taught them how to plant and grow maize and beans, enabling them to survive future winters. ...The “savage” children he observed had already experienced their infantile trauma, their emotional separation from their mothers, and pressures to change; thus they were already insecure in their standing with their parents and had begun to exhibit behaviors to compensate for their internal feelings of low self-worth. ...The collapse of our original sense of self occurs at a time before communication can occur between child and parent; the original person is already covered over by the Fear-Self before the child is able to protest. ...It’s time that we moved on to a more loving and accurate understanding of who our children are and who we are in relation to them. ...Resiliency varies greatly from child to child, as does the fear of expressing one’s true feelings to parents who might be perceived as threatening or whose connection to the child is so tenuous that he fears loss of love if he is honest. ...Through these posts will you be empowered to see, precisely, how you yourself have been invalidate and in that seeing there is a powerful glimpse toward your own liberation. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Latest Review of Liberation from the Lie at Amazon.com

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-01T13:35:54-04:00

This is an excellent book and a worthy addition to the growing body of literature uniting salient concepts from psychology, philosophy, and spirituality (and several other disciplines) in an effort to understand and improve the human condition. Although the author is obviously well versed in these fields, there is no need for the reader to be equally so. ... Gross writes with the ease and authority of someone who has “field tested” his ideas. The notion of a collective and primal “Wound” of invalidation and the subsequent development of various “Fear-selves” to mitigate the pain of that wound rings with a resounding truthfulness as it relates to my life experience. To paraphrase another reviewer, “I dare you to read this book and not find yourself in it!” A word of caution, however, is in order. This is NOT a self-help book in the traditional sense. There are no affirmations to recite, journals to keep, or empty chairs to speak to. Liberation from the Lie deals with the cause of fear…not the effects. From the perspective of someone who is accustomed to assignments, endless analysis; “doing something” in an effort to “improve” my self, these ideas can be quite challenging.

The God of Fear Part 3: The World Cut in Two

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-04-01T10:42:50-04:00

It is easy to speak glowingly of the awakened persona, but unless we discover the roots of fear, unless we fully realize our own psychological domestication, we must live a second-half lives imitating the accomplishments of others more famous than ourselves. ...Where they once believed in themselves and in life, people of all classes and ranks suffered from their collective disempowerment, for even rulers must constantly look over their royal shoulders for those who would use force and violence to wrest away their treasured status. The social revolution set off by organized agriculture, city building, and, eventually, empire creation demanded a very different kind of personality than that of the hunter-gatherer in order to fill its need for laborers, fighters, artisans, scientists, and homemakers. ...Civilization could not have existed were it not for a family structure that produced discontent and the urge to heal this discontent through an array of responses, including egoistic achievement, and for the masses of people to identify as members of the culture of achievement, even if they were not in a position to create such public achievement themselves. ...Compared with the emotional harmony of the hunter-gatherer household, where children tended to be far more placid, where temper tantrums were all but unknown, and where insecurity was essentially nonexistent, the civilized family became fraught with conflict, insecurity, emotional domination, clinginess, and imposed hierarchies. ...Morris Berman notes, “It’s all hype, of course; prestige in either direction, up or down the vertical ladder, will not heal the narcissistic wound suffered in childhood, and that is why there is no end in chasing it.” There is some benefit to narcissism: These personalities over the centuries have produced great art, technology, and a large body of knowledge in their attempts to compensate for the love they failed to receive (or which was truncated early). ... Eliminating narcissism altogether may not be our desired goal, considering the gains it has produced for us, but seeking to return the narcissistic pendulum from the extremes reached by ancient Greece, Rome, or modern-day America is probably a worthy objective. ...One of the key questions we need to address is: Can we continue to evolve as a civilization beyond our culture of inadequacy, insecurity, and fear? ...If you’re interested in exploring the Liberation manual, whose sole purpose is to provide you with your own mirror and guide to find your own way out of the maze of psychological fear and endless seeking, then consider reading the whole of Liberation from the Lie.

The God of Fear Part 2: The Primal Wound

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-31T18:24:52-04:00

While the hunter-gatherers lived in a world fully connected with nature and other members of their families and tribes, we live in a world of profound disconnection, set apart from both nature and the other people in our communities. ...In hunter-gatherer societies, children remain physically connected to an older person, most of the time their mothers, throughout most of their first three or four years. ... • Hunter-gatherer children remained physically close to their mothers for up to four years, constantly held and carried; modern children are separated from their mothers at least for periods of time each day from birth onward; ... • Hunter-gatherer children slept with their parents for up to five years; most modern children sleep in a separate bed, if not a separate room, from their parents from the day they arrive; ... • Hunter-gather children were raised in groups or clans, with many adults taking responsibility for parenting duties; modern children are usually raised by their biological parents alone, or with the help of a very few trusted relatives or hired caretakers. The differences are many, but the most profound is this: Hunter-gatherer children were loved and respected just as they were. ...Kung (and many other non-Bantu tribes of southern Africa), Australian Aborigine groups, the Berbers of the Middle East, and most Native American tribes of the Plains and Plateau region, children were virtually attached to their mothers for most of their first 18 months. When not in the arms or on the back of her mother, a young children was passed on to other people in the community who held her for extended periods. ...We, on the other hand, typically place children into their own rooms early in life, where they experience isolation and terror from being alone; often in the dark. ...While the hunter-gatherers considered each child to be unique, to be loved and respected for the individuality of his talents, life path, and story as it unfolded, modern parents seek to produce children who become “special” by dint of their accomplishments.

The God of Fear: Part One

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-31T18:22:05-04:00

The time of the hunter-gatherers in the human cultural story is over; these societies, isolated from modern influences, have all but disappeared. ... These observations show us a world that is very different from our own—a world in which individuals trusted life. ...Hunter-gatherers differed from us less in the shapes of their bodies and the development of their intellect than in the way they related to the world around them. While they had every reason to live in fear—fear of wild animals, illness, starvation, fear of competing groups, fear of natural phenomena like storms—the vast preponderance of evidence shows us that they trusted the world to provide for them and keep them safe. ...For most of us, food is abundant; our living environments are sheltered from the elements and from hostile competitors; medical care is available if we become sick or injured, and we can expect to live into old age. ...While women labored for more hours each day than men (some things never change), their work was made lighter by singing and talking side by side with friends and family as they made clothes, gathered seeds, plants, and herbs (the core of the Neolithic diet), and supervised their children. ...In contrast with our culture’s obsession with achieving transcendence (for many through religion, but for others through meditation, mind-altering substances, public accolade, or material success), hunter-gatherers did not invest faith or fear in an overarching life goal or all-powerful deity. ... Morris Berman, one of the world’s foremost experts in Neolithic culture, points out that when “Native Americans refer to the Great Spirit, they often are talking about the wind. ...The great anthropologist Paul Radin, who did extensive fieldwork among the Winnebago Indians, argued that for such peoples, reality was heightened to such a pitch that the details of the environment seemed to “blaze.” ...As observed by Colin Turnbull, author of the classic The Forest People, the Mbuti of Tanzania still today live within a “sacred reality” that is “no more sacred or esoteric than the forest in which they dwell.”

The God of Fear

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-29T11:37:05-04:00

The questions was: who could have imagined this world - this world of endless strip shopping centers, the land gobbled up by vast swaths of single family homes, of the air and water hopelessly fouled, of the total assault on plants and animals, and all the rest of the life killing machinery of modern industrial civilization. ...This is one of the questions that I have sought to answer in my book Liberation from the Lie, but I would like to explore it in somewhat less depth in this post and several to follow. ...Belief, we shall see, is based, exclusively on fear and my book and this blog has only one purpose; to expose fear - to see it exactly for what it is. ... If you’re very lucky you will be re-born and maybe you will be less likely to rest on your self-laziness in another life. ...If you are ever interested in discovering your Authentic Self, you will need to fully explore every belief to the light of clear seeing. ...Or we believe in a heaven, because our minister has told us that this world is sinful and is only a passage to the permanent place after death (how pathetic!). ...When we are fully aligned with the fear-based personality, and let’s admit it, nearly all of us are, we are fully split from our Authentic Selves. ...We do this through sustaining our ignorance of how the world functions, we stay asleep by zoning out in front of our TVs, we stay asleep by going to church so we can be told how and what to think, we are drawn to eastern philosophies, which also tell us how to live and transcend the challenge of everyday life. ...When we are clear on the roots, we can pull up this weed of a life by the roots and take the first uncertain step to ourselves; a shining being free of fear, strong in her courage, steadfast in her self in this life. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Rage and the Fury

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-26T13:55:42-04:00

For god’s sake, I’m a goddamn veteran and put my ass on the line to defend this country that isn’t even mine anymore. ...The presidents of companies that foul the environment and doing irreparable harm to essential resources need to be treated as criminals or even worse, for the harms they are causing by their very actions are more injurious than those committed by people we call criminals. ...When I believe that Black people are less than me, I can act with privilege and deal with them in ways I would never treat a fellow white person. ... When I believe that people are not apes, then I am free to support my local school board when they insist that creationism is given at least the same status of evolution in our school’s biology curriculum. ...When perceptions of injustice are based on direct observation, then we have the right and even a duty to act to make things just and fair. ... We also know that the native people of this continent have not only lost all their land through naked violence, but have been victims of genocide intended and unintended. ...It is, in fact, one of the very great challenges of our time - a time when the planet is dying, when the poor are sinking faster and faster into every more dire economic straits, and when the powerful possess for ever more influence to dominate and exploit the helpless and vulnerable. We also need to see where we are unfair to others - when we act with undeserved privilege as a consequence of belief or just simple mental laziness. Anyone who has been a parent with more than one child, will have dealt with demands for fairness from one of their children - of charges of preferential treatment of one over the other. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

You Are Not Enlightened

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-25T15:47:07-04:00

You are enlightened when the personal identity in the personal Me/I ends and you are not enlightened, because it is realized that this word, you, is just a concept ... a projection. When we believe in this concept, we have a story with a nice and neat beginning (birth) and an awful conclusion (death). Free of the Me/I concept the story is not taken very seriously. When we stop believing in the concept, the presence of this moment is, pretty much, everything. ...As Byron Katie is fond of saying, you can argue with reality, but you’ll be wrong only 100% of the time. ...You as a concept is just an object, not all that different from the computer you’re looking at right now. ...So you are both enlightened and not enlightened at the same time. How does it feel to be and not be all at once? It reminds me of that Danish Prince who said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

You Are Enlightened

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-24T15:09:04-04:00

You are enlightened and the only reason you don’t know it is that you are identifying with your thoughts as who you are. ...You only believe you aren’t enlightened and that is your problem and it is that belief that sustains an infinity of seeking. ...But the kicker is this; the reflection asserts a thinker and it is that thinker that holds the belief that he is not enlightened and must go to LA to meet with this esteemed Lama.” ...It doesn’t matter in this moment, whether it be some heavy talk or my throwing a cream pie in your apparent face.” ...Everything you do is an expression of the oneness whether it happens in a pristine natural place or a public toilet. ...But, since you asked, let’s say you run into a man who calls you names and pushes not only your psychological buttons but your physical body. ... Your initial experience of fear, if it is what emerges in the moment, then that’s the way enlightenment is playing out. ...“I will say this from personal experience, the moment we see through the thinker everything just flows perfectly, why not enjoy the journey no matter what briefly arises in awareness. ... Kick butt, if that is what arises in enlightenment (not all that likely), just see the mind carry on its secondary assessment like some old schoolmarm that always knows what’s best for you.” ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Truth Way

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-24T15:06:01-04:00

“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”̴ ̴ words attributed to Jesus Christ - John 8:32 ...The truth is all that matters. ...We know the truth when it cannot be debated. ...The whole purpose of the Truth Way is to find the authentic self. ...If you read my book, you will discover how this line of inquiry will take you back to your own Wound and you will discover who you are not. ...Instead, I will assume that you either have a serious vision problem or are crazy. If you say that there is something wrong with me because of my love of music, I will have no idea what you’re talking about and excuse myself from the conversation. Beliefs need to be defended, but the truth is just the truth. It is the truth that will set you free. ...What is true for our own self will always reflect the authentic self and your authentic self will be different from my authentic self.

Is This Happening to Me?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-16T16:36:00-04:00

This is another post about the difference between the state of awakening and that of trance-like sleep. ...In trance-like sleep state - perceived “things” (feelings, emotions, thoughts, objects, memories, aspirations) all happen to me. ...In awakening - perceived “things” (feelings, emotions, thoughts, objects, memories, aspirations) all happen, but not to me or anyone/anything else. ...Obviously nothing, because the “you” “you” think “you” are is just another perceived object, which is not happening to “you”. This is so decisive an understanding that it cannot be read carefully enough. Practice: As you read these words or look out the window or wonder about the next time you’re going to get some nooky ... get a feel for the difference when the mind asserts that it’s all happening to you in contrast to it’s all happening but to no one or no thing. ... This computer is not be seen by me - it’s just an object seen - but not by me. ...You will shine in the midst of all of these amazing happenings! ...

How to Find the True Self

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-13T10:52:14-05:00

And when the truth of this is absorbed, what happens next? What happens is that we begin to notice this reflex as exactly what it is. ...Seeing (hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling) without really noticing what is sensed, because the mind is off to the next thing. When we are identified with the mind (and who isn’t?), we can never discover the vastness of what overlies this lightning fast quickness. This is not a call to struggle to do away with the persistent chirping of the mind. It’s there for a reason, but it is call to explore what “surrounds” this attention grabbing energy. What overlies this place of chatter and restlessness is a place of rest and calm, which sheds its light on everything without the coloring judgment and compulsiveness of the conditioned mind. ...Severing your identity with the mind’s incessant ranting insistent quality and finding one’s self in the overlying quiet is the very essence of waking up from the habitual - all knowing self. ...

Liberation VS Self-Improvement: May the Best Thought Win!

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-12T11:21:54-05:00

I’m feeling better already - I’m really not a loser - I really don’t have a clue what’s going on in Bob’s mind - maybe he’s even more miserable than me! ...But I learned from reading The Secret that I’m really harboring an underlying thought that I’m poor and this defeats my conscious thought envisioning lots of money in my bank account. ...According to this book, I was the victim of a terrible invalidation trauma in my earliest days and that the pain was too awful to bear. ...It’s these “fear-selves” that create a life-long trance that acts to dis-connect ourselves from the authentic self and that awakening means to see that they are just illusions - phantoms that I myself created to avoid pain. ...When I feel this pain - I see the vulnerable little girl who had to negate her own self to receive the love she so desperately needed. ...I now see that all of the self-improvement books I read were really about creating a “better” false-self. ...I’m starting to feel that for the first time in my life I can stand on my own two feet, even if the old-fear selves want to take over my self. ...While there is a me, I cannot know it through thought - just like I can’t really know a tree through thought. ...Thought is a secondary response to life and all of this self-improvement and psychological projection is just stuff that is added on to the immediate experience of life. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Gateway to Happiness and Creativity is So Much Closer than "You Think"

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-11T09:19:32-05:00

So this day forward, pledge that I will see through every form of conceptual reasoning that motivates us to get enlightened and to be a better me. ...Now, if you see that the word self is just a concept, something that doesn’t actually exist in the universe, then you must realize that no other selves exist. ...If you are ever to touch the truth of this moment, you must see through the error of establishing any concept as real. ...But we can see that there is just this ... with no you or me. ...But just as we can see that happiness does not possess any objective reality, so we can see that the same understanding applies to “I”, “me”, and “other”. ...This is not a path of negation - it is the path of truth and what happens in your life, even thought, is the real of this moment. ...That’s how the mind works and it’s really great for that - but it is falling into the error of placing credence in concepts, if only for the sake of convenience. ... When the concept of me and other (dog) is seen through as just the mode of the mind (of convenient communication), then there can never be a problem. ...I write these for my own clarity knowing that it is all dedicated to finding out what is false, so that the true shines, free of the obstruction of belief and psychological projection. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao, Yin & Yang and the All: Verse 42 of the Tao Te Ching Commentary

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-10T12:27:44-05:00

The one gives rise to the two, which in Chinese cosmology assumes the complementing energies of yin (feminine principle) and yang (masculine principle). ... This is another expression of the unity of opposites: a theme that we have encountered quite a few times on this journey. And it is the interplay of yin and yang that creates three and this three gives birth to the ten thousand things. In this way, the Dao expurgates the unity of all in one as One all arises and as nothing - there is potential (or nothing) in the absence of arising. It is within potential or nothingness that even the one arises in this fleeting, yet eternal moment. ...Because when you win a contest anger and resentment arises for he who has lost. ... This story also points to why most American Indians cast a very wary eye at competition - a world that divides people into winners and losers. ...A violent person is he who lives life unaware of the unity of opposites and who fails to understand that needing to win is a force with the darkest of consequences. ... When we understand the two and can experience the balance that is implicit in every moment, we can live a life that is joyous. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Living Tao: Verse 41 Commentary of the Tao Te Ching

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-09T10:45:28-05:00

In my last two non-Tao Te Ching posts, Appreciation and Trust and Life as Awareness, I have sought to prepare the field for Verse 41 of the Dao De Jing (the alternative and more precise spelling). ...Some readers see this stanza as ironic and are prone to relate themselves to the “lesser Scholar” - they link laughter with having awakened to the Dao. ...The great Scholar is perfectly okay with the laughter of others, for it is seen to be a part of the Dao itself. ...If we examine how we experience the world and our lives, if we review how we go about making decisions, nearly all of us will see that we have developed a narrative of our life and who we are through the vehicle of thought. We are always thinking and we employ thought to make sense of who we are and to get a feel for where we are in our lives. ...We can obtain lasting clarity in life by understanding the decisive distinction between simple actions which are integral to themselves in contrast to those thought and conceptual actions that are calculated to inflate the self. ...I might even study very hard to impress my teacher, but if I must study hard to impress the teacher and thus inflate my own self identity than I am acting from deficiency. ...Most of us, if we are rigorously honest and possess the capacity to see clearly must come to realize that we thrive on attention (or its absence), validation, and receiving accolade. While none of these things are, in themselves, a problem, when we personally identify with them and feel forlorn when they are not happening in our life, they become red flags of the deficient self. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Awareness and Life: It's All One

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-08T11:40:02-05:00

In recent years I have heard many people say that from the perspective of awareness not only does nothing matter, but nothing is happening. ...The first thought that occurs to me when I hear that statement is the question, I gotta wonder if this person would say the same thing if I started sawing off his fingers? Of course, our philosophical person would respond by saying, of course it matters to the body/mind but to awareness it’s all nothing - literally nothing.... Let’s just take a look at what is really happening right here and right now. ...It’s all happening so fast that, if anything, it is that which produces thoughts and feelings, but is neither. ...If the mystery has a key at all, it can only be found here and it is further seen that wisdom is held by this immediacy of change. ...We never again need to worry or concern ourselves with the future, for we see - we see that our thoughts were wedded to a belief in a separate me that lived somewhere on the bank of Life. As we seen this all-powerful, irresistible movement propel itself, we see that no separate self could be found. ...It is the Fear-Self that must hold onto its beliefs even when Life shows, time and again, that they are a pure consequence of our internal fears - our deficient self. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Appreciate and Trust: My Only Teaching

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-07T10:37:52-05:00

And since everything we think we know about life is wrong (everything), then something other than thought must come to the fore. ...What we think about life, what we think “we” know, is just a thought object that arises in consciousness; nothing more and nothing less. So if what we think about life is just an object happening in life and has nothing whatsoever to do with “knowing” life, then how do we take the first step? ...Appreciate everything without exception that arises in life - including the seeming manifestation of your own ego and particularly the resistance that comes from your body in whatever life circumstance in which resistance arises. ...The second step (and this is probably the more difficult of the two) is to trust everything without exception, that all is perfectly right for you at the moment in which anything happens. ...Your mind, if it’s anything like mine, will “think” that it knows more than life itself. ... Just know that your mind cannot read the mind of Tao, so we are called to trust and appreciate everything exactly as it is, even brutal injustice, and know that it’s perfectly right for us. ...If you are alive and you appreciate and trust everything that happens as it happe, then what happens next will be exactly the right thing. ... See everything as perfectly right and therefore utterly trustworthy and because it is a gift intended only for you, appreciate it with all of your heart. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Who Am I? Attention and Identity

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-06T17:45:37-05:00

I wonder if I am the mind, that which thinks, sees, hears, and breaths this body or something else - perhaps something that is aware of the mind. ...If I can really see that - I must ask myself, when I “attend” to the question of self-identity - is attention just noticing itself? Frankly, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know that a world of potential exists that does not occupy my present attention. ...Or could it be that I am the ‘potential’ for everything that is, was, or could be and that attention simply brings that anything to the light of this body’s mind through the energy of attention? If this were true, then everything I experience through attention is me. ...If we identify ourselves only with the energy of attention, we then carve out of this immensity of potential experience one infinitesimal slice and say this is the “mere” me. But if we are potential, the potential to be anything, then this energy of attention, this infinitesimal slice is simply the emergence of me happening to and with my body. ...Ahhh, this is me as a bad driver ... ahhh, this is me as the sound of the me violin making those beautiful me sounds. ...In deep sleep, I am that deep sleep and nothing more needs to be added to this experience. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

I am Everything ... and So are You

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-06T08:44:42-05:00

Here is the most simple way I know to express the living reality of multiple simultaneous universes: we never have need to indulge in a Concept of who we think we are. We are everything that arises - including our egos and any thought/belief that contradicts this truth is a thought of personal separation, although it too is as much a part of us as anything else. But everything we perceive also creates its own distinct universe and we are a part of that universe as well. Thus the dog laying beside me possesses her own universe that is separate from my own. This is a universe we can never know or experience, BUT it can be honored as it expresses itself as US!!! Your experience is different from mine, but just as you are in me - I am in you. These worlds touch, but how they touch can never be put into words. Love, to me, is to respect both: the ceaseless universality of this experience of me as everything and you as everything. ...

Gangaji: Simply Stop Looking for What You are Wanting

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-05T13:38:53-05:00

Gangaji - Simply Stop Looking for What You Want - A Brilliant Video

Being and Nonbeing: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 40

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-05T11:09:39-05:00

As we grow up and learn about our world and obtain a place for ourselves in society, we undergo a complex process of creating and adding on. So when Laotsi talks about reversal, he is talking about a return to the being that is there prior to all of this adding on. ...Every thought we might claim about the world and, even more importantly, every thought we harbor about ourselves - every one - we yield to it all. ...But because the mind is restless for identity, it will aggressively seek to re-establish thought patterns and concepts which it “knows” and which it enjoys to maintain its identification with objectivity. ...But (and this is a very big but (only one T)), that which sees has no apparent being. ...So when you see without the conceptual insertion of the thought that an “I/me” is doing the seeing - this is the Dao itself. ...But the one thing every concept has in common is that they are all objects of thought. You can sense happiness and you can sense the “I/me” thought, but each is clearly seen as an object. ... But in the case of “I/me”, we learn to claim it for ourselves. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Understanding Cause & Effect: Does Reality Conform to Neo-Advaita?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-04T13:04:31-05:00

In this post I will continue my rant using Greg’s book, but I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against Greg. ...We should also remember that how we interpret the words of others, if not our own, can be more an issue of misunderstanding than one of clarity. ...In this narrative can you see if A (the tree), B (the wind), and C (the strain on the tree) are no longer in evidence? ... In fact, we can quite clearly see the chain of connections that link the outcome of this sequence, D - the crushing of my car with A, B, and C. Were we to claim that A, B, and C are no longer in evidence we would be ignoring what is clearly seen and experienced and imposing our belief on a situation. ...One he throws all sequences of sense impressions into a single vessel (A thru D are made separate, when they are, in fact, whole and one) and two, he takes the mind’s proclivity to see the world as snapshots as how the world actually is. ...Reality as it actually presented itself was both complex and failed to present a channel for him to express the hate his ego and self-hate needed to manifest. ...We saw that mind experiences life as a series of snapshots and that is made possible through its reliance on both language and belief. ... We take different snapshots of reality and not only of the “same” sequence if we are both experiencing it at the same time, but we will even create differing sequences depending on our mood, energy level, and other factors with the same basic sensed material. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

You Are Perfect

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-04T10:15:38-05:00

They are singing with joy and power, but several whisper in your ears, their shame filled voice belying their silvery beauty, “how worthless I am - how deficient I am - I am pathetic.” ...It can take a myriad of forms from self-hate to mild frustration, but it will oscillate between these two poles depending your life circumstances. This is, precisely, the energy that drives the I must get out of here to get there thinking. ...This is the fundamental lie and it is the dark force that makes this earth destroying civilization possible (see Liberation from the Lie for how this iclearly seen to be a perfectly valid statement). Inadvertently, our parents rejected us, our educators reject us and there comes a time when we adopt the very same belief. ...You are no different from the glittering fish, the powerful tiger, and the majestic spruce. ...It is only the underlying belief in your deficiency, a belief brought to life by your invalidation as a young infant, that sustain this lie. ... You can only find what is already there, when you cease the deep process of self-illusion. Drop the belief system (for it is a system - a rather complex constellation of thoughts (and again my book is a kind of manual for identifying the false self in its multitude of guises)) and you will know, first-hand, of your own perfection. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

How to Get from Here to There: The Game Ends Here!

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-03-03T13:24:32-05:00

It didn’t take long to see that if I was ever to get enlightened, it was going to take lots of hard work. ...In most cases it’s a competition with ourselves, whether its the ceaseless battle against the ever-burgeoning waistline, the self-full drive of self-improvement, or the biggest contest of all, personal enlightenment. The motifs of struggle against all but insurmountable odds fits well with our mythology of what it takes to succeed. ... Yet we persist with our struggles and hope that through sheer effort and goodwill and we will, one day, obtain our very own golden ring and we can finally rest. ...There is only this and we never need to go anywhere, because life itself is ceaseless changes. ...It’s in the ceaseless projects your mind invents on how to get from here to there. ...First see how you struggle to get from here to there all the time in your life, whether its struggling against a traffic jam or seeking enlightenment. ...If you are prompted to struggle in this life - struggle against injustice - struggle against pollution, struggle for justice - then do what you need to do, but you - the deep - authentic you, needs never to go anywhere. ...And even if painful things happen, and they will happen, maybe they are happening right now, that’s just the way life is right now. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

An Exploration into Non-duality - Advaita: Is it Valid?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-23T15:08:45-05:00

Greg Goode, a person I admire and respect, but do not agree with, says in Standing in Awareness, “...awareness is not geographical, the very notion of awareness as a place or locale dissolves (italics in original).” This argument is based on the supposition that since the actions and moods of the mind can be “seen” by awareness, then the mind must be an object of awareness. ...I would assert that as far as we can determine, the faculty of awareness is a consequence and function of the mind/body and that the world demonstrates this contention a thousand million times over. ...Yes, upon awakening, I realize that for much of the night I was “unaware”, and since this event is replicated day after day, I must, at the very least, doubt Greg’s contention. And because I survive deep sleep as a mind/body, even if the activity of awareness clearly ceases, I must further realize that this process of deep sleep adds credibility that awareness is, indeed, a function of the mind/body. ...Yet our everyday experience proves that this is just the action of desire that seeks to negate the power to make of things to make us feel bad or to fear the inevitability of our own death. ... Even if I’m inclined to reject the existence of things outside of their brief manifestation in awareness, I must at least have some doubt about the veracity of this claim as based on my every-day experience. Just because something is counter-intuitive and of esoteric origins doesn’t make it right or better than our apparent existence and the apparent existence of everything else in our universe. ...While there may be no way to separate a tree from the sun, earth, seeds, and rain that make it possible for the tree to exist, those elements will persist even in the tree’s absence. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Low is High and High is Low: Verse 39 of the Tao Te Ching Commentary

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-23T11:04:22-05:00

They are the fractures that illuminate the uniquely human experience of lack - that for the “I/me” and only for the “I/me”, something is missing (lacking). ...The barrier that separates us from that life is a single belief - albeit a deeply embedded and complex cluster of thoughts that revolve around the dark sun of the Wound; the core thought that projects a deficient me. This is the me that must always lack something - this is the me that seeks to be someone else, but most importantly, it is the belief that we actually are the image we have of ourselves. It really doesn’t matter whether that image is positive or negative (or anywhere in between) - it is just a thought - and its a thought about a thought. ...Because it is simply not possible for any entity in the universe to turn away from the One, the substance of this stanza is rather dubious. ...One scholar suggests that the purpose of this stanza shows that the Dao must exist, since existence would be not possible in its absence. ...What we discover in the next stanza is that this affectation, etc., is the creation of a universe that turns away from the actual living Dao, aka Confucianism. ...It was a custom in ancient China for rulers to self-describe themselves as lowly and pathetic, as “poor lonely orphans”. ... And, we understand that that illusion must always be tied to the continuum marked on one end by abject failure and on the other by immense success. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Fighting Against Yourself

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-20T10:58:55-05:00

Because it happens to all of us, it’s a good example of how identification with the body causes suffering and how that suffering is healed through the seeing through of that belief. ...What you want is to sleep and your body/mind just won’t allow that to happen. ...Like every other struggle it’s really just a battle of a deeply habitual belief against what is real. In this battle we believe that “we” are fighting against the body’s doing something that our “ME” belief system rejects. ...This thing we take to be who we are is purely the manifestation of a very old belief system. ...The “I” part of that sentence is a portal for confusion, because awareness is utterly without an “I” attached to it. ...While we all may need to seek, for we must know what is false prior to finding what is real, we can save ourselves a lot of time by just seeing what’s really happening. ... It’s not bad and it’s only a problem if our belief system makes it one (which it will from time to time). Ultimately, it is seen that we need this “me” sense, as we need this body, but it is not our ultimate identity. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Letters from Seekers

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-19T10:47:47-05:00

But the mind and its thoughts, ideas, and projections, no matter how sophisticated and elevated is but a fragment of life and, when one truly awakens, is seen to be a consequence of this larger life as well. ...We just can’t trust life to be safe, so we make up stories about pain and suffering and they seem VERY real. ...That’s nice, but not necessarily transformative and the reason why is that the person doing the meditating is the seeking self/witness. ... As Tarthang Tulku (an old Tibetan Buddhist) used to teach, there comes a point in our meditation practice where we need to observe the witness, the very entity we take to be ourselves. ...With practice it is seen that this spacious awareness is who we are. ...When you really trust life more than your mind, on that day you will be free. ...> which is this body, there is no free will, thoughts are not personal and ...In fact, it is the mind's flight from pain and fear that keeps the seeking process in place, as well as the identification with personal pain and fear, in place. ...Trust in life exactly as it is devoid of any projection you might impose upon it by your conditioned mind. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Witness: A Personal Story

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-19T09:25:56-05:00

It is a violation of Navajo belief to reveal all that is seen in a reading, but I was told two key things; one that my soul was “native” and would survive the coming catastrophe; and two, that I would likely die unhappy because I had a critical failing. ...As some of you know, I wrote a book based on my work with Navajo healers, Zen, nonduality, and contemporary anthropology and the focus of the book was an entity called the Fear-Self. ...Each Fear-Self has one purpose and that purpose is to compensate for the largely unseen, but subtly felt tension that we feel in the pit of our stomachs or in the shallowness of our breath. ...We might emulate non-dual teachings, but until we see the extremely subtle attraction of the spiritual witness and its primary projection we will be lost in its very deep maze for a lifetime. In this last three paragraphs I want to tell you how I saw through the Witness and when I use the expression “seeing through”, you need to know that I didn’t reject it, it’s just that I stopped believing it. ...The Witness is the place where we feel safe, even when we know in our hearts that we it forces us to live a second-hand life. ... In one sentence: we must learn to TRUST life exactly as it is and refuse to find refuge through our primary Fear-Self. ...When this finally happened, my own sense of beingness seemed to morph into a weeping little boy that tugs at my heart, for this is me when the Wound was most clearly experienced in my life. So I reach back, way back prior to the time when the analytical Witness was born and re-unite with that boy in anguish and say that we can walk together into the light of the world and not be scared. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Integrity - It's Not What You Think: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 38

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-18T12:39:27-05:00

Nietzsche expressed contempt for what he called the “do-gooder” and this same contempt, based on the same reasoning, is expressed in the relatively large-scale Verse 38 which begins the “De Jing” section of the Dao De Jing (De is translated as integrity, virtue, or efficacy and Jing means “classic”). ...The Dao De Jing is a plea for action and not the motive to define one’s self through one’s actions. ... The maintenance of a “good”, “loving”, “loyal” self is, in a word, bullshit - a fiction designed to compensate for the inner pain of identification with inadequacy and worthlessness - the very issue that we discussed in Verse 37. ...For most of us they are merely public announcements designed to convince our suffering inner being that we aren’t as worthless and inadequate as it really believe ourselves to be. ...I used to work in a prison and one thing many of the Black prisoners knew about so many of the white “do-gooders” that would visit the prison from time to time was just how vested they were in their words. ...First, we can see that how Lao Tse uses Te in this sentence is very much like the way he uses Tao going all the way back to Verse 1. ...Seen as points on a continuum, we can see that there is a living evolution to the highest Te, where there is no Te at all. ...In this case, Lao Tse is attacking Confucian belief as conceptual by putting into place a “philosophy of life” that is divorced from the immediacy of living. ...We could spend ten thousand lifetimes debating what is good and what is bad and it would never come to an agreement that would take us one step away from concept. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

We Must "Fail" at Life to Succeed: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 37

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-17T10:29:37-05:00

How many of us were raised with the admonition that we needed to make something of ourselves? ... And not only did our parents think of us as worthless, but a part of our own selves bought into the ideology of self-worthlessness. ...Too much misbehavior and people would say, “he isn’t making anything of himself”, “he will never succeed”, “he’s just a failure”, “he’ll wind up in jail one day”, “he’s spoiled”, “he doesn’t know how to take directions”, “he needs more discipline at home”, “he obviously was raised in a disorderly environment”, “he’s going nowhere”, “he’s just a bad kid”, etc. etc. etc. ...The Dao De Jing presents the Way (Tao) and Verse 37 pulls us back again to that place where we never had to make something of ourselves, where we can be who we truly are. Let’s reach out into the feeling of this Verse and re-unite with our who we really are under the many layers of indoctrination and domestication. ...When the ego body, the body socialized to make something of itself, is seen to be a lie (i.e., “When the truth is found to be a lie” Jefferson Airplane), everything evolves just as it will. ...Of all the journeys we will ever take, this is the most difficult, for the destination is a place where everything we have believed about ourselves is discovered to be not true. ...It is this journey which is described in my book Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and for All. It is the manual to finding out who you are not - because until we uncover the false self in all of its guises, we will always sustain that which is false in our own selves. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Impermanence: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 36

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-16T11:09:26-05:00

Most commentators of Verse 36 of the Dao De Jing emphasize its return to the union of opposites, one of the primary themes of the Dao. ...Isn’t it true that when we are feeling the most down and depressed, we buy into the permanence of our situation? Not only can we realize nirvana through the realization of impermanence, but we can also release our dark and tight grip on our most painful moods and states of mind. ...The genes that make our arms and legs are identical to the genes that make the claws of lobsters and the legs of spiders. ...I have taken the liberty of removing the final couplet, since I don’t believe that it’s included in the most reliable versions of the Dao. If we pull at the end of a rubber band, the power of contraction will overcome the force we apply to extend it. ...When we realize that we wear ourselves ragged by straining after great accomplishments, physical, material, or spiritual, we fail to realize the law of impermanence. ...The power of the Wisdom of obscurity is that we stop the endless straining - the furious chasing after this and that. When that hungry motion ceases and the dust finally clears, a new self arises - a shining self that loves and embraces just this - knowing that even this passes. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The 3 Bodies

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-16T10:12:15-05:00

When you experience impatience, envy, or anger - isn’t it true that the “witness” condemns the Ego Body? ...Once we are clear on what really constitutes the full body, we can really experience what it means to be living in the light of awareness. ...As long as we identify with the judge/knower, we are not likely to experience the pure light of authentic awakening. Although I tend to rail against methods (maybe that’s my own judge), here is something that might work for you to see “through” the icy authority of the judge. Anytime a thought constellation emerges that affirms any sort of body - physical, egoistic, or judge - try inserting the honest truth that you don’t really know what a body is. ...And since so many teachers have said that we are not the body, any belief or experience that asserts that we are the body, must be a mistruth - a lie. So when you complain about your body, or experience anger, envy, irritation, compulsive pleasing that relates to an ego need, or that you judge yourself or others of any of this - just realize that you don’t have a clue what a body is and really mean it, for, in truth, you don’t. You should discover that what you have associated with your body, whether it be physical, egoistic, or judgmental, is really just energy and not “your own” at all. ...Once this is seen and sustained and once we realize that we have believed in every falsehood that has ever existed, we can live in the light of compassion and understanding. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Spiritual Warrior

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-15T14:44:24-05:00

The spiritual warrior is at home with everyone and everything Even if all people and places lead him only to himself. The dream of the individual person he once believed himself to be ...The spiritual warrior is not afraid of taking sides. He will not falter, for he fears not evil. ...but nurtures none, for his feelings come from the Tao ...The spiritual warrior loves the sound of the surf and the hawk ...But he does not stumble for they are his constant companions ...

Enduring Contentment: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 35

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-15T10:49:59-05:00

We shout our spiritual attainments to the world with loud pronouncements of how much we love everyone and love every aspect of the world. ...The deficiency thought is so powerful and so largely invisible that people will do anything to compensate for its wearing pain, including putting on the compulsive smile or taking on the persona of the person never riled - never upset. ...So we chase after it relentlessly - with the same aggressive passion that drives all the other compulsive drives that underlie the explosive nature of the industrial civilization of ceaseless striving for this and that. ...When thoughts like, “this isn’t it” or “I’m enjoying this” come up, refuse to attach to them. ...At this point the Star translation fails to maintain the theme of this Verse, so we will need to consult a different version. ...And if we are to understand this Verse in this light we will simply adopt the belief that the “things of this world” are insipid. ...It is not the world that is flavorless and bland but the Dao (Tao). ...Thoughts come and go, judgments (a type of thought) come and go, love and smiles come and go, anger and storms come and go, and even life comes and goes, but the Dao is forever. ... See that what you seek sees the external world, but is not of it. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

OK, I Get the Enlightenment Thing. Now How Should I Act?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-14T12:38:49-05:00

Any projection about the future must be of a psychological nature. This is seen and in that seeing it is understood as a belief culled from an old and needy narrative. Even fully realized people experience projection, because we are within a body and a mind. ...There can never be a valid concern about how to act, because the projected situation only exists within the psychological nature. ...In a way they do, but without the notion of doing “good”. When there is only this moment, no concept or belief can be shown to be real. ...Me is a projection - the same projection that feels compelled to ask the questions about the future. ...Enlightenment is always here .- it’s only the belief in its absence, a belief made possible through the psychological self, that blocks its realization, that keeps the false believed as true. Thus it is, exclusively, belief that keeps the structure of the psychological self in place. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Becoming the Vastness: Verse 34 of the Tao Te Ching Commentary

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-12T11:08:50-05:00

The total mass of this dark matter dwarfs that which can be measured by instruments that rely on light and radio waves. ... It is now believed that dark matter is involved in not only the birth of all matter and energy in the universe, but also its current motion and spin. ...Everything you see, feel, think, is an expression of this same dark matter that gave birth to the universe. ... Ironically, this cutting edge technology returns us back to that very person who, about 2600 years ago, inscribed this wonderful Verse 34 of the Dao De Jing. ...Scientists have also learned that only a very small part of an animal’s genome can be linked to the development of its body and mind. ... Yet geneticists have observed that this “dark matter” of DNA is that which directs all of the genes that are linked to body development. ...Realizing that this same unseen Dao lies in the core of our being and around our being, we become still. ... In full stillness, when we have ceased seeking anything, we are the vastness itself, yet have done absolutely nothing to evince that quality. See my earlier post ‘The Key to Awakening’ to get a feel for finding this stillness in your own life right now, right here. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Key to Awakening

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-12T07:33:18-05:00

So when thought encounters the words of awakening, it will seek a method, a way out. ...Notice that every single thought of self-improvement wants to take you from point A (here) to point B (there). Movement, the journey from A to B starts with the thought of the flawed and needy you and promises to take you to a much better thought of you at point B. ...It’s the thought that there is something wrong with me or my life or both and because there is something wrong I must have some method to get me out of this place. ...Were it not for that one single, solitary thought, you would not be driven to ceaselessly seek a way out. Selflessly allow that thought as well, but see through the belief that this thought is you. ...This is your world, but there is no active you in it. ...When the thought of you is seen to be false and ebbs away - this vast swirl of motion, of light, of energy, becomes your perennial friend. ...Now instead of seeking a “way”, a method, a process, we just let it be exactly as it is. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

What Am I? Philosophy for the Spiritually Advanced

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-11T16:54:33-05:00

From the perspective of non-duality I am actually that which sees the incidents of disorganization and the self-irritation that inevitably develops as a by-product of this trait. ...This illustration would better if I could show the “disorganization” experience within the seeing self, as well as the resulting self-irritation, but I could not do it with this software, but from the experience of non-duality this is the way it would, ideally, be shown. ...From the perspective of non-duality the seeing self is that which never changes and the perceived world consists of passing images seen by the true self. ...It cannot be knowing, because any knowing, without exception, is, itself, an object, something that can be seen and because it can be seen, it must be an object to something. ...In fact, from the perspective of non-duality, every perceived thought, feeling, emotion, and material object is a kind of condensation of the underlying nothingness. ... Nothingness condenses to form thoughts, sensations, emotions, and material objects but, in fact, no such object can exist because it has no enduring aspect. ...The disorganized person, the irritation, and the observing seeming “self” (or witness) are each just expressions of nothingness with no enduring reality of any kind. ...When it is seen that there is no material or psychological self of any enduring or valid kind, then we are free to love everything exactly as it is, even if it’s a tick sucking blood or a cancerous tumor destroying the life of this body. ...It is a dance of that which is perceived along with the ground of being (nothingness) that provides the space for everything to be exactly as it is. ...Because our culture and socialization so greatly values thought, (we live in an extremely aggressive world) we have evolved to give ourselves over to its domain all but entirely.

Self Knowledge: The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 33

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-11T12:36:14-05:00

As we progress through the 81 verses of the Dao we will continue to highlight how this magnificent works brings every element of this false identity to light. ...As long as we identity with attributes of personality, we will neither know ourselves or know others. ...When that belief is held to be true, our outer being will seek opportunities to show ourselves and others power through the use of force. ... Once our identity with the core King thought of powerlessness is fully seen through as a lie, then we are free of any need to show others and ourselves as powerful. ...Once this “King” thought is seen for what it is - a lie - no different from believing in the Tooth Fairy, we are free of its living legacy in our being. ... It may never disappear entirely, but its “act” has been uncovered and its power to control our lives (and the lives of others) is all but extinguished. Thus to know one’s self is enlightenment and once the self is known, we are able to know others. ... The ensuing personality continues with its own preferences, but its sense of identity is no longer a strictly external one. ... This is the ground of not only our own changing being, but the of the seen universe itself. ...When this belief is seen to possess no elements of truth of any kind, it is the death of the false self.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary: Know When to Stop

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-10T11:11:19-05:00

When we see the full-emptiness of every moment, we also see that it is the operation of the mind to create a story - actually many stories about me and my life within the full-emptiness of this moment. ... Yet when we just stop and explore this moment, we see that that narrative is really just an object that occurs to consciousness. ...When you see how your mind does just this, you will have taken a giant step toward your own awakening to the magic of this very moment. ...This stanza does not mean if a given king or lord could possess the Dao that that possession would create a perfect world. What is meant in this stanza is this: were a king or lord be able to align herself (himself) utterly with the Dao, then a perfect world would ensue. ...We know when to stop when we see that our names - our narrative has fully departed from the actual movement and validity of the now - the Dao itself. ... We are of the Dao and the belief in our woeful separation is the essence of “the Lie” as it is described in my work, Liberation from the Lie. ...This means that when you feel defeated by life and terrible about yourself, that this narrative and the evidence that your false self has marshaled to support it, are false. ... Even if this is the most accepted story you have about your life, even if it seems to be everything you know, it is false. It is, in the language of Verse 32, a universe of names and to the extent that this story has hardened, to that same extent, you have departed from the Dao.

You Are the Conduit of Life

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-10T07:37:34-05:00

Then there is the world of the senses, of which thought might be one. ... Our seeing of a tree is not the tree itself, it is only the seeing of the tree. So, perhaps there are only 2 levels of being and each refers only to itself. Then there is the energy of attention, that can focus on thought or the senses. ...If we disagree, we can inquire about what is happening in the world and between us. ...This world is available to each of us, but there is a price to pay. ... They are methods, and processes we use to filter life, to manage life, to make it comprehendible, to reduce its mystery, to create a self-pleasing identity, to make things clear that are inherently vague. ...As the thought “tree” is not a tree, the belief is not what it seeks to refer to. ...If I believe that people should be more loving, or my wife should understand me better, or that traffic should be moving faster, then I am inviting pain and separation from the truth into my life. ... If I believe that my kid should be doing better in school, then I can work with her on that problem.

The Real New World Arises: Are You Ready?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-08T13:00:22-05:00

Are you ready for the Age of Turbulence that rises now just beyond the visible horizon? ...My hope is this: I hope that people awaken from the nightmare of the endless need to achieve. I hope that people see first the wonderfulness with which we are born. I hope that people will be embarrassed by dreams of inequality, that I need to have more than you, that I am better than you, that I must serve you. A whole new generation of liberated human beings must arise from the wreckage of this age. These are the little babies who ask only one thing: to be loved for who they are and not as we would want and need them to be. ...We must reject as ugly that which separates, that which says I know better than you. There is only one thing to know and that is that the earth is sacred. ...From this single belief is born power hunger, rage, separation, hideous divisions, slavery, and the disgusting excesses of the society’s masters. ...We must learn to bow before the young instead of forcing their heads into the dirt of obedience and have them bow to their elders.

Are Blacks More Violent than Whites?: The Liberating Power of Facts Over Belief

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-08T10:48:59-05:00

By and large, it is an observed fact that black people do commit violent crime at rates of about 7 to 1 over whites. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies, have sought to show prejudice in the way law is administered in the US, but the differences they show fail to explain the enormity of this difference. ...Using the same data that I was presenting to my class, a sociological criminologist asked himself the same question, are black people more violent than white people. ...If black people are more violent and if violence were explained by race, then blacks should be more violent everywhere they live. ...He looked at rates of violent crime in these black areas that were most poor and black. ... He collected census tracts that were predominately middle-class, but had some black population, and were ethnically mixed and then looked at the rates of violent crime in those neighborhoods. ...These are not so easy to find, but they exist, because most poor whites, as we have seen, live in areas that are mostly middle class. ...The story goes so much further and it is one of the reasons I wrote my book Liberation from the Lie, because this topic is all about power; how the few amass it and most of us are forced to live in fear. ...I could have spoken from the position of a white supremacist using my beliefs and I could have used the FBI data to show these students that, indeed, blacks are more violent. ...They might use anecdotal evidence, they might flail about, they might get angry, they might even get violent, but, in the end, they would have to rely on a flimsy foundation of belief and it would be a battle between conflicting beliefs.

The Tao of Enlightenment

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-07T11:45:07-05:00

We’ve heard it a thousand times, enlightenment is not of or by the mind. ...Meaning, purpose, having an agenda, desire, knowledge, body, and the universe of objects and sense experiences are of the mind. ...Perhaps it is more precise to say that the well is us - for everything we sense as ourselves arises from within this well of light. ...Thus I can experience thoughts that arise from this light, but cannot experience or see thoughts that arise from other sources. ... Ultimately, we can only experience our own Tao (or this Tao - which is both personal and impersonal simultaneously). It concentrates here, but is connected to everything else through space and time. If we could reduce it only to this moment (a time that does not exist) it might appear either unlimited or totally limited depending on the point of view. But since no such limit exists, nothing else can be said about its existence or the reality or falseness of the perceived universe. ...The well is defined by the objects and sense experiences that are seen from within it. ...When everything is seen as connected within the well of light, everything is seen to be of this light.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 31: A War is a Funeral

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-05T09:55:08-05:00

Verse 31 of the Dao De Jing is so closely aligned with Verse 30 that it requires little to no further elaboration or clarification. It is the third verse of what I am calling the Force Group (verses 29-31). ... These are things that happen and are likely to continue to happen, but the “old Taoist” never celebrates them. They are, in all cases, the very last option used to settle a matter. The striking similarity of Verses 30 and 31 can possibly be attributed to the importance of their content. ...As translated by David Hinton notice how different the view of war and the technology of war as described in this Verse so powerfully contrasts with that propagated and celebrated in the United States and much of the world today. ...Recall that the Dao De Jing is, formally, a manual for taoist leadership. ...Verse 31 is the only verse in the Dao that uses the term “noble-minded” and it is for this reason that the authenticity of this Verse has been questioned by some scholars. ... But it has been found in very ancient versions of the Dao and is thus considered authentic to the original concept of the text. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 30: The Ravages of War

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-04T09:58:35-05:00

At a time when America is engaged in endless war against an elusive enemy, there are few verses in the Dao De Jing more important for our time than Verse 30 - what I have called “The Ravages of War.” Were we to refine our understanding the of the Dao De Jing into just single terms, some of the key words would be trust, tranquility, flowing, and allowing. ... This document was written primarily to instruct leaders in times of great turbulence and the author clearly acknowledges that problems inevitably arise in life where force becomes one of several options that can be used. ...The weapons, the methods, the emotions we use to force situations and to pressure people to do what we would like will turn against us. It is a powerful irony that what we do to be safe, to “do the right thing”, is exactly what must happen to allow for precisely what we don’t want in life. ...Force will rise up and challenge us and the question that we must respond to, often having little or no time to reflect, is, what are we to to address such forces? ...We are urged to use force as the very last resort and when it is used, its use must be as parsimonious as circumstances allow. ...They have lost the way and that losing of the way is rooted far back in the ancestral memory of the people, to a time when they came to believe in their own inadequacy. ... Once this inner crucifixion is seen and understood for what it is, a lie, only then are we truly free of the dark hand of the angry ego in our lives. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 29: The Spiritual Vessel

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-03T15:27:42-05:00

How tirelessly we work to create, somehow, the world we project as right, as well as good for what we assert are our own interests. From the point of view of the Dao, this is a vast and painful waste of energy. ...This first verse in this series deals with how the individual struggles to control his own life. ...The key to winning the battle (which really doesn’t even exist - for there is no battle) is simply to join the Dao, become the Dao. ...Even is we stumble about in life and “grasp” for this and that, then too we lose. Letting go of control also means to stop the endless grasping for this experience and that feeling. ...Verse 29 then plunges forward describing those who seek to control and those who grasp at life, to attain happiness and power. ...Disentangle yourself from all of the self-constructed identities, spiritual, powerful, social, or otherwise and welcome the Dao into your life. ... You can resist and hold onto what you can or you can join the dance with a big and loud YES! ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

Love or Hate: What Difference Do They Make?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-03T11:52:21-05:00

If I love something, what difference does it make? ...Is it possible to just stop at with and see the impotence of declaring the self as loving or hating what we are with? We are always with something and that “with-ness” can never end. ...Even if I say I love everything, we show the world how evolved we are. If I rejoice in my hating, we show the world our impressive dark passions. ...We could do it for the fun, but when identity comes then (expressed as needing to impress ourselves or others) it has turned into something else entirely. But when we stop at with, there is depth, there is connection, there is no line separating you from me. ...Ultimately, this is the source of love that is always there, but hidden behind the wall of the fear-based self. See through the parade of identities and that great well of endless light is revealed. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 28: Becoming the Channel for All Under Heaven

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-02T11:38:06-05:00

Reading the many verses of the Dao De Jing, it becomes increasingly clear that the deepest message of this remarkable document is one of abiding trust. ... But even that is of the Dao, for we likely need to live a life of distrust if we are ever to discover the deeper trust that is expressed as accord with all that is - and how it is. ...Using the translation of David Hinton, it is to nurture the feminine, it is to return to infancy, the time of not knowing, it is to cultivate the black (to be a ground for the light), and it is to be the uncarved wood, available to be anything. This is the language of creation, of boundless flexibility, of seeing everything just as it presents itself, and it is to flow with change, like the shadow of change itself. ...Thus regarding the inner quality of gender, we are asked to “know” the masculine - the ying of existence - objects, states, thoughts, feelings, but be the yin of being - that which is feminine - that creates, nurtures, accepts, provides a space for all to be as it is. ...The Dao is the dark vision, for it is only the contrast between dark and light that things can be seen and experienced. Unless we live as the dark vision, our ability to clearly see will be clouded by identification with belief and conditions that we have taken to be ourselves. ...We take from the field for a purposes that come and go and thus such actions are likened to “mere implements”. If we are to identify ourselves as beings organized around use and purpose, then we have cut ourselves off from the boundless field of the Dao. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

"IT" Doesn't Matter: Part 2 (of 3)/Goals and Suffering

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-02T10:18:22-05:00

We assert goals about what we want to happen for us in life. In the field of spiritual exploration, one of the most persistent goals is the elimination of personal suffering and the attainment of enlightenment. ...If our child is ill and we want her to get better, that is not a psychological goal. ... But the desire to get these painful thought patterns out of our head, to defeat anxiety, to get enlightened so that we don’t have to be weighed down by life anymore, these are all psychological goals. The very force that gives these painful states such control over the quality of our immediate experience is the goal to get rid of them. ...Anxiety, simply seen from the light of effortless being without the slightest trace of having a personal goal to destroy it, ceases to be a problem. ... When we use psychological force to arouse a projected outcome, we create the very suffering that we so desperately want to extinguish in our lives. ...We discover that the anxiety, the psychological suffering is not ours’ to control. It’s not “my anxiety”, “my psychological suffering”; it’s just something that is noticed. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 27: The Vital Secret

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-01T12:50:08-05:00

Verse 27 of the Dao De Jing focuses on actions that leave no trace - unseen - unnoticed - seamless. ...The theme of leaving no trace is linked to the philosophy of wu wei - no action, yet nothing is left undone. ... Looking out onto the world itself, the natural world, unaffected by the actions of human beings, there is no doer, yet nothing is left undone. For much of the Dao, this perfect, but ever-changing natural world is the model on which the Dao De Jing is constructed. ...Nothing is truly tied but everything is changed when it is cut into its parts (untying the knot), for the sum of an object will always transcend its division into its parts. ...The second stanza seems to contradict the first, for in this stanza a distinction is made, between the “good” person and the “bad” person. ...The “good person”, through her understanding of the Dao is well positioned to be the teacher of the person who is open to hearing about the Dao. ... The teacher learns from the “bad person”, who is thus the resource for the good, and the “good person” becomes the essential resource for the “bad person”. ...Once we truly see how the good learns from the bad and the bad learns from the good and this is truly a single illuminating cycling energy, we are liberated from attaching ourselves to any side of the false polarity. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

"IT" Doesn't Matter

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-02-01T10:15:43-05:00

So many people involved in the spiritual ‘journey’ struggle mightily over decades to “get” the message of Zen or Ramana or the Buddha. ...The light that sees the horrible thoughts, the light that sees the struggle to pull one’s self out of bed, the light that sees the confusion over the words of Zen or Ramana or the Buddha, is always the same. ...There is only one difference between the awakened experience and the struggling self; in the latter case, there is a psychological identification with just one class of thought and that is thoughts about a self. ...The awakened experience sees this class of thought as just another object essentially no different from the chair I’m sitting on. ...So, everything you might think about Zen, about how hard it is to “get” and then relentlessly interrogate yourself why you can’t “get” enlightened - all of that is just a bunch of self-referential thought based on only one erroneous belief. So anytime you have these thoughts, that life is meaningless or that life is meaningful or that you are crap or that he is crap (or that I am crap), just see it as noise - an object, a thing. ...So all of this effort over changing or transforming your thoughts and feelings is a total waste of time. ...I suspect that some of us, the “IT” doesn’t matter teaching might be exactly what the “doctor” ordered ... but that’s just a thought. This means that the thought "I am enlightened" is also just another erroneous thought - no different from the thought - the Buddha or Ramana or Osho or my girlfriend is enlightened ... just thought ... seen by the same light - your authentic self. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 26: True to the Authentic Self

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-31T11:31:41-05:00

It is who we are prior to our primal invalidation (see Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and for All). ...Wolfgang Kopp, in his brilliant book (out of circulation unfortunately), Zen Beyond All Words, instructs us to be in the world but not of it - to hold fast to the inner being of presence and untarnished wisdom. ...But don’t mistake my words to mean that you should refrain from undertaking any further activities, that it’s better to withdraw and live a solitary life far away from the hustle and bustle of the world. ... You must learn how to handle things possess things, without letting things possess you; you must act, but be inwardly free of your action. ...It can be likened to an ocean where the universe of highs and lows, desires and fears, hot and cold, health and sickness, ease and hardship are the waves that break at the surface, but the depths are unaffected by anything, no matter how powerful the surface may appear to the conditioned mind. ...Life may call on us to be bold, strong, and vigorous ... but within measure and it is this measure that is spoken of in the final line. ...We witness the tempest of life without leaving our authentic domain, but we remain free to express our vigorous energy in this life without it possessing us. ... Whitman was someone deeply connected to his root, but wasn’t afraid to express his self in this life with earthy vigor and muscular strength. We are not called on to emulate Lao Tzu or Walt Whitman, but to find our own strength in this world - this life. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 25: Tao Follows Its Own Nature

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-30T13:53:48-05:00

Verse 25 throws us back to the dark world of the Dao itself. Three core themes are presented in this Verse and they are no longer unique to the Dao De Jing. They have been spoken of earlier in this text, but what makes Verse 25 unique is how these themes are combined to produce a singular vision. ...The first stanza establishes the Dao as something whose form we can never know, yet it pervades everything we can see, touch, hear, feel, taste, and sense. ...It throws itself everywhere, to the limits of the universe and, simultaneously, returns to its origin. This describes an arc so great that no human could possibly conceive of the vastness of its greatness. ...Its greatness pervades everything that possesses form, as it is expressed in the next stanza. ...We, as humans, are counseled to follow the earth, for it is the earth that all depends. ... We can trust that Earth will follow Heaven and Heaven will follow the Dao. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 24: Useless Baggage

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-29T10:16:02-05:00

But to be more precise, what the Dao is saying here is that we stay strong and we endure when we stick close to what is most natural to our being. ...He was referring to our tendency to just treat the obvious symptoms of disease rather than the whole person and the full context of their life. ...This stanza encourages us to look deeply at our own lives and discover where we are standing on tiptoes. ... Anytime we are in a rush, we can be grateful for it presenting us with the opportunity see explore what is really going on. ...Enlightenment is simply the ending of that search with the understanding that the self stands resplendent neither needing or asking for anyone to seek it out. ...The lines on self-promotion and esteem point to the fact that they, in the long run, if not the short, achieve exactly the opposite of what they intend to gain. ...Try this small thought experiment: ask yourself, would you be searching for a different “you” if you were content with your primal being? ... You might now ask yourself, “what is it about who I believe myself to be that I find so contemptible - so unacceptable?” ... You will, in time, see that your self-rejection mirrors the very primal rejection (that probably originated with your parents) that gave birth to this Wound. ...v=250&username=xa-4b642dc3280911b9">

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 23: Trusting Tao

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-28T11:23:23-05:00

They are here, but for only a moment and then time washes life clean with new happenings. ...The author of this stanza plainly says, if heaven and earth can’t do this, how could a mere human being? ... Thus if we are to flow with the Dao as Dao, we must cling to nothing and just ride the wind of ceaseless change. The third section of this Verse talks about how we are to ride the waves of Dao. ...Notice how in the first half of the stanza references to Way, gain, and loss emphasize becoming those qualities (and, of course, Dao contains both gain and loss) and how the second half of the stanza emphasizes how Way, gain, and loss are in themselves joyful. ... You will know it when it happens in your life - and it will happen when the energy invested in separation ends and we seamlessly merge into the Dao itself. The coda of this Verse brings us back to the Dao De Jing as a manual for leaders. ...We allow the Dao to flourish in our own lives and in the lives of the people when we absorb the profound words of this remarkable Verse. ... It must be sincere - otherwise it is just false and as something false, it is just the ego wearing the mask of the sage. In this moment can you become a master of the Dao.

Liberation from the Lie: Latest Review at Amazon.com

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-28T08:35:39-05:00

The Self-Help Book that is Written is not the True Self-Help Book... until Now!, January 27, 2010 ...By far, one of the better, if not the best, "help" books I've read (believe me, there have been many). The exercises put forth by Mr. Gross in "Liberation from the Lie" are very practical. My opinion, his work is much more focused and accessible than what Tolle attempts to impart in the "Power of Now" (not to discount Tolle's stellar work). Having worked in the psychotherapy field for many years, I've been very leery of the so-called "cognitive revolution" and found the author's Taoist influence very refreshing (I've discovered the notion of "Wu-wei" to be extremely helpful in my understanding of human problems and how I approach them). But, the author moves beyond Taoism and succesfully integrates personal experiences and ideas from a variety of disciplines into his tome. The author's conception of fear-selves reminds me of the false-selves articulated by R.D. ... Gross moves beyond Laingian phenomenology and into pragmatism... a way out of the proverbial rut! Read this book and you'll see how many of the ideas put forth are relevant to the human condition and, more importantly, the path to liberation.

Who Am I?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-28T07:52:10-05:00

Were we to listen only to the voice of those who speak as realized nondualists, we are just this pure awareness, shorn of all thought and feeling. ...What makes us unique is our very thoughts and feelings, for you think and feel is experienced only by your body/mind. ...Until we see the false as the false (as Krishnamurti was fond of saying), we can only be a slave to that which is unseen. ...The purpose of pure awareness is to see every dimension of our own false-selves and in that seeing to begin the process of our own liberation. My own book Liberation from the Lie is a detail manual in finding every hiding place of our Fear-based selves. ...We come to believe that by stepping out of this place of mutual agreement that we will returned to the unsafe world of ourselves! ...Once free of all false belief, it becomes time to really break out of our shell molded by fear and the flight from pain. ...It is to move past the silent domain of pure awareness into the creative realm of life; the realm of your voice If awareness shows us nothing else, it shows us that life is nothing but creative. ...I know that there will be many of you who have read Ramana and have made him into a kind of god and thus aspire to live in the same silence he evinced in his life. ... If you believe that the purpose of life is silence and non-action based on the fear of action, then these words are probably not for you.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 22: Returning

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-27T12:05:03-05:00

Even in the harshest climates on Earth – the Arctic, rainforests and deserts, they had to trust nature to take care of them. ...Now that nature could no longer be trusted to provide for human needs, a new class of professional priests arose to placate the gods that control nature. This is the era when religion arose – as well as the gods, for it was the gods that needed to be appeased (sometimes with human blood) to bring the rain and the sun to nurture the farms that sustained life. ...Also Ironically, it was the hunter/gather that lived in the shadow of starvation and death each day that lived in the flow of security, gratefulness, balance, and contentment – while it was in the place of plenty where human beings live with persistent insecurity and anxiety. The Dao De Jing is a return – a return to that time of trust with the world. ...Return is one of the core themes of the Dao De Jing and it is key to understanding Verse 22. ...The daoist leader allows everything to be as it is in its passage of return, but with one decisive proviso, the people themselves must also have returned to a place where the identification with lack, the key driving quality of civilization, is a thing of the past. ...Where the mind can only fixate on this and that, the Dao embraces change and the whole cycle of birth, death, and re-birth. ...One final note – in this age of high technology, no one should read this post as a call to emulate a projected hunter-gatherer. On the other hand, we are capable of returning to a world of implicit trust in THIS, that the world can sustain itself without interference from human cunning wedded with lack.

My Understanding of Awakening

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-26T11:13:14-05:00

How we respond to the “bomb” varies from people who fear its power to those who are pleased that has seemed to have brought to an end the era of great wars. ...Thus how the mind perceives the world is a direct consequence to both the powers and weaknesses of the body and the cultural conditioning in which it was raised. ...The world is as real as our bodies, but as long as we experience the world as a vast collection of separate entities, including our own fragile self, we will be addicted to fear and illusion. ... If we begin with the understanding that everything in the universe is connected and that every seemingly individual thing is an expression of the whole, as well of itself, then we are grounded in the reality of the world. But if we promote individuality as the fundamental truth of things, then we are grounded in the illusion created by the mind and we are not the mind. ...The experience of the whole as one can be experienced once we have seen through the illusion of the mind and its many layers of conditioning (biological and cultural). ...As long as we are in a human body, qualities and elements of the body mind will continue to be seen as real within the greater consciousness. ...When everything is see as an aspect of the whole and the whole as that aspect, then what we have previously taken to be our personal selves now presents itself as just another part of the whole and the whole as that part. ...Returning to the intrinsic reality of the world, were my dog to be limited to my mind experience of her, then transcendence of the mind state should not be bothered in the slightest were she to get hit by a car and then suffer and die. ...Thus when I see birds flying in the sky or chirping merrily on a tree branch, my heart soars with the love for I feel for them, for we are one.

How Not to Get Enlightened

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-25T14:05:41-05:00

It’s easy to feel the silence that underlies everything. But then a little voice arises saying excitedly “that’s it.” And the moment we hear that voice as our own, we’re back on the treadmill. We believe we got to be somebody and we grasp onto the first voice that seems to pop up from our own head. Wisdom (awakening) is seeing that voice has just another manifestation of conditioning - nothing less and nothing more. Or here is another way of looking at it - that voice is no more you than that tree over there or, conversely, they are both you in different guises. Either path leads to full and total awakening.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 21: We Are the Only Dao

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-25T11:08:38-05:00

Verse 21 of the Dao De Jing takes us back to the murky and esoteric world of Verse One. This is the unseen landscape of the Dao or, to put it a little more precisely, it is the landscape itself, but one where the ground, the source is vague, obscure and unseen. This Verse also takes us back to De (or Te), which we have defined as virtue - selfless action - alive to this very moment - rooted in the Dao - where the world is seen as the Self. Where a flower is a visible manifestation of the unseen and underlying Dao, where the flower is unique and individual, the Dao is unseen and pervasive. In much the same way, the actions our bodies take in the world are of the realm of De with the essential proviso that our personal, striving, incomplete self has been seen to be false thus allowing the self to merge into the Dao. ...The ten thousand things can be seen as separate and thus have the power to arouse desire or the ten thousand things can be seen as one, leaving no place for desire. These are alternating conditions, but once a person becomes rooted in the Dao, the fantasy of the sexy lure of the individual object fades from consciousness and the trance of separation is broken. ...These fragmentary outbursts of word sounds express the esoteric dichotomy of where the seen is always united to the unseen (the seen is the bowl - its utility is its space). ...Note how Dao holds all of the universe - everything is subject to This and This This is Your most profound identity! ...That which sees This, but can find absolutely no identity with the flow of objective experiences, whether they be forms, feelings, or thoughts is our enduring, unseen, and ungraspable identity.

Should We Banish Knowledge and Learning?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-24T13:35:18-05:00

We’ve seen how the Dao De Jing argues for their banishment of both knowledge and learning. We’ve also seen that this position is oppositional to that espoused by the confucians at the time when the Dao De Jing was written. ...The answer is no, because the knowledge identified in the text as deserving of banishment is that which is designed to stop thinking; or to tell us how and what to think. To the contrary, the whole spirit of the Dao De Jing is one of throwing one’s self into the flow of this life. ... We understand this world through seeing and seeing with open eyes, unsullied by the words of others. ...We cannot see into the past, but we can study the past with the same open mind that has the same qualities of openness and freshness that we use to see the sun rise each morning. ... We can explore the issues of crime and poverty using that self-same vision that enlightens all that it touches. We can create our own works of inner vision, whether it be to write a novel or play a part on stage. ...Just like we cannot fully understand the Dao De Jing without understanding the cultural and historical context in the time that it was written, we also cannot understand our world without understanding our own history, as well as the evolution and ecology of our natural world. ... We are free to dig deep, question everything that doesn’t sound quite right to our open hearts, and do the work of understanding in this present moment.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 20: Melancholy Drifter

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-24T12:17:41-05:00

Verse 20 of the Dao De Jing stands out from all of the other verses of this 81 Verse utterance. ...This very confucian culture that tells people how to think, when to say “yes” and when to say “no”, tells them what is good and evil, and tells them what to fear, it is this kind of society that the Dao De Jing so vigorously rejects. ...How different is this from our contemporary age, where our churches and mosques and temples tell us how to think. And, if we have spurned the realm of organized religion, we mindlessly absorb the babble of the countless voices that come to us through advertising and demagoguery that calls itself news - fair and balanced. ... We struggle for this and that only to get bored, because we are told to get bored, because life is really about perpetual wanting. ...This is the transitional stanza were we are taken from the attack on affected confucian China to the speaker of the mysterious words of the Dao itself. ...This repetition is to make perfectly clear that this person of Dao has fully seen through the falseness of well-off confucian society. ...He is confused because he refuses to pretend that he knows the mind of the universal Dao. ...Perhaps his heart aches heavily because he knows that to follow the Dao also means that he must take the road less traveled. ... But because we don’t lower our anchor anywhere, we live in a world where all departs and enters all at the same time.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 19: Banish Learning

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-23T10:16:58-05:00

The Dao De Jing is remarkably appropriate for these times of economic decline and the impending collapse of the world of cheap energy (carbon-based energy). ...Verse 19 continues the themes of Verses 17 and 18 where learning and accomplishment based on conditions designed to impress others are decried as not the way of the Dao. ... It is a vigorous attack on a complex and cosmopolitan world esteemed by the confucians of ancient China. ... Were Lao Tsu return to this world, I doubt he would find much of interest on a university campus or wandering the streets of Paris or New York. ...In the translation of Verse 19 we will return to my favorite translator (and hopefully Lao Tsu would approve of their work); Addiss and Lombardo. ...When the text refers to learning and knowledge, the focus is on how the confucian philosophers of ancient China used and understood these terms. ...When the hollow falseness of these ego drives are clearly seen, people will naturally return to duty (what needs to get done) and compassion, for both duty and compassion are already constituent qualities of the Dao. ...We are asked to return to the perfect and direct simplicity of nature untarnished by the trivial affectations of falsely cultivated human beings. ... Where the confucian world raised human culture above the raw vigor of nature untrammeled by human intervention, daoist philosophy places primal nature above that of all human cultural achievement and affectation. The self that “dwindles” in taoist philosophy is, precisely, the cultivated and affected self that sees its smallness in the context of vast nature that holds everything in its loving and trustworthy embrace.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 18: The False Life

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-22T09:55:01-05:00

Its focus is also one of leadership and just like 17, Verse 18 presents an array of social conditions that must arise when the “Great Tao” is rejected. In my own view, the first two lines are the most important to understand if we are to get to the key of this Verse. ...I will put on the mask of learning and knowledge so that people will admire my brilliance, for inwardly I feel that I am insufficient. I will honor my father and mother because I know that will impress others and make me appear to be the good daughter and son in the eyes of others and thus lift me from my own inner-self-contempt. ...But they must arise anytime we organize our lives and our personalities around a need to refute an inner pain that relates to a belief in our inadequacy, insufficiency, worthlessness, or unlovability. ...We do this to avoid the pain and suffering that we know will ensue if we fall back into the dreadful underlying belief that fuels the whole fake process. ...The Dao De Jing shows us the way out (as does my own book Liberation from the Lie and Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of the Now and A New Earth - among others). Our liberation is just seeing the whole dialectic, the whole process and in seeing it, knowing that it is our not our true and enduring nature. We need to see this dialectic as a rejection of the Great Dao by falsely separating ourselves from the immediate and direct flow of experience; our true, but ungraspable, nature. Once seen, there is really no where to go, for the energy of self-improvement is just a seemingly elevated path back to the false dialectic.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 17: Trust

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-21T14:23:35-05:00

As has been previously said in this commentary, most scholars assert that the Dao De Jing was compiled as a leadership manual, but with the knowledge that it also represents a pathway to the fully awakened life. ...In this translation, the four types are described as a continuous trend from that aligned with the Dao to that which is despised. ...But it is also important to note that as the leader migrates away from the Dao (as her separate self becomes apparent) she moves from being praiseworthy, to being feared, and finally being despised. ...Because the Dao can only be experienced directly as the very “isness” of dynamic existence, it can be trust fully. ... Fundamental trust is full embodiment with the Dao, with the perfect and vivid truth of this moment. ... Living as the Dao, we live is in alignment with what is happening and with our capacity as a human being. ...For it is with words that we can contort or reject the truth so that it best supports our agenda -serving beliefs. This is why direct experience is best, but in its absence, trusting others who have proven their impartiality, their freedom from any self-serving belief is the best we can do to navigate this world. ...He stands apart in his ultimate need to be seen separate and better (he may be praiseworthy, but he is not fully aligned with the Dao). The leader who embodies the Dao need never be modest, for he knows that he has accomplished nothing.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 16: Stillness

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-21T08:50:45-05:00

Throughout the Dao De Jing we see that the Dao is the whole and that this wholeness is reflected in every individual manifestation, no matter how seemingly small or brief it may be. ...This is a complex question and, in my own view, it required a book to answer (Liberation from the Lie), but the very ‘short’ answer is that we do not access the wholeness of existence and the reason why we don’t access this full dimension of living is that we maintain one decisive belief. ...Notice how everything is your perceived life, what you directly experience, comes briefly into being and then returns to the nothingness that is its enduring place of rest. ...When the mind is open to the ever-present flow and immediacy of the Dao and the shackles of the separate “I” fall away in the light of this truth, everything is seen as our own body. ... When we come to realize that we are this wholeness, this Dao, there is, never again, the unease, the danger projected by the separate “I”. ...One, when the we see and understand ourselves as this very Dao, we care about everything in our world. ...But these terms also refer to an understanding of the crisis of separation we all experience, for if we didn’t experience it, works such as the Dao De Jing would never have needed to have been written. Once realization happens we have our own personal experience of struggle and seeking with which we can use as a resource to understand the existential suffering of others. We understand how they will do anything to achieve the peace and contentment that we experience in this very instant. ...Once we see this struggling, separate self, as a thought-based happening within a vast ocean of happenings, it begins to naturally fall away.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 15: Wanting Nothing Else

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-20T10:24:36-05:00

Verse 15 of the Dao De Jing is one of the few verses in this work that describe the nature of the person awakened in the Dao. The author of this Verse refers to these people being of times that are very ancient. ...If the author of this Verse were to use living people, she/he would bring the description a little too close to this immediate life. ...Life calls on us to act and not just now and then, but right now. Acting, moving, breathing, feeling, thinking, tasting, touching, seeing, hearing - all of this is life and life is so much more than the sum of its parts. That is why the author of this Verse prefers to just describe what cannot be known. ...We hunger for the truth and look here and there instead of simply opening our eyes now without the slightest desire for completion or fullness. ...Feel what it would be like not to desire any fullness or completion. ... Act in the moment and sustain that being that does not seek any sense of completion or fullness. ...Once you are free of the search and live in this very here and now unfull and incomplete, then a whole new universe radiates everywhere and you are THAT.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 14: Untouchable Tao

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-19T11:28:11-05:00

The essential insight of this Verse is that the mind that seeks, the mind that searches with the purpose of grasping the Dao, that search and that seeking must end in failure. Understanding the Dao is not a matter of the mind or of thought, but of the subtle heart that senses the flow of energy in this very moment. ...Sure there are brief interludes of peace and contentment and even in these moments the mind tries to figure out how it can hold onto them. ...If we must really know the truth, we must come to the realization that this is the life of a psychological slave. ... We hold on for dear life to a life raft designed to keep us sunk in the realm of made-up reality and second-hand life. ...While we can never see or hear the Dao, we can sense its vivid truth in the energetic quality of the living moment. ...The instant we give up the searching and seeking and drop our desperately hopeful projection onto our own brain, in that very moment we are free. If you’re not experiencing this now, then you are being blocked by your psychological identification with the brain - the thinking mind. You and your life are not and never will be a thought. ...Thoughts arise naturally in the flow of the Dao, but they are not who you are or anything else in the universe.

Why I Hate Religion

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-19T09:54:45-05:00

I really have to feel bad for these poor defenseless Muslims who must read the Daily Papers searching for something or anything that will hurt their feelings and compel them to attack with threat of death those people who hurt their feelings. ... Actually, it’s harder being a reasonable human being, just enjoying life, knowing that such intolerant zealots grow more numerous as we cower in their medieval shadow. ...And even when I’m able to find some scraps of ‘potential’ evidence for some religious belief, I must be brave enough to be willing to hold this evidence to the most rigorous scrutiny. ...To grow, to evolve, to be a human being in the most integral sense of the word, our purpose in this life is to be true to life. ...But, at the very least there is one thing we can say about god and that is this: there is no evidence in support of its reality. ... If we were brutally honest with ourselves, we would need to concede that anytime we invest something with such awesome power over our own lives, this must come from a place where we must fail to trust our own experience. ... It is obvious that we are so pathetic and so stupid, that we need a concept, for which there is not the slightest bit of evidence for, for which the most brutal wars have been fought over, and for which we absorb an identity that is, clearly, not our own. ...And then real ugliness, like the poor un-life of Kurt Westergaard, becomes a “normative” product of beliefs that are so smugly self-approving that they compel, otherwise decent people, to do indecent things; like murder people for the crime of free expression. ...But of the truths of your and my life, this is really more of a personal matter, but, for me, the best rule is just one of simple openness of the heart and the mind. ...That when a group of orthodox religious zealots get together and concentrate their hate because someone brought to light the cruel, narrow-minded, and ultimately ridiculous qualities of some of their beliefs, that they cannot tolerate such free expression and must condemn that person to death.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 13: Honor and Disgrace

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-16T09:31:31-05:00

If our commentary on the Dao De Jing used only Verse 13, it would be enough, for this Verse possesses words of the greatest majesty. ...If my blog were dedicated to the easy joys of this life, I suspect I would have received more favor and honors in my own life. ...This life of seeking is just the positive-seeming manifestation of fear and self-contempt that is alive and well in each our all too human psyches. ...So even when we achieve favor, we are afraid to lose it because once we lose it, we return to our normal status as a ... loser. ...The self, Verse 13 refers to is, of course, our psychological being, that self that identifies with lack - insufficiency - inadequacy - and, of course, being unworthy of love. ...A life of depth, a life of joy is there for all of us when we realize, through direct experience, that this self of pain is just a thought. ... If you would like to explore this further and see how to unearth what is false to the clear light of direct seeing, then I urge you to take a look at my book, Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and for All. ... But to get off the merry-go-round of favor and honor makes the journey not only worth it, but essential if we are ever to live a life with the depth, love, and spontaneous joy that each one of us deserves. For when we see through the veil of the false self, we discover that our authentic identity is a jewel on the vast web of connection, which is our world. ... This is love expressed in the intimacy of our connections with all - with the air, the water, the plants, the animals, and, most of all the spirit that animates it all; the sacred and profane; the Dao that fills everything with its life, its vigor, its birth and its death.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 12: Food

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-15T10:29:03-05:00

Power-hungry war lords forcefully rounded up the young men to fight their battles for wealth and domination. ... This was a world that these authors strongly rejected and it is the theme of simplicity that dominates Verse 12. Again I return to the Addiss and Lombardo translation, because I think it is the clearest and because based on these readings it seems to conform to the original Chinese the best. ...When we seek to emulate the lives of the powerful and wealthy we are compelled to reject the life of tranquil simplicity. When we choose the life of the senses, we can only reject the simple essence of this seemingly unadorned moment. ... When we are aligned to our natural body, which in the example of this verse is our belly and the hunger that naturally arises in life, we are attuned to the very motion of the Dao itself as it expresses itself through our bodies. ... They are brief appearances of the Dao (as being), but they are fundamentally unstable and unsustainable. Because they must fail to endure, they are truly vapid arisings, as opposed to that which is deep and enduring; such as Heaven and Earth. ...We never need to reject this moment - this body - this life - for the excesses made possible by the unfortunate inequalities of human society. There is a majesty to this moment that no money can purchase, whether it be feeling the caress of the wind on our skin, the smiling eyes of our dog as she looks lovingly into our eyes, or even simple lunch of steamed dumplings.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 11: Being and Non-Being

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-14T11:47:02-05:00

In such schools, perceived objects are seen as unreal, as merely representatives of thought or short-lived images arising within the unity of consciousness. ...The mind is an innately psychological entity that can know only being in terms of how it “feels” about the perceived object. ...While the mind simply cannot contort its way around this truth, this is not a problem in the slightest for the ground of being that is always there but is unacknowledged by the mind. From from the perspective of the ground of being (the Dao) all such identities are seen as mind constructs that are intrinsically false and unreal. ...Noting the second stanza we can see that without emptiness, a pot cannot simply cannot exist (non-being). ...Also notice now how the mind itself is, itself, being that would not exist were it not for the space in which its does its many functions. ...Ahhhhhh, the burbling brook, that soaring heart, that child’s smile, that violin sonata of Bach, my memory of my late father - all the passing life of being on the screen of nonbeing. When we attach ourselves to the thought of nonbeing we risk negating the world of objects and when we attach ourselves to the world of being we make ourselves vulnerable to the constant pain of loss, for we tend to cling to what we know, what already is. ... We can love all of being (or not love - if the resistance works for you) from the perspective of nonbeing. ...When this happens we engage in the union of being and nonbeing and reap the joy that is always there.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse 10: Meditation

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-13T10:55:19-05:00

This verse is divided into two sections (we recall that the original Dao De Jing was not divided into chapters or verses - this is a relatively modern approach to providing structure to this document). ...The first stanza speaks of mending the idea of separation, held by the ego, with which we divide the world as “us” and “not us”. When the veil of separation is lifted between the self that we label as “personal” with the universe, that we label as “impersonal”, then and only then do we embrace the One without separation. ...It is a gentle rocking motion - in and out - it is the very current of life that connects us with everything in the universe, for the life breath comes from the universe, enters our physical body, and then it releases itself back to the universe. ...The whole of the Verse implies that the true Sage King (Queen) is one rooted in meditation, but now the author takes this being rooted in mediation back into the bright light of the living world. The ‘advice’ implied by the next series of questions cannot be fully realized until one is rooted in that which embraces the all as One. ...For when we lead this life liberated from the clinging of the needy self, all the world, the four directions, are brightened by our innocence and spontaneity. ...If we are to be the conduit of this NOW, just as it is, if we are to allow the energy of the Dao to flow without unnecessary blocks, then we must act without this psychologically-based knowledge. ...This word has proved to be a bit of a challenge to translators and many, such as Addiss and Lombardo, leave it in its Chinese form. ... Personally, I think it’s best to just leave it as Te with the knowledge that it possesses each and all of these qualities.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse Nine: The Way of Heaven

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-12T15:48:44-05:00

Verse Nine is a group of direct aphorisms, but their simplicity can be elusive, for if we take this Verse to heart, we can't help but be transformed but its profundity.  ...We fill and we fill and this is how we live the bulk of our lives. ... Can we discover that this now, just as it is, is just right. ...We can seek for the love of seeking and we can seek out of the compulsive need to seek. ...We know it's right because it can be maintained without the obsessive need to always strive to make it better. ... Knowing and living the middle way is the place where the restless mind can find the tranquility of which it can only dream. ...Anytime we hoard what is deemed valuable by others, we will make our world a dangerous and threatening place. Again what we strive to acquire is exactly the process from which discord and fear must arise. ...Each of these approaches to living, based on needs that we imagine, are ways we undermine the Dao - the gentle flow of space and time that is always open to us becomes visible as we just see how our drive to accumulate, to add on, to raise ourselves, does exactly the opposite of what we truly pine for. ...Knowing this and living this fundamental truth is the Way of Ways; the way of heaven itself.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse Eight: Living as Water

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-12T10:54:26-05:00

We can learn how to become the Dao itself when our own behavior and mind are modeled after that of the Sage. ...The first line urges the reader to be like water, to be a source of nourishment for all of life, that gives of itself freely, without any preference. ...If we are to absorb these teachings in a way that is truly transformative, we must be willing to part from convention, to take the road less well traveled, to strike out to a place where the mass of people have already expressed their negative judgment. ...Water, in and of itself, is not the Dao itself, but it is close. ...This line is making reference to something a Chinese reader is more likely to understand, since it probably is a reference to the ancient philosophy of feng shui. The author assumes that the reader already knows what a "good place" is, but the reference is vague without this knowledge. ... A quote I found at the wikipedia reference defines it as that which endures, for to be buffeted by winds, shatters Qi, the elemental power of the universe. ...The last line of the teaching, "Work when it's time." is the first reference in the Dao of time, an element of life that is repeated later. ... We also recall that the Dao De Jing is also a manual for leadership and this teaching is directed to the would-be leader, who must make decisions. ...A good leader affirms the primacy of accord, of not going against the flow, of seeing the larger movement of energy and action and knowing that wisdom is that which blends the whole into the one.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse Seven: Selflessness

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-11T09:53:42-05:00

The question becomes what quality do they possess that allows them to endure. That quality is that they are not self-promoting. ...The sage does not and by not existing for himself, he is always in front. He is not of the world of striving and self-purpose and self-meaning, thus he stays outside. Having no interest in himself, he is always within, for it is the self-interested, the self-promoting that fails to plumb that which is within. What would it be like to see this truth as plain as day? What would it be like to live just one day without the slightest element of self-interest? We will discover that the underlying message of this Verse is that of Wu Wei, which is concisely defined as "do nothing". ... Wu Wei is the living truth of everything gets done, but there is no one doing it. ... We are not struggling to become one with what is, we are not running after that or fleeing this.

Goldman-Sachs and the American Way of life

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-10T16:48:48-05:00

This morning I was reading an article in the NY Times about the huge bonuses being given out by Goldman-Sachs and the J. ...At a time when the average American worker is struggling to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for her/his family, these Wall Street fats were making out like bandits. ...We grow up with belief that we are living in a dog eat dog world, of few winners and many losers, where cooperation is for sissies and thinking in terms of community and equality, is, for all intents and purposes, being a communist. ... Let's not forget that this is the country that was built on the backs of slaves and on land stolen from its lawful and original inhabitants. When the the wuss Canadians were distributing small pox vaccines to their native people, we were giving out blankets infected with small pox as gifts to the unknowing obstacles to the march of American progress. ...Let's just get real and celebrate the successes of Goldman-Sachs from our cold, empty kitchens and hope that we, one day, will be able to manipulate the winds of political largess more in our own direction. ...We are living in a time when there is never enough, when the desire for ever more power, excitement, and money fills our world, then this is the time that Hungry Ghosts rule. The Wall Street Masters, the Super High Tech armies of the corporation fulfill the craving need for control - control of oil, of water, of people's minds, these are the Hungry Ghosts of our time. ...The Hungry Ghosts demand our faith and respect and if we fail to show them our obedience, our subservience, then their dark side will arise from its shadowy realm and their great arsenal of punishment will be shown to the resistors. ...By just turning our backs and refusing to participate in their fixed game, then and only then, will we start the revolution.

The Tao Te Ching Commentary Verse Six: The Valley Spirit

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-09T09:43:16-05:00

Many verses of the Dao De Jing return to describe the Dao itself. Verse Six focuses on that quality of the Dao that is eternal. Because the Dao is the one and only creative spirit of the universe, it is described as female. Addiss and Lombardo translate this Verse as: ...It is called the Mysterious Female. ...Is called the root of Heaven and Earth. ...The two qualities emphasized here are the Dao as the root of both Heaven and Earth and its eternal, inexhaustible nature. As you read these commentaries on the Dao itself (thus far Verses One, Four, Five, and Six) begin to see these qualities as those of your own authentic self. Living the the Dao is not the struggle to become it, but to be it. These Verses are direct pointers to that being.

Tao Te Ching Verse Five: Heaven and Earth are Not Kind

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-07T11:34:49-05:00

When it is said that Heaven and Earth are not kind - the ten thousand things are straw dogs to them, what is meant is that things appear, exist and live, and then decline and die. ...When the Dao is realized, we fall out of the trance of the perfect, unchanging self and embrace the innate nature of change that fills the universe. When a sage treats a person as a straw dog, he falls out of attachment with the perfect and static image of that person and realizes the fleeting nature of existence. When we define our world as a collection of static objects and beliefs - "my loving husband", "the planet is dying", "work sucks", "television is for morons", "life is perfect" - we are living in way that we have not only objectified our world, but we have also objectified ourselves. All such beliefs are mere images that rest on untested beliefs - that are, themselves, merely expressions of the underlying fear and understanding that, in fact, pain, unpleasantness, and death are also part of the play of this existence. ...When we realize the fleeting nature of existence, we value this moment in its brief life and we not only yield to it its fundamental freedom to change and, ultimately, die, but, more to the point of this verse, to not get attached to any demand that it not be any different from what it is, changing and, often, declining. ...Thus the true sage is unkind, in the sense that she sees through the veil of the need for some to cling to a static concept of life or a person and also the deification of some small subset of people and objects. ...Thus while everything changes and everything dies, it is in the very nature of the Dao that it constantly creates anew. Thus, in this sense, Heaven and Earth are infinitely loving and productive - but not, to the individual person/object. ...The Verse ends with a small reminder of humility, that the best leader is one who knows when to stop speaking and abide in the center, where his energy connects with the living forge of the Dao.

The Dao De Jing Commentary: Verse Four - The Origin of the Universe

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-06T11:56:09-05:00

I want to add one more translation of the Tao Te Ching that I am going to include in the compilation of this commentary. It is Dao Te Jing (which is the correct English spelling of the name) translated and with its own commentary by Hans-Georg Moeller. ... Verse Four continues the Dao's exploration of its own nature and, once again, it presents an important paradox. Addiss and Lombardo translate the first Stanza as (I have changed the spellings to mirror the Hans-Georg text): ...While it is the origin of everything, it is, also, everything just as it is. ... Thus the origin of everything is just this right now! We live as the origin and as the manifestation of everything that has preceded us. ...The sharp glare the Dao now softens and that is is from and of the Dao. ...This first challenging phrase "deeply subsistent" refers to the unimaginably ancient age of the Dao. ...This is the stunning paradox of the world itself; ancient and immediate in perfect simultaneousness, such is the Dao.

The Tao Te Ching: Verse 3 Commentary

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-05T13:48:15-05:00

As was said in the introduction to this Tao Te Ching commentary, this book is thought to have been, primarily, a manual of leadership and it is this theme that dominates Verse Three. The taoist conception of the ideal government was one where people would not contend for power and have their basic needs taken care of. ...At the risk of using language and labels that are too contemporary and fraught with projected emotional value, we also would say that the Taoist envisions the most minimal of governments; a kind of libertarian conception of government. ...This is, of course, the very society we not only have, but one which we promote as “natural”, as a consequence, we mindlessly assert, of “human nature”. ...As the all but perennial outsider, Jews are encouraged to find a kind of comfortable, but separate place and one of the ways this is done is through clearly delineating the values and beliefs of the dominant culture from our own. ... This active mind is not there only to serve as a means to establish our rightful separation, but to be the manifestation of intelligence itself. ...When we questions and criticizes as a consequence of ego, of needing to bring unnecessary attention to ourselves, to look smarter than our fellows, then yes, this is a clear contradiction of what the Tao is saying in this Verse. But if our questioning is simply inspired by wonder about our world, an interest in learning, of inquiry, then this is the Tao itself. ...When government provides for its people, when happiness and well-being abides to all, the world of lack vanishes from the human condition. As has been described in fairly massive detail in my book Liberation from the Lie, only a world organized around class division, frequent war, constant power striving, is one that demands obedience and achieves socialization goals through punishment and constant correction.

The Tao Te Ching Verse 2

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-04T10:17:02-05:00

This verse takes on an epic journey by challening us with our attachment to our most heartfelt beliefs and finally returns us to the mysterious evanescent, yet changeless world of the Tao. ...While in the complex Verse One in which I presented all three of my favorite translations, for this commentary I’ll be using only the Lombardo version, which I tend to prefer to Hinton or Star. ... If you’re wondering why I have decided not to use the Mitchell translation, it’s only because as much as I really love his perspective throughout the Tao, I find it just a little too filtered by his deep involvement in Buddhism. I have made every effort, in this commentary, to conform to those qualities of the Tao that are unique to it - although many, if not most, of the key perceptions and insights of the Tao have been incorporated into the teachings of Zen Buddhism. ...Thus in this first stanza, when we live our lives by concepts, no matter how widely accepted they may be, we have created a world that is closed. ...While it continues the theme of the first section which seeks to goad us from our attachment to limited conceptual knowledge, the second section does away with our idea that opposing polarities are separate. ...Our conceptual knowing rests on the false premise that polarities, whether they be about the “good” or the “low” are merely relative manifestations that fail to possess any quality that can persist as real or valid. ...When we are free of our conceptual shackles, no matter how elevated and spiritual they might appear to our ego and the aspiring egos of others, our compulsion to teach, to take credit, to own, disappears in an instant. ...If I seek to take credit, then the accomplishment that I claim is mine and mine alone will become not only a source of contention and dispute, but it will fail to survive the onslaught of time and attack. ... Were I to take credit for something that I assert is “good” then I have elevated the “good” into a concept and thus have posited that which isn’t good.

Desire: A Very Brief Note

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-03T12:12:28-05:00

It is how we respond to pain; subtle and not so subtle. And for so many of us the background and often foreground experience of pain is like an inner sensation that is just waiting for our attention. ...Pain and desire - two sides of being in a dance that seems to never end. First see through the process of desire and return to the inner sensation. We try to push our pain away first with desire. So we spend our whole lives pushing and pushing and pushing. ...Desire is the very manifestation of resistance to what is! It is the red flag of our life's ceaseless call for a very different form of attention. See desire as the dead-end, the path that leads only back to itself; the life of endless, quenchless desire. ...Then ask it in a most gentle voice, “what is it you want to say.”

Enlightenment and Teen Romance: Is the Key Here?

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-03T12:54:13-05:00

All of those cloying behaviors that say “please please LIKE pathetic me” are some of the most direct and powerful ways a boy can push a girl away. ...And because we all know, at some level, that one of the best ways to create distance between two people is the effort to be liked, it’s a very common theme in teen and even adult romances. ...When we desire something and think that we can attract it into our lives through effort, we are telling the universe that we, as we are, we are weak, fragile, and incomplete. ...More to the point, the very organization of self that contorts itself into this form of desire is that which must remain in pain and incompleteness. ...Then you must take the brave step of disengaging from the whole process of desire, for it is that very desire that your ego believes is your innate self. ... That desire is a natural consequence of an underlying identification with inadequacy, which, itself, is an echo of our primal Wound (you really should read Liberation from the Lie to learn much more about the Wound that we all share). ...True strength is that which merges with spark of the universe, as it is right now, free of the filter of the ever-desiring self. ...This is the chasm that we must be brave enough to see and feel and then to just wait with that seeming emptiness of self. ...The incompleteness that we communicated to the world, the energy that has pushed away our natural joy evaporates in the willingness to experience the vastness of our authentic selves. ...When we really understand this we are strong enough to see through the false promise of desire.

The Tao Te Ching: Verse 1 - Part 2

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-02T09:28:40-05:00

This is a world where the boundaries between apparent objects become diffuse and disappear as we allow ourselves to fall into the current of the Tao. As was said in the previous post, this means to see the world of thought (the primary world of conventional existence) as simply the myth of the separate man and woman. ...His words clearly mix the Tao as both the origin (mother) of all and as the individual manifestation of the “ten thousand things”. ...For me this dilemma is resolved by Hinton who, deftly, avoids establishing a hierarchy, but does differentiate the qualitative experience of being, where in awakening, one resides in the ongoing mystery of life by seeing through the illusion of separation, with its desire and personal identification with its own perceptions and merges into the nonbeing of the Way. ...It will be seen that we do this by transmuting our fears into conventional behaviors designed to build the seemingly secure walls of the self. We will see that by identifying with this appearing self, we make it possible for persistent adversity and struggle to fill our short lives. But to see this thinking self as just appearance, the mask disassembles and we merge into THIS as our authentic selves - this world of infinite and ever-changing connection; the living Tao itself. Reading Hinton’s translation, we also see that we never need to fight the thought-filled self notion, for that too is of the Tao. ...Until we untie the network of beliefs that affix us to the thought filled world of the separate self, we will persist in sustaining the illusion of separation. ...Just last night I had a dream and in this dream a person asked me, what is the difference between the awakened one and the unawakened person.

The Tao Te Ching: Verse 1

ericg51@gmail.com — 2010-01-01T12:47:19-05:00

For me this is the most direct stanza in all of the Tao Te Ching. As I said in my previous post, this is work for leaders, but this first Verse seems so much more than just a manual for leadership. ... It asks us, using a quiet voice, to really stop and take a look at all of our assumptions about who we are and what is real and this first, very brief stanza, does just that. ...For me it is saying that the Way (Tao) that is conjured by our individual and personal minds is not the Way. ...This is a remarkable statement, for it sets out, in the very first words of this book that the way is not of the mind. ...But the Tao informs us that “A Name that can be named is not The Name.” ... It’s not saying that this thing I’m naming a tree is almost a tree or is partly a tree. ... And perhaps more to the point, it’s saying that this thing I call “me” is not me. ... It’s saying that I am not the name “me” or anything I can link to this thing called me. ...No map, ever, can be the place itself, for the place is the Way and the Way can never be translated into a label.

The Tao Te Ching - Introduction

ericg51@gmail.com — 2009-12-30T14:35:43-05:00

Over the next 3 months I hope to write a post for each of the 81 chapters of the immortal Tao Te Ching. ...A Chinese woman I knew said that it could not be understood by a westerner and even the wisest people in China are profoundly challenged by its mysterious words. But for me, I felt that I understood its many themes and over-riding understanding of this world the first time I read it. ...It is not a matter of understanding, but of an openness to the real; the underlying thread that connects everything in its perfect changeless and ever-changing web. ...While we are told that its author is the mysterious Lao Tzu, many scholars assert that the text has more than one author. ... It is believed that the age of many of the chapters of the Tao are much earlier than the approximate age of its first known compilation. ...Like the Tao, the Chuang Tzu is believed to have more than one author. ... Some scholars have said that the section of the Chuang Tzu called the Inner Chapters might have a single author; perhaps the semi-legendary Chuang Tzu. ...While it may have been a manual for leadership it is so much more. its short chapters possess immense depth and we will attempt to plumb these depths in these posts. I offer them to you as an invitation for each of us to re-enter this majestic text with an open heart and mind.

Avatar: A Tale of 3 Films

ericg51@gmail.com — 2009-12-30T11:14:07-05:00

And, speaking of IMAX and 3D, I think it would be a good idea to ‘take a look’ at its presentation technology before talking about the movie itself. ...The lines spoken by the goodies are like something out of a marine training manual (for example, the proud cry of “Outstanding” said by a marine when a bomb shot from high above kills innocent and lovable aliens) and the lines of the goodies seems to be taken from a sympathetic movie about Native Americans and their inherent balance and harmony with all living things. ...As this film showed, the white man not only waged ceaseless blood-thirsty war against the Indians, but they also took immense pleasure in slaughtering the once vast buffalo herds out of the sheer joy of killing, as well as the added benefit of starving the native people. ... I don’t want to give away too much about the film, but the involvement of the white man (Sully) into the life of the now vulnerable Nav’i becomes essential to their own survival. ...He said, “Having seen and enjoyed both movies I don't really think that's a fair criticism...especially in the case of Dances With Wolves. ... In both movies the protagonists walked into their situations with stereotypical preconceived notions of native culture and in both movies the main character arc of the story involved a discovery and awakening to the fact that everything they had been taught was false. At no point in either movie was it suggested that, left to their own devices, the natives in any sense "needed" help from the whites-- they were never portrayed as helpless, except in the face of the mindless destruction wrought on their societies by the invaders. ... On a whole there was a definite underlying spiritual consciousness to Avatar that is far too often lacking in our society, something which helps the film have an almost magical effect on some of its viewers (myself included).” ...This person’s insights feel ‘spot-on’ to me and I now feel that the way Avatar showed the evolution of the white hero’ consciousness was, in retrospect, compelling and beautifully crafted. ...The film shows two mutually exclusive worlds; that of the high-tech white man which treats the world as a dead thing; and that of the Nav’i that views everything as alive.

The True Pathway to Finding the Self

ericg51@gmail.com — 2009-12-29T12:48:06-05:00

and we continue to ask ourselves the question, we discover that all we will ever find is our mind responding with the word “me”. ... And this answer is no help at all, because it just takes us back to where we started for now we must ask, “Who is this “me”?” If we dig deeper, we will discover that this word “me” is just a label that the mind applies onto life experiences out of habit. It’s a deeply entrenched habit, but it’s just a habit that we learned from our parents and our world as we grew up. ...It is the only the mind that demands that we seek for what can never be found. ... Aligned with this identity, we come to believe that we lack something and, it just so happens, that all of the literature of enlightenment confirms our fears. ... We are just these poor saps wandering about our pathetic lives searching for the one thing that can never be found. This is what happens when we become a slave to the psychological identity of our already invalidated minds. We embraced the identity of the Wound (see the Liberation from the Lie book) and covered it up with the many masks of the False-Self (again see the book). The key to our prison lies in simply watching and observing the mind with the knowledge that our identity is not it (the mind).