My Spiritual Coach - My spiritual blog & articles

As part of the divine consciousness, do we already know everything?

7/13/2021

As part of the divine consciousness, we really don’t know anything from the standpoint of our limited brains. We think we know things because we have accumulated many facts and educated ourselves so we can gain some measure of control over our lives. We believe that “knowledge is power” and on one level it is. It is better to have skills and understanding than to be completely clueless, especially when performing tasks.

But when we talk about divine consciousness, we are talking about something that is so large, we are simply not equipped to know about it fully. We may be able to see pieces of it, like an ant looking at an elephant. The ant may see just the toenail and think it is a huge mountain. It could never even see the whole elephant.

That is how we are in the realm of divine consciousness. We can get glimpses of it and live in it. We can experience it. But it is difficult to put words to what the experiences are. We can only hint at it. We can only talk about sensations but we can never pin it down. We aren’t meant to. It is arrogance to think that one day we will know everything.

The human race knows a lot already and it still hasn’t increased in happiness or peace. It has not taken itself into higher levels of consciousness and continues to chase after things that do not last. Knowing a lot does not provide much consolation on a cold and stormy night.

What's the difference between your heart and your soul?

7/13/2021

The heart is the vehicle through which our Soul is expressed and experienced. We cannot contact our Soul, the part of us that is eternal and connected to All-That-Is, through our brains or minds. It is through our heart center that we make contact with our eternal being, the Soul.

Our minds are logical, dissecting mechanisms that are very good at solving material problems. But when it comes to the spiritual, we must use the heart. And I don’t mean the organ made of flesh and blood. I am talking about the energy center of our bodies that resides almost exactly where the physical heart lives. But it is something else. It is our unseen heart that feels love and joy in proportion to how we are tuned into our Souls.

The Soul is the part of us that never dies. It cannot be destroyed and it feels no fear. The mind, on the other hand, is a master of fear and is constantly looking out for the next threat to our survival. The path to the Soul is therefore, not through the mind but through the heart center.

The spiritual gut, which sometimes manifests in the physical gut as well, works in conjunction with the heart to contact and download the presence of Soul. You can feel this when you say, “I had a gut reaction.” Add this to your heart center and tune in to who you really are.

Is the noble eightfold path of Buddhism intelligible?

6/23/2021

Like the Ten Commandments, Buddha’s Nobel Eightfold Path, is simple to understand but not really easy to accomplish. These eight attitudes are not moral precepts about specifically what not to do, though. They are a simple list of how to behave if you want to live a life with a minimum of suffering for yourself and others.

Buddha does use the word “right” but it is not in the sense that you are damned by God if you don’t take his recommendations. It is more in the sense of what is most appropriate for the moment. Here is the Noble Eighfold Path:

Right understanding
Right thought
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration

Because they are so simple, people can interpret these concepts in different ways. Huge volumes have been written on the subject. My interpretation, in short, is approach everything with a free, pure, unattached heart. This ensures that we say the appropriate words as well as perform appropriate actions. We consciously put our efforts towards meaningful goals while remaining grounded in what is eternal about ourselves.

Four of the ideas in The Noble Eightfold Path concern themselves with our inner selves: Understanding, thought, mindfulness, and concentration. This is different from the Ten Commandments, which do not concern themselves with a person’s inner life and more with their relationship to Jehovah and with each other.

Four of the items on the Path are action-oriented: Speech, action, livelihood, and effort. The Buddha did not leave anything out. And by not defining precisely what each “right” thought or action is, he left a lot of room for interpretation. But the final test is, by living this way do you alleviate suffering? Thousands of years after he delivered his insights, they are still alive and bringing people and understanding of life, so they have stood the test of time.

Is it possible to dissolve the ego completely? If it is possible, how can this benefit somebody’s life?

6/9/2021

The Universe is perfectly designed, so if we are born into bodies that come equipped with egos, who are we to say it needs to be completely dissolved? We can manage it because it has some troublesome aspects. It is fearful, tries to prove itself right and everyone else wrong, and it is never satisfied with what is, wanting more, more, and more.

But it is also part of what makes us human. And as with our bodies, we can do things with it to optimize its performance and not turn it into our enemy. We can put it in its place. We can be grateful to it that it is only trying to protect us to ensure our survival. We don’t have to fight it. We can thank it and then put it in its place as our servant and not our master.

The ego wants to excel, improve on things, fix things, and gain praise. It sees what’s wrong with the picture and is discontent with the Now. All of these qualities spurred the great works of art, engineering, technology, and inventions of our species. So we don’t want to throw the ego out completely. We want to put it where it belongs—being a help to us in our creative energy and not destroying our happiness in the process.

What were Eckhart Tolle's fears and anxieties of his life situation before Enlightenment?

6/9/2021

Eckart Tolle’s fears and anxieties, that he reports on in his books, were very much like all of our fears and anxieties: We’re not enough. We need to do something to make ourselves enough but we never do enough, we’re not good-looking enough, we’re not smart enough, we will be on the street with nothing, we’re not loved or appreciated enough, we’re not (fill in the blank).

Those are just a few fears that plagued him, along with an unhappy childhood with quarreling parents, not fitting in at school, and just the low-level non-stop terror that the mind inflicts on everyone who doesn’t know how it operates.

When he discovered how the ego-mind and its negative bias runs our lives instead of us running it, he was able to get out from under its tyranny and start to control and master it. Now he could use it as a tool, instead of letting it using him as its tool. This brought him freedom from the never-ending emphasis on lack that is the focus of the ego-mind, which always wants more, more, more and is never satisfied with what is.

The books by Eckhart Tolle were very popular because they had the answer that if you are totally in the present (now), you are totally happy. But are people now disappointed because he had no way to get there, since he got there by accident?

6/9/2021

It’s delusional to think that anyone can be totally happy all the time by following a simple formula. It is a popular concept, of course, that if you are always in the present you have found the way to total happiness. It is a great selling point with people who are looking for instant enlightenment and a life of endless fun without the discipline, watchfulness, and work it takes to get there.

Such ideas can also make a reader feel that if it is so easy, why doesn’t it work for them? They must be deficient in some way. They then add that to the list of negatives that keep them stuck in a depressive world view.

I don’t interpret Eckart Tolle’s present moment awareness as being totally happy, anyway. I interpret it as being at peace with the underlying understanding that all lis right with the Universe, regardless of what my emotional reaction is to the circumstances. Sometimes being totally happy is not appropriate and shows a shallowness and lack of sensitivity that borders on the fake and annoying. Sometimes, being truly sad and feeling it deeply, is the appropriate emotion and shows compassion and empathy for other sufferers.

As F. Scott Peck says in the first line of The Road Not Taken, “Life is difficult.” Because people don’t want to face that, they are outraged, angry, disappointed, upset, unhappy, feel entitled to their piece of the pie, and every other negative emotion. If we accept that life is difficult and that it requires spiritual work and discipline to achieve inner peace, lots of our problems would clear up naturally.

With Eckart Tolle, it wasn’t really an accident that brought his breakthrough into the world of spiritual peace. It was that his mind broke. He had taken the ego-mind to the limit and saw the absurdity of its claims on him. He saw that he wasn’t two beings, his nagging ego-mind and his eternal, harmonious soul. It wasn’t an accident at all. It was the result seeing clearly, for the first time, that if he went with the repetitive, automatic, and negative path of this mind, his life would continue to be hell.

Many mystics have arrived at this realization the same way. Often it is the result of The Dark Night of the Soul. But it is never an accident. Part of it is by grace as well. But it is never because someone read a book and got “instant karma” as a result. It always takes some form of work.

Why are a lot of enlightenment answers unintelligible and why do people upvote them anyway?

5/23/2021

Answers about consciousness and enlightenment seem meaningless to people who think that they are only their ego-minds, with their never-ending demands for everything to make sense. They also think they are their bodies, with their endless round of physical needs and cravings.

They want to tie all the mysteries of life up in a neat package that can be proved under laboratory conditions, and therefore that would be the Truth for them. This would give them a sense of security, though any thinking person can see that life merely in the physical is an endless cycle of eating, sleeping, procreating, and working so we can get up then next day and do the same thing again until we die.

Then we will be replaced by other organisms, all with their same wants and desires—mainly to survive with a few little meaningless perks thrown in, such as entertainment and fleeting pleasures.

Yet some people are beyond this. They know within their hearts that this survival-at- all-costs approach to life shows meaninglessness on the level of the insects. Reproducing in swarms and filling their bellies so they can excrete later. Only if we are on a path of enlightenment, to bypass the endless whirl of the physical and its dis-satisfactions, will any underlying happiness, gratitude, or sense of purpose be possible.

The other problem with the language of enlightenment is that we don’t really have a precise vocabulary to define the different states of consciousness attained by an enlightened being. These states are beyond mere feelings and emotions. Eventually their descriptions end up sounds like cliches. “I was lost in the bliss of One-ness with all life and all death. We are all one.”

People don’t feel this in everyday life and it becomes tiresome to hear this kind of imprecise language over and over again. It becomes lost in a blur. The states of consciousness that go beyond the mere everyday survival thoughts, rehashing of old events and jumping with anxiety into the future, don’t sound possible the way they are described.

Yet, when we are on the Spiritual Path we can detect the soul behind what is written and therefore respond to the being who put themselves out there enough to at least try to describe enlightenment.

Do all enlightened beings renounce their worldly possessions?

4/29/2021

It’s not that enlightened beings renounce their worldly possession, it’s just that they don’t cling to them. They understand the everlastingness of their spiritual identity and therefore do not place a significant value on things that can be stolen, lost, or destroyed.

Enlightened beings may enjoy beautiful objects but they do not place high emotional value on them either. They don’t even have to own them to enjoy them. They can appreciate objects and experiences for what they are: Transitory and ephemeral, not lasting and eternal. Like a gorgeous butterfly that settles nearby and then flies away. The enlightened being does not need to place a pin in the butterfly and frame it to keep it for all time.

Enlightened beings do not put great importance on anything that comes and goes, or can disappear or be taken away. They focus their attention and energy on what is lasting and deep. Therefore, enlightened beings may even be extraordinarily wealthy, but they would be just as happy if they had nothing. With enlightened beings, it is never about the external manifestations of reality and more about the internal discoveries.

We don’t need to make a big fanfare of giving up everything that makes life comfortable to show that we are enlightened. We can just hold what is really valuable and enduring in our hearts and souls. Then we can be thankful for whatever good comes our way but not depend on physical items for our happiness and peace of mind.

Why are we motivated by materialism?

3/25/2021

Buying and amassing a whole bunch of material goods for ourselves gives us a temporary high. It feels good for a short while and then we need to feed the beast once again. The high has disappeared and we must up the dose of our next toy, piece of jewelry, car, house, or anything that we value outside of our inner selves.

We keep looking outside ourselves for one more item that might be the that panacea for all our discontents and anxieties. Then we get it and find it didn’t do the trick, so we are motivated to try the next path in the maze. Each time we think we will find the reward with the next acquisition.

Jackie Gleason, the famous comedian and billiards player told the story about how poor he was growing up. All he ever wanted was a billiards table of his own. He knew that would be the key to happiness for him. That would solve his restless angst. He was putting off his happiness until that moment and knew one day it would happen.

Through the years he became wealthy and famous. He finally bought himself a top-of-the-line pool table. But after only a few days, it was just one more thing in his house gathering dust. Yes, he used it, but now he was used to it. His mind had moved on to the next thing it felt it needed to hold onto for its joy and peace of mind.

That was one of the most important realizations of his life. We are motivated to keep getting more and more materials things because the satisfaction is not lasting. So we keep going down that false path because we think that one day if we get enough of the right thing, all will be solved.

What is a possible criticism to Eckhart Tolle thoughts?

3/5/2021

I admire Eckhart Tolle and his conclusions about why humans can find only brief moments of happiness with ego-minds dominated by fear. Perhaps my one hesitation relates to savoring the rich memories of past joys as well as learning from past mistakes.

I agree with Tolle, that the past is gone, the future doesn’t exist, and all we have is now. But I want to cherish beautiful memories as a way of managing my thoughts. For example, if I am going through a painful time, it is useful for me to reflect back on a moment of beauty, such as a peaceful walk in the forest with someone I love. This enables me to steer my thoughts in a more positive and healing direction in the present moment.

Also, reflecting on, without obsessing about, some red flag behaviors and situations in our past can help us make decisions that will bring peace and joy into our lives. Therefore, the trick is to preserve these important memories without being terrorized by them every time they come up.

Daydreaming and reveries play an important role in our creative lives. Spartan insistence on paying close attention to every moment of the Now may not be a light and breezy as it seems as an ideal. For example, it is great to be mindful while we are performing routine and repetitive tasks but it can also be fun to think back on an amusing time or something funny from the past, while we are scrubbing the toilet.

Therefore, perhaps the element of exuberant fun may be lacking in Tolle because of his own painful memories that exert an unrecognized influence on his thinking. The future also can be very pleasing to think about when we remove the attendant anxiety about the unknown. So I am not ready to completely throw out the past and future as useless for complete happiness.