My Spiritual Coach - My spiritual blog & articles

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.

Is the law of attraction/manifestation simply a way for people to just believe in themselves, and therefore take action, or is it more than that?

1/25/2021

The Law of Attraction, which is “like attracts like,” makes a lot of sense when we see it in nature. Geese don’t hang out with skunks, they attract other geese. It is also about the energy that we put out there. It is invisible, but is comes back to us as we magnetically attract it.

However, I take issue with people thinking that they can sit on their sofa all day long and pet their cat and all the goodies they ever wanted in life will magically appear. My experience is that you have to meet the Universe at least half way, through action, to manifest anything you want in your life.

It is the lazy way out to think that you can lose weight, for example, by just thinking thoughts that you are thinner. You have to put in the work and the discipline. You must take some form of action. That is what sets the whole Universal ball rolling. If you just sit there and indulge in magical thinking that just because you are a good person and think nice thoughts everything good will come to you, I’m sorry, it won’t work.

Unfortunately, the Law of Attraction has been so commercialized, it has lost its original meaning. It is all about the energy forces of the Universe, which are unseen but can be harnessed by our own energy fields. It is not about brining in all the stuff money can buy and everyone lives happily ever after.

The physical plane is not easy and we a driven by the media to believe we need so many things to be happy. The Law of Attraction appeals to people who want lots of things. And therefore, it has become tarnished from misuse. We believe all these things lead to a happy, successful life. But they don’t. Inner peace, joy, love, bliss—our minds need to be all of those first things to attract them.

But we cannot be a huge SUV, a McMansion, a $1,000 pizza, and those things all go away or get digested and turn to excrement or dust. So, using the Law of Attraction for such things may be amusing, but it is not fulfilling and often doesn’t work. We are coming from an energy level of need and want, rather than fulfillment and that is the flaw. Law of attraction, without the necessary energetic work to supplement it, will not work.

Is the pursuit of enlightenment less of a thing for women?

1/25/2021

Enlightenment has been the center of my life since I was a small child. And I am a woman. At a young age, I also became aware that some religions don’t believe that women can achieve enlightenment or even be allowed into sections of an all-male heaven. I was perplexed.

Are you going to tell me that I won’t be allowed into the boys club of enlightened beings because I have been blessed with certain physical attributes or a certain distribution of hormones in my system?

Whether we have testosterone running through our veins or estrogen has nothing whatsoever to do with our Soul’s path. Those things belong to the body and determine whether we are male or female strictly for reproductive purposes.

From an enlightened point of view, we are not our bodies. They are the vehicles through which our Souls experience physical existence as part of their karmic journeys. It’s absurd to think that a male, regardless of how he behaved in this life, has a better chance of going to heaven than a female who has led a life of caring and spiritual pursuits.

One example is Digambar Jains. I am generally a big fan of Jains except on this one point. They believe that women are not capable of being enlightened. Svetambar Jains have opposite beliefs, believing that women are capable of enlightened and can become religious role models. But women, especially among Svetambar Jains, are believed to be deceitful. They believe that deceit is the foundation of their character. The reason they were reborn as a woman is because they were deceitful in a former life.

One of their sacred texts states:

“As the result of manifesting deception, a man in this world becomes a woman. As a woman, if her heart is pure, she becomes a man in this world.”

And men aren’t deceitful? That is my question. What does gender have to do with it? According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 93.% of the population in prisons are males and 6.7% are females. Is it not deceit to steal peoples lives through murder, theft, racketeering, con artistry, and other crimes? So please don’t tell me how holy the male population is, based on their criminal behavior.

According to a study entitled: Women in the Afterlife: The Islamic View as Seen from Quran and Tradition by Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad:

“The most basic relationship in Islamic society is not between a man and a woman but between a man and God: It is definitely not between woman and God.

. . .men, have, upon occasion, apparently used the assurance of their own place in eternity as a tool of control and of dominance.”
Yet other religious systems based on the Goddess, instead of a patriarchal punitive God, have deemed women as the leaders in enlightenment.

Heaven, (which I have experienced as enlightenment here on earth) is not a physical place of luxury where women take a subservient role as they wait upon men. This is fun fantasy for the male ego. This fairytale is not based on spirituality or any of my own deeply-held experiences of enlightenment. It looks like a pride-based and greedy imaginary man-made creation, based on physical dominance, very similar to life on earth.

What does it mean to find your “inner truth”, and have you found yours?

12/22/2020

So much of what we think is the truth is just received knowledge that we assimilated when we were too young to resist. We wanted to fit in when we were children. We wanted our parents to love us and to care for us. Therefore, it would not have been in our best interest to buck the system, even if we were capable of resisting.

Then we went to school. We had to learn what the teachers in our culture were teaching. It was considered to be the truth at the time, until we find out that history can be re-written according to cultural biases.

Our religious institutions also have their input into our view of truth. They frighten us with versions of hell at ages when, again, we are too young to resist and are not capable of intellectual argumentation. We are punished if we do not agree and it is much easier just to fit and and not make waves.
And so, most people never get to find their “inner truth.” To do that, we must scrub our consciousness clean of all received views and notions and find out what is so jut for ourselves. This requires going in within and learning about who we really are as Eternal Soul. It is a quiet place, away from all information input and entertainment. It is a place of peace, where you fearlessly discover what you love and what brings the most joy.

Yes, I have found inner truth for me, and it is a place of endless freedom. Most people don’t take the time to discover who they are. It’s much easier to accept outer truth. But, as we have seen through time, what we thought was true (such as the flat earth or that the earth is the center of the universe) is false. Inner truth is never false, because it is based on Soul, which can’t be incorrect.

How does being attached to the material world impact us?

12/22/2020

Being attached to the material world turns us into grasping, frightened beings. It is obvious to any thinking person, that all material items have an invisible time stamp on them. They are all going to go away one day. They will rot, rust, decay, die, get stolen, eroded, or perish in other ways. Anyone who observes the material world can attest to this.

Yet we fool ourselves, and delude ourselves, in a kind of mass hypnosis into valuing and seeking these things and more things to cope with our fear and boredom. We want to display these things to bolster our egos in front of others and make ourselves feel that we have “made it.” We want others to envy us, admire us, and want what we have. We entertain ourselves with shopping and adding even more to our storehouse of things that are never going to last. And so we waste the beautiful life we are here to experience. We are chasing after and placing value on something that can be easily taken away from us.

When enough people want to grasp all the material goods for themselves, our planet will not recover from this level of greed. Tearing down rain forests, overfishing and polluting our waters, paving over nature and creating fake scenarios to pamper our fantasies, does not bring inner peace, joy, or beauty. We must go within and discover our Eternal Soul, which never goes away and cannot die. All else, although entertaining and challenging, is a waste of time and creates more problems than solutions.

What did Echkart Tolle mean by saying problems are illusions, or fear is an illusion?

8/4/2020

When Eckhart Tolle says that problems are illusions, or that fear is an illusion, he is not making light of the pain and suffering we go through as humans. He knows very well the unhappiness and fear that so many people live in, regardless of their external circumstances.

Instead, he is referring to how we create problems and fear in our lives. We assume people are out to get us, that the Universe is playing tricks with us, and that we are helpless victims. Tolle’s approach to problems is threefold:

Leave them
Change them
Accept them

. . . anything else is craziness.

If we have a clear view of these solutions, the problems no longer remain problems because we have walked away, changed the situation, or accepted that the situation is not going to change so we might as well be happy and get on with our lives. Therefore, they are no longer problems, they are decisions we have a to make.

Fear is also an illusion. We cannot touch fear and we cannot make it stand still. It is a part of our thinking patterns that are influenced by so many things, including our brains’ hard-wiring for fear as a survival tactic. Tolle cites the example of sleeping in a safe, warm bed at night. The ego-mind will start conjuring up all kinds of things to be afraid of: Financial ruin, ill health, and even dying.

Meanwhile, we are snug and secure in our warm bed creating mental strife for ourselves. There is nothing to be afraid of and we are tied in knots of fear and dread. That is why Eckhart Tolle describes fear as an illusion. And like problems, fear disappears when we understand the reality of our existence as Eternal Souls.

Do we have a monkey mind?

7/20/2020

The term “monkey mind” is an old buddhist description of how our ego minds jump from topic to topic from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. You might say, “We don’t have a monkey mind, it has us.” In other words it is so pervasive, repetitive, and non-stop that unless we are meditating or asleep, it has us. It runs us and causes our emotions to go up and down all day long and sometimes into our dreams.

Even it we “have” a monkey mind, it doesn’t mean we actually are this monkey mind. It is just a tool we can use to accomplish our goals. But if we let it run our lives with its restless chatter, then it does indeed, have us. It needs to be disciplined and put in its place. It is not who we are, for we are much more than this conglomeration of neural transmitters. It is merely an instrument in this body that helps us navigate through the physical world.

The monkey mind is responsible for all the unrest, neurosis, violence, and upset in the world of human interactions. It keeps us awake at night and causes us to seek substances to subdue it. We are addicted to the monkey mind and its antics and then seek out other forms of addiction to quell it. And so, if we do not acknowledge this monkey mind and begin to tame it, it will, indeed, have us. And until we realize we are The Eternal Soul, we will experience its rambunctious behavior.

Does Eckhart Tolle believe in God?

7/20/2020

If you are talking about the patriarchal Old Man in the Sky, who watches every move you make and punishes and rewards accordingly, then, no Eckhart Tolle does not believe in God. This is a primitive God, created in the image of a vindictive, capricious, and unjust man by men who were trying to put a face on the forces of nature. This is a God that has been constructed through fear and the desire to find safety in exchange for rituals and obedience.

Eckart Tolle does not believe in a God that created us from the “dust of the ground,” the way a potter forms a clay pot. Rather, we have emerged from the Creative Forces of the Universe. We are the natural outcropping of many physical and spiritual interactions and were not put here by some man-like God who then tasks us with proving that we are worthy of being alive.

Furthermore, Tolle does not believe in the hellish aftermath of life that is imposed by a punitive God who has watched us floundering around as we attempt to keep His commandments. Tolle doesn’t even come from “belief” for belief means we really don’t know but would like to think it is true. Like a child believes in Santa Claus. Rather, Eckhart Tolle comes from a sense of knowing. This knowing is based on his own experiences and not on some fairy tale made up by our forefathers a long, long time ago.

Can you trust the law of attraction to solve all our problems?

7/11/2020

No, solving all our problems is not so easy as sitting on a couch and thinking positive thoughts.

The Law of Attraction does work. Like always attracts like, as we can see in nature all around us. Skunks don’t hang out with geese and fish don’t fraternize with sparrows. But it is not so simple as just being a positive source of energy and opening yourself up to the abundance of the Universe. All the goodies are not going to fall into our laps automatically.

The way it is designed, which many people would not like to face because they think it is easier to just wish and hope, is that we must meet the Universe at least halfway with action. It sounds like such a wonderful fairy tale to think that all we have to do to lose weight is to think about being thin. No, sorry, we must also stop eating fattening and non-nourishing foods and do some form of exercise.

And if we want to be wealthy, all we have to do is stop our negative vibes about cash flow and money. But again, this is wishing and hoping. It is not the whole picture. Yes, we can be unobstructed conduits for all the good of the Universe, but we must put in the effort. Not the struggle, not the grueling slavery, but the effort that shows our intentions.

The goal of “solving all our problems” is unrealistic and not the reason for our existence on this planet. Our problems are instigation for growth. And once they are “solved,” opportunities for new growth appear. It is never solved. It never gets done. and our opportunities for growth are endless.