My spiritual blog & articles - My Spiritual Coach

Other than intent, are there differences between 'shower thoughts' and thoughts you get while meditating?

10/1/2021

Thoughts I get while meditating are like bubbles rising into the horizon. I don’t get pulled into them or give them any importance. They are automatically generated by my thinking machine (ego mind) and have mostly to do with survival, the past, or the future.

They can be funny and they can be a nuisance, like a buzzing mosquito, but they are completely irrelevant to the mediations process. Meditation takes us into deeper layers of consciousness than mere thought.

Shower thoughts are about planning, getting things done, gettin clean, something someone said, a song you like, all kinds of random things, and they can be tied to intention or not. The ego-mind cannot be still in the present moment, so it seeks to distract itself with all kinds of thoughts, some of which are actually useful and problem-solving but others are just mental clutter.

The whole point of meditation is to go beyond this metal noise and get to a place of quiet peace. Therefore, thoughts during meditation are useless.

How does Eckart Tolle's "Power of Now" help people who live in countries which are a failed state with the lack of basic everything and not a glimmer of hope for improvements?

10/1/2021

All of us, no matter how wealthy or well-fed have found ourselves in terrible circumstances beyond our physical control. Eckart Tolle teaches methods for finding the peace within, from which we can solve whatever problem presents itself. We cannot solve any problem from a position of upset, anger, want, lack, need, and distress. Those emotions only cloud our problem-solving ability.

We cannot solve the problem of a failed state from a position of greed of the elite, torture, imposed hunger, and terrorism. Those are all the results of the lesser, human ego mind that seeks to entrench its position through domination and control. Only an enlightened understanding of the peace that dwells within the soul produces cooperation, preservation of resources, and the overall happiness of all in any society.

Eckhart Tolle’s books are not a magic bullet for all of a sudden getting rid of the human greed and cruelty that fuels world hunger and other human-caused disasters.

Eckart Tolle’s work has helped people who are in prison, on death row, and other circumstances that are beyond the individual’s control. He explains that you can be in the worst of circumstances and still find that peace within. From that standpoint, you can then work to embrace your life, and understand that you are more than a survival machine that eats, procreates, and dies.

But first, we must clear our minds of all the garbage and fear that it automatically generates. Then we must find a path to where our inner peace lives. After that, no matter what the circumstances, they do not affect our inner happiness or peace.

Tolle uses the example of being stuck in the mud or quicksand. It would do no good whatsoever to kick and scream in fear and upset until you wear yourself out and get taken under. Better to acknowledge, “This is where I am right now. What is my next step to get out of this?” Thinking clearly and calmly will bring much better results. That is all Eckart Tolle is about. Get rid of the little, fear-filled human mind and tune into the rich territory of the Soul.

The Soul is connected to all the natural intelligence of the Universe. And when people tune into it, problems get solved. Even if you do get taken under, you will not die in an agonized state of resistance, but will surrender to the larger forces that work within and are much larger than the individual ego.
Tolle is very clear that anything in the physical state is unstable. We cannot expect anything in the physical to last. But he points the way to what does last: The Eternal Soul.

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 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.

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.

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.