A 10 Week course on A New Earth with Ekhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey – Week 2

• http://www.oprah.com/media/20090710-obc-a-new-earth-week2

You can grab the workbook for this class here although you have to sign up to oprah.com which is free and no doubt will take you all of 45 seconds:  http://www.oprah.com/workbook/oprahsbookclub/anewearth/pkganewearthwebcast/20080130_obc_webcast_workbook2

My notes:

Ekhart Tolle

• Taking our attention away from where it usually is and put it into our breath. Ask ‘Am I still breathing?’ it’s an easy way to bring awareness to the present moment

Such a powerful tool for bringing yourself in the moment.  The other technique that Tolle recommends which I find very helpful is just asking yourself ‘am I in the present moment?’.  Simply by asking this brings yourself into that moment and you hear everything that is around you, feel everything you are touching and are aware of your inner body.  It is especially helpful if you find yourself down or experiencing any kind of negative emotions, just ask yourself ‘am I in the present moment?’.  Doing so will put that space between the real you and those emotions as being in the moment doesn’t allow for negativity only surrender to what is, it’s the ego that breeds negativity through it’s fear of the unknown future of regret of the past.

• When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago

  • Relating to the outer world through a middle man, your self talk which is built up of previous thoughts and experiences that form thoughts and judgments. This forms labels and you aren’t interacting with the world directly but more so with these labels

Clearly there is a a necessity for this from time to time, and especially in the past when we were fighting for our lives everyday.  Being able to, in a matter of milliseconds assess a tiger as ‘tiger, bad, predator, run’ instead of marveling over it is part of the reason why we are here today.  However, like many of our survival traits that got us to where we are today it becomes more of a hindrance than anything else when we follow it subconsciously from day to day.   Even then I feel that we could be marveling at the tiger’s grace and beauty while running our asses off about it.  The point being that we basically see the world as a bunch of recipe cards, we look at the tree but we only see the word tree, our mind says ‘that’s a tree and moves on’, we do this of course because like I said our mind is programmed to save the really heavy thinking for fight or flight situations but in this day and age in the developed world there is no fight or flight situation.  Once you drop the label and stop to marvel at what the tree is the world radically changes.  What I like to do is to see the story behind the object as well, imagine everything that tree has seen, what it was like when it was born, the people who have kissed under it, cried under it, but even then I would imagine I’m using my mind too much as the most wonderful thing to do is to simple sit and be with the tree, feel its surface, listen to the wind blowing through 10′s of thousands of leaves.   Here would be a good time to ask yourself if you’re in the present moment.

• What happens when you are free from the ego, where does that energy go?

  • Into the present moment says Tolle

A woman called in to ask this and it reminded me of how many people think that if something isn’t used it is wasted, which is certainly with perishable goods but not with energy.   We exert so much energy into egoic activities, so much time going over situations that have or have yet to

• • “I” embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth depending on when it is used

    • Normally people saying ‘I’ are refering to me and my story, what you identify yourself with. Becomes a self-made entity that you refer to, me and myself

• If I’m not my story, who am I?

• Eastern meditative mantra, you ask who am I in a meditative state and leave it blank afterwords. You seek the actual answer you leave it blank and sit in stillness, in emptiness and in that emptiness you become alive, you feel every cell of your body and you get a sense of your own presence that has nothing to do with your thought process.

In this state you realize that ‘I’ am nothing, but also that ‘I’ am everything.  It’s a difficult thing to explain what this means and I’m not sure myself yet exactly if I know what it means but I’ve seen touched its meaning briefly, yet with more frequency as the days go by.  I’ve likened this to explaining what the color blue looks like to someone who’s never seen before.  Not explaining what the color blue is but explaining what it looks like without using any other color or anything to do with light for that matter as a point of reference.  Try as you might, the blind person you are speaking with will have no greater understanding of what blue looks like.

• Step out and find a dimension that has nothing to do with your past, your history or your future expectations, this is stepping out of the ego.

• When someone says ‘I’ it is usually referring to external possessions, roles they play, positions they hold, their race, their nationality, etc etc. It’s fine to honor some of these things, be a good mother, but realize this is not who you are, you are simply performing and honoring a function. If you do identify with this you become lost in a surface reality. When you can be aware of these things, be aware that you are identifying with these, the observer that is ‘aware’ is your true self.

• How do I break myself from this way of thinking? It starts on the external, refuse to talk about the things you’ve identified with.

• How do you prevent a child from getting lost in the world of conceptualization? For example when you tell a child that ‘this is a bird’ instead of seeing the bird anymore for it’s wonder and splendor they simply project the word ‘bird’ out or the concept of what it is. To prevent this, you still have to explain concepts and words obviously but Tolle suggests not saying ‘This is an oak tree’ say ‘this is called an oak tree’ because it’s not an oak tree, oak is just a word. You loose your relationship with the oak tree when you think you know what it is, the world looses its miraculous quality. When you’ve introduced the oak tree encourage the child to touch the tree, the experience the tree, to see the way the sunlight filters through the branches. Instead of moving on and allowing the child to think he knows what this object is by a concept or a word encourage the child to really go and experience what the oak tree really is.

I think when a child is doing anything out of line they are simple crying out to be in that present moment with you.  I imagine as the ego develops it becomes more egoic, more something out of wanting attention and to feel important and special, but in the beginning I’ve noticed that when you simply stop and exist in that moment with the child they want nothing else in the world.

• The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past, it’s conditioning is 2 fold it’s conditioned by content and structure..

• • content being whatever you identify with and take to be yourself.. Depends on your up bringing, your situations, your culture. It differs from person to person

  • The structure consists of identification. The ego seeks something to identify with, what it is it doesn’t really matter.

• What is the ego? Why do we have an ego

• A false sense of self based on mental concepts. You are identified with your thought processes.

• The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth is a dysfunction and a disease. When you can no longer feel the life that you are you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.

I got a little excited when I heard this question asked as i have found much peace in my search for what the ego is.  At the end of the day our ego’s are no more than memory storage and assimilation systems and like all things the ego is there to facilitate the spreading of seed.  This is why we must give thanks for ego and then move beyond it instead of being resentful and seeing it in a negative light.  Moving beyond the ego is the only way to live in this moment now, however without the ego our species would never have reached this moment.  All of the drive of ego is simply there for self-preservation, however the world we know, how we know it and what we do in it has changed so radically that our ego’s best intentions are no longer serving their purpose.  The problem of course is that we’ve only just now started to tell the ego of these changes, it still thinks we are living in the Savannah.  It makes us jealous to protect our mate and spread more seed, it makes us fearful so we are on constant alert for predators and can therefor live to spread more seed, it makes us focus on the negatives so that we can remember our mistakes and not have them be fatal in the future in order to spread more seed.  Without this, our ancestors wouldn’t have survived and so we give thanks while at the same time begin to educate ourselves on the different world around us and how these subconscious feelings don’t apply to our modern lives anymore and hold us back from our truth

• When we try to change our bad habits for good aren’t we trying to resist rather than accept ourselves.

  • We aren’t trying to change something inside myself, we are bringing awareness to old conditioned forms of behavior, and after bringing awareness to these old conditioned ways of things they drop away. Just bringing awareness and then change happens, awareness immediately lessens the compulsion

An interesting point indeed, and very true from my experience.  Once you see the truth in something you can’t unlearn that truth, once you take the red pill there is no going back, you can’t plug back into the illusion, you are free.  The illusion itself evaporates like water on a hot summer day, there is no struggle, no grand event, it slowly just turns to vapor and is no more.  Most importantly besides seeking and finding the truth there is nothing to do on your part, you aren’t ‘seeking’ anything besides truth, once you find it, it sets you free all on its own.  That is why the more important word in the human language is the word ‘why’ , why is the path to truth and while we can all ask it until we are blue in the face it is only those who are ready to listen to the answers that will find this truth, and peace.

• The ego equates having with being and lives through comparison. The ego compares itself to find some sort of superiority. If you ever find yourself feeling superior or inferior to anyone that is ego as it wants to position it somewhere.

Again of course this comes from the need to spread the seed.  We look to find where we stand in the pecking order as we know potential mates are doing exactly that.  This will allow us to either choose a mate that will not challenge the alpha male as much, ie: marrying within your means, or it will push us to ‘better’ ourselves so that we may vie for the alpha position.  Betterment here of course being a illusory fallacy.

• Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having.

• • Ego is never satisfied. The ego attaches to the future, always wants to obtain something in addition

The ego by its very nature can only exist in the past or the future.. Remember it’s a system for survival, it is either analyzing our past experiences to improve upon them or imprint our mistakes firmly in our head so we don’t repeat them or it is looking to the future to postulate scenario after scenario in order to have a plan for anything when the need arises.  Of course this ‘works’ in the animal kingdom, this is what set us apart and allowed us to rise to where we are now.  By not living in the moment as an animal does we were able to go over and over and over mistakes and improve them, the first instance on earth of sentient conscious evolution.  This does not work however so much anymore.  Our minds have become tools for manifesting and instead of improving on our mistakes by obsessing over them we create a loop in our behavior, repeating what our subconscious mind is focused on.   The point is that the ego cannot live in the now, it didn’t evolve for that as living in the now doesn’t help an animal survive in a predatory or dangerous environment.  We have to see the truth that we are no longer in that environment and stop being slaves to our part of our subconscious that didn’t get the memo on this fact.

• The present moment is the easiest way out of the egoic mind.. The ego identifies with the past and future. It identifies with the past and looks to the future to complete itself. There is no life but now. When you remember anything when are you remembering it? When you experienced something 2 yeas ago when did you experience it? When you are thinking about the future when are you thinking about it? The now is the foundation for the rest of your life as the rest of your life will be now

• When you are waiting you don’t want to be in this moment.Whenever you find yourself waiting, why not practice being?

A wonderful practice that I’ve taken on.. Again with the trick of just asking yourself ‘am I in the moment right now?’ doing that when you are ‘waiting’ and you stop waiting and just start being.  It is beautiful to surrender to this.  Again of course the ego is what causes our impatience.  The ancient ancestors that didn’t have this anxiety when waiting for something no doubt starved, didn’t have a push to make them go out and hunt or gather, or pick up the pace when the sun fell.  All in all the ones that lived in the moment and didn’t rush didn’t survive as well as those who did and consequentially weren’t able to spread their seed as much.  Meaning the trait that allowed those who did, impatience, became hard wired into us over millennia.

• If someone takes away your shirt give them your coat too. At what point are you crossing the line where someone is walking all over you? Even saying no can be powerful.. When someone say’s no it is usually negative. You can say it in a negative light or in a positive light or just being neutral.

Coming from a place of acceptance and neutrality is easier said than done.  I think the hardest thign for most people is that this state of acceptance or surrender isn’t instantaneous in the beginning..  The acceptance comes from knowing the truth, and 99% of people don’t know the truth of any given situation they are in, some have an inkling and even then choose to ignore it.  The truth only comes from a long line of whys, followed usually by a long line of answers that your ego doesn’t want to hear.  Why do I want to fight for my shirt? Because it is mine, I worked for it and I should protect it.  Why not just go buy another shirt? Because if I go buy another shirt then that’s more money I’ll have to spend on that and less money I’ll get to spend on something else.  Why do you want to spend that money on something else, why is that something else important? It isn’t Why is it important to protect your shirt? It isn’t.  Now if it’s 25 below zero and you’ll freeze without it sure keep the shirt, and literally loosing your shirt is probably a fairly extreme example however if you can apply this thinking to that you realize just how little importance anything we think is important really has.

• The Peace that passes all understanding

• Comes when you live in internal alignment with the present moment. When you no longer argue with what is even if it is a situation that you don’t want. Accepting the is’ness of the present moment and then move on from there, your action becomes empowered from life in this state whereas from a state of resistance comes no empowerment.

He makes this point to address the ‘stick in the mud’ situation.  When you’re stuck in the mud do you just accept it and stay stuck?  Of course not, you realize that you need to get unstuck but you don’t start getting unstuck from a point of resisting the situation.  You realize and accept that you’re stuck in the mud and simply do what it takes to get unstuck.  The resistance, or anger, or anything else won’t help you get unstuck.  Of course he’s referring here to more metaphorical and mental concepts.  Obviously we have a strong flight instinct in us, and our ego’s have been built up to prefer this ‘resistance’ to negative situations.  But the reasoning again doesn’t apply to our current world, it applies to a situation where you are being attacked by a predator and that fighting like you are insane will actually save your life.  We can concede this point and be grateful that we have this built in mechanism that resists danger however we also have to realize that our minds don’t yet know that this mechanism doesn’t work for being stuck in the mental mud, the spiritual mud, until we teach it

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