Thursday, March 29, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
“The Secret” and the Identified Thinker
(from my March Newsletter)
Buddha said. “We are what we think. All that we are arises through our thoughts. With our thoughts we create the world.” Wow! This sounds like powerful stuff. All we have to do is harness our thoughts and we are cool. We can fix our relationships, create wealth, and turn life into that wonderful fulfilling thing we keep reading and hearing about. Right?
Even as this is being written, tens of thousands are being enticed to learn “the Secret.” What is the secret anyway? It is the law of attraction. This is “manifesting” living under a different guise. So all we need to do is to control our thoughts, think good thoughts, set a goal, and visualize it and everything turns out okay. This is better than that old religious “pie in the sky.” This is pie in the head!
But before we run off thinking that the Buddha has given us a recipe for the next new Cadillac in our driveway, consider this quote, also from the Buddha, “The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze.”
Now if we put these two quotes together, we come to an inescapable conclusion. Our thoughts create a world of illusion, “an alluring mirage.” This would seem to indicate that there is a deeper reality at work than those involved with New Age multilevel marketing want us to believe. They say all we need is to turn our dreams over to the game show host that lives in our heads and we can get what we want, when we want it. Want a better life? Get a better game show host.
What if your lot in life is tragedy? What if you are stricken with disease, pain, or poverty? Well this simply means that you have not pumped yourself up often enough with the right affirmation. You have allowed negative thinking to metastasize into a bad story in your life. Imagine the horror and guilt of someone who is struggling with enormous challenges only to be told by their new age friends that none of this would have happened if their thinkin’ hadn’t been stinkin’.
But let’s turn this thing on its head for a moment. If thoughts create reality and attract good into our lives, then why is the world such a nasty place, and why are you and I so arrogant and self-serving? Could it be that the world of thought itself is the problem? Could it be that our true calling is to analyze the thinking that is already there?
When we stand aside and watch the voice in our head we are appalled at the hostility, the judgment, and the self-enhancement that motivates the voice. But we cannot stand aside. We imbibe the voice as “me.” We identify it as ourselves. As we do this, we become the content of our thoughts and we look out through our eyes and we see what Paul called the “world of the flesh.” Everything we see is drama! When we identify with thought, we are what we think. All that we are indeed arises from thought. When we identify with thought, we quite simply have no idea what we are actually thinking since that “thought” masquerades as an illusory “me” that lives in our heads, and we pay no further attention.
Perhaps the problem of the identified thinker is best summed up in Genesis 3:22 where God throws Adam and Eve out of the Garden. In The Message version of the Bible it goes this way: “God said, ‘The Man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything, ranging from good to evil. What if he now should reach out and take fruit from the Tree-of-Life and eat, and live forever? Never—this cannot happen!’" There is a basic incompatibility between “knowing” and “living.” The identified thinker knows, judges, and thinks, “I am my head.” It convinces us that we “know everything.”
If we remain the identified thinker “The Secret” will morph into greed and desire cloaked in spirituality. The first principles of discovering the true Self are surrender, acceptance, and compassion. “What is” is the Divine expression. Life unfolds in each moment inviting us to pay close attention to It. No one wants to talk about THAT secret. Radical humility is not a topic for a bestselling book or DVD.
Ask yourself this question. Do any of the Awakened Masters of the ages recommend mind stuff as a path to spiritual awakening? So what motivates this effort - “s”elf interest, which is exactly what must die if we are to Live.
Buddha said. “We are what we think. All that we are arises through our thoughts. With our thoughts we create the world.” Wow! This sounds like powerful stuff. All we have to do is harness our thoughts and we are cool. We can fix our relationships, create wealth, and turn life into that wonderful fulfilling thing we keep reading and hearing about. Right?
Even as this is being written, tens of thousands are being enticed to learn “the Secret.” What is the secret anyway? It is the law of attraction. This is “manifesting” living under a different guise. So all we need to do is to control our thoughts, think good thoughts, set a goal, and visualize it and everything turns out okay. This is better than that old religious “pie in the sky.” This is pie in the head!
But before we run off thinking that the Buddha has given us a recipe for the next new Cadillac in our driveway, consider this quote, also from the Buddha, “The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze.”
Now if we put these two quotes together, we come to an inescapable conclusion. Our thoughts create a world of illusion, “an alluring mirage.” This would seem to indicate that there is a deeper reality at work than those involved with New Age multilevel marketing want us to believe. They say all we need is to turn our dreams over to the game show host that lives in our heads and we can get what we want, when we want it. Want a better life? Get a better game show host.
What if your lot in life is tragedy? What if you are stricken with disease, pain, or poverty? Well this simply means that you have not pumped yourself up often enough with the right affirmation. You have allowed negative thinking to metastasize into a bad story in your life. Imagine the horror and guilt of someone who is struggling with enormous challenges only to be told by their new age friends that none of this would have happened if their thinkin’ hadn’t been stinkin’.
But let’s turn this thing on its head for a moment. If thoughts create reality and attract good into our lives, then why is the world such a nasty place, and why are you and I so arrogant and self-serving? Could it be that the world of thought itself is the problem? Could it be that our true calling is to analyze the thinking that is already there?
When we stand aside and watch the voice in our head we are appalled at the hostility, the judgment, and the self-enhancement that motivates the voice. But we cannot stand aside. We imbibe the voice as “me.” We identify it as ourselves. As we do this, we become the content of our thoughts and we look out through our eyes and we see what Paul called the “world of the flesh.” Everything we see is drama! When we identify with thought, we are what we think. All that we are indeed arises from thought. When we identify with thought, we quite simply have no idea what we are actually thinking since that “thought” masquerades as an illusory “me” that lives in our heads, and we pay no further attention.
Perhaps the problem of the identified thinker is best summed up in Genesis 3:22 where God throws Adam and Eve out of the Garden. In The Message version of the Bible it goes this way: “God said, ‘The Man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything, ranging from good to evil. What if he now should reach out and take fruit from the Tree-of-Life and eat, and live forever? Never—this cannot happen!’" There is a basic incompatibility between “knowing” and “living.” The identified thinker knows, judges, and thinks, “I am my head.” It convinces us that we “know everything.”
If we remain the identified thinker “The Secret” will morph into greed and desire cloaked in spirituality. The first principles of discovering the true Self are surrender, acceptance, and compassion. “What is” is the Divine expression. Life unfolds in each moment inviting us to pay close attention to It. No one wants to talk about THAT secret. Radical humility is not a topic for a bestselling book or DVD.
Ask yourself this question. Do any of the Awakened Masters of the ages recommend mind stuff as a path to spiritual awakening? So what motivates this effort - “s”elf interest, which is exactly what must die if we are to Live.
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