A Stroke of Insight

Every now and then something really important appears on the internet. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find it. But when I do, I want to share it. You must watch this video and then think how it applies to Witness Thought Transformation. Click the title and have your life changed!

All my best,

Mark

Buddhists Blunder

There is a wide spread belief that Buddhists can do no wrong. This latest bunch of violence aimed at Tibetan liberation is wrong headed and potentially exposes Lama Buddhism as a fraud. But not so fast! The Dalai Lama has stepped up to the plate and shown wisdom in denouncing any form of violence. In fact he has threatened to resign if the nonsense doesn’t stop.

So what is going on here? Should we all want social justice? Don’t we have the right to fight for world peace? If you want to live from your ego, of course you have all kinds of rights. This reminds me of that well worn phrase; “Be the Change.”

Being the change means changing from the inside out. It does not mean rushing to the Chinese border and having a bloody confrontation with their army.

Shame on those Buddhists. They should know better!

The Super Bowl of Life: Go Deep, Go Long

Yes, this is inspired by the Giant’s Super Bowl win. They started the season with losses and came into the playoffs as tremendous underdogs. But they won. We think of going deep and going long as tactics used to win football games. Having a running game is important, but these days it usually serves to set up the passing game. So every team must be able to go deep and go long to be a serious threat.

Life is very much like that. In order to win, we must go deep and stay at a depth for a long time. Today, many of us are confusing money, success, and achievement with depth. When I tell people that they need to go deep and go long, I am often told that the message is “off-putting.” Few want to answer the call to depth. Many of us have confused depth with being very serious about our superficiality.

So I wanted to put this going deep into perspective. Perhaps some sobering facts might serve to motivate.

Every year over two thousand children, most under the age of five, die as a result of child abuse. 18% of us are alcoholics or alcohol abusers while 8% are drug users. 816,000 of us attempt suicide every year and about 33,000 of us succeed. If ever there was a case for going deep, those statistics tell it all. But I could go on. I could go on to the divorce rate, teen pregnancy, and a depressing number of other topics.

The bottom line is that the world we live in is not in good shape. It is not in good shape because people are acting out their pain. We lie, murder, we are greedy, judgmental, intolerant, materialistic. By the way, the murder rate is about 5.7 for every 100,000 people.

Now you are saying to yourself, that’s not me. I’m not a murderer. I don’t hit my kids. It is what happens inside of us that makes all the difference. The world on the outside will only change if we each individually take responsibility for what is on the inside. But we don’t want to look inside. Why? Because there is pain in there! Inside of many seemingly very nice people are thoughts of violence, hostility, anger, rage, hatred, and enormous judgment, not to mention fear and an overwhelming sense of rejection.

Witness Thought Transformation™ frees us from the tyranny of thought and releases us into the flow of life. From this vantage point we can witness the pain instead of becoming overwhelmed by it. Witnessing our thoughts takes us deep and long in a way that is not burdensome, but is uplifting and fulfilling.

I want to tell you the benefit of going deep and going long. It is a life of peace, free of struggle, without the need to become something or achieve something to feel like a complete being. Mastering Thought releases us from drama, ego patterns, and the need to prove something. With clean motivation, we can now step into the world and make a real difference.
I am a therapist. I know your pain. I have seen every kind of misery. I know the only way out is going deep and going long.

Do you find this message “off-putting?” Good! The more uncomfortable the better. No one in the history of human kind has ever gone deep and gone long until they were very uncomfortable with going nowhere.

The Witness Consciousness Two-Step

I am finding that Witness Consciousness has two distinct steps to it. The first of course is the initial thought watching. This leads to a huge breakthrough in awareness and a “knowing” that is easy to experience. But then I have observed that without practice people go back into their ego and the drama of the world. The knowing that comes with the initial breakthrough never leaves however.

This requires step number two. In a way, this is more work than the first step. Practice! Yes, we need to keep watching our thoughts in order to stop the slide back into the ego mind and the patters of unconsciousness that we all have. This requires a sustained effort at “watching” over a period of a year or two until it becomes second nature. That’s why building a community of watchers is so important in order to support the practice.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this two-step process?

Video Book Review

Here is my video book review of "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle.

Click here to play video...

Open Mouth insert Britney

Lord I apologize, but I just can't resist a comment on the recent Dr. Phil, Britney Spears debacle. For those of you who have been lost on a Pacific Island for the last few weeks, let me bring you up to date. Britney, it seems, had some sort of mental issue and ended up in Cedars-Sinai for what I assumed was a 72 hour hold. This is what we call in the shrink business a 5150. Whatever it was, the family reportedly asked Dr. Phil as a personal favor to visit her in the hospital and see if he could lend her a hand.

Two things happened that prompt my need to comment. First, Dr. Phil made plans for a TV show featuring Britney's misery. Second, he issued a statement to the press on leaving the hospital that assessed her mental condition. Both of these actions were huge mistakes and an incredible breach of trust in any one's book.

Let me just say that Dr. Phil is no longer licensed as a psychologist. So he can trample all over some one's privacy and confidentiality with impunity. So he is not subject to sanction by some licensing board somewhere. He is a private citizen behaving in what ever way one behaves these days.

But let me comment on the two things he did. First of all, planning a TV show was grossly premature. The respectful thing to do would be to tuck that idea in Dr. Phil's back pocket until such time as Britney had recovered. Then a show about the whole affair would be helpful to people going through similar issues. But to plan a show as some kind of intervention is a little like allowing Frontline to do a special on your wife's visit to the gynecologist. All this could do is further Britney's pain and embarrassment.

Secondly and perhaps equal in importance was Dr. Phil's commenting to the press. The bottom line is that any comment is a gross breach of faith and trust. He should have kept his mouth shut if he really wanted to help. He should have known that anything he said would have just made the situation worse. I understand that as I write this, he is vehemently defending what he said. Well, if he had remained silent, there would be nothing to defend.

As a licensed therapist, I take my legal and ethical obligation for confidentiality seriously. But as a human being I know when I am stepping one someone else to move up the ladder. Dr. Phil may not have set out to exploit the situation with Briney, but he did - pure and simple.

The Secret without The Sacred

Life has its ups and downs. Life has its pleasure and pain. But it is all the Divine Expression. I hate to use the word God since so many have a reaction to it, so let me use the term the Divine Expression. The Divine Expression is life. There is nothing in existence that is not the Divine Expression. What we like is the Divine Expression. What we hate is the Divine Expression. Everything – the infinity of the present moment, the expanse of the universe, the neighbor that irritates us – all is the Divine Expression.

To say that Life is Sacred is accurate. It is like the ocean. The ocean has depth, but on its surface there are waves and swells, highs and lows. When the ocean is active there are white caps and steep drops to the furrow between the waves. Regardless of the surface of the ocean, all is still the ocean. To say that waves are the ocean and the troughs between waves are not the ocean is nonsensical. The ocean is the ocean and the Divine Expression is the Divine Expression.

Our lives have highs and lows – pleasure and pain – blessings and misfortunes. All of these things are the Divine Expression. The question here is really our willingness to allow the Divine to be the Divine. This leads me to the Secret, the Law of Attraction and all of that.

Without the Sacred, the Secret, goal setting, and attracting wealth – all moves us away from the Divine Expression of Now. They become the ego’s efforts to gain the upper hand, get an advantage. Until we realize the Divine, all of these other efforts move us away from What Is. In fact, it is a clever way the ego has of saying “no” to the Divine. “Yes, Lord, I realize the present moment is the Divine Expression, but I am waiting for a better moment. Thank you very much.” It is hard to express in words the arrogance of this attitude.

The Divine Expression can be realized through surrender, radical humility, and true acceptance of What Is. These are characteristics that are totally foreign to our thinking. So we want the Secret without paying any price for the Sacred. Surrender, humility, and acceptance don’t help us advance or get what we want. After all, if God didn’t want us to get what we want, why would he give us two big hands to grab it with? Right?

The fact that the Secret is secondary to the Sacred as a principle of life should be self-evident, but sadly it’s not. To discover the Sacred the destruction of everything “we” hold dear must take place. The false self, the ego and its tricks must be exposed for what they are – diversionary tactics.

There is sweetness to the Sacred. It satisfies fully. Mastering Thought through Witness Thought Transformation™ opens the portal to the Scared. Without the Sacred we are convinced the problem with our minds is negative thought and self limiting beliefs. Through the lens that we get from Witnessing our Thoughts, we realize the problem is the mind itself and our fascination with thought.

Can we still set goals? Work hard for our dreams? Try to change the world – our personal world? Of course. But paradoxically, there is something about realizing the Perfection of the Sacred that makes the effort all the more satisfying. It’s like a horse and carriage. The Sacred is the horse that pulls the carriage containing the Secret. You can’t have one without the other. The Sacred is the Secret of the Secret.