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.

The ego is: The Grinch that Stole Christmas

“Peace on Earth, good will toward men . . .” so says Luke 2:14. And this is that season, isn’t it? Of course, as we look around the earth we see very little of either. Why is that? Why is it so hard to find peace and good will? Oh to be sure, there are many who feign peace and goodwill. They appear to be the “good” people, but too often it is an act; an ego defense. So good and evil are really two sides of the same coin- some sort of compensation for personal, societal, or national pain.
So where did human kind go wrong? How did the wheels come off the world’s bus in such a profound way?

Believe it or not, it all starts around 3 to 5 years of age in each individual. As we learn language we develop two distinct styles of communication. One style is designed to communicate with other people. But the real problem lies in a type of speech called “ego-centric” speech. What is ego-centric speech? It is a running commentary that children of around two years of age have that describes what they are doing and why they are doing it. At this age, the child is acting on impulses from the limbic system and nonverbal emotional messages from the limbic and right hemispheric formations. The child assumes there must be some logical explanation as to why they are following these impulses. So they use their newly discovered talent for language to explain why they are doing what they are doing. In other words, ego-centric communication is an elaborate form of rationalization for the ongoing behavior that is being dictated by more primitive and nonverbal parts of the brain.

Well, things get pretty scary at around 3 to 5 years of age. This ego-centric communication becomes internalized. This overt thinking gradually becomes internalized eventually becoming completely hidden to everyone but the commentator, a five year old child. At this point the child is not only speaking in words, but is thinking in words. This ego-centered speech becomes more and more complex and more and more addictive to the point where as adults we cannot shut off the constant commentary.

What’s at issue here is not that we talk to ourselves, but the quality of the communication. The impetus for this internalized view of the world is impulsive, emotional, and self serving. The quality of this does not change with age. The internal commentator is concerned with one and only one thing – self enhancement!
This is bad enough, but then something even more sinister happens. Because this internal commentator is so ubiquitous and continuous, we make a fatal assumption. We believe that this internal voice is me! By identifying with this voice and giving it credence we become what only can be described as “lost souls.” We are forever in the grip of the emotional distortions of a five year old who is concerned only with him or herself.

This internalized ego-centric speech becomes what many writers and teachers call the “ego-mind,” the “false self,” the “thinker.” It’s proud, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, and most everything it says is bullshit. It is easy to see why there is no peace on earth or goodwill toward men.

Witness Thought Transformation™ will set the world free from the voice in the head that is masquerading as “me.” It is simple, it is fast, and it is a revolution. To hear some testimonials about it, go to my home page and set yourself free from ego-centric speech.

Learning Annex

I did my regularly scheduled Learning Annex workshop yesterday at the Creative Chakra Spa in Marina Del Rey. As always Sandy was a wonderful host. We had a great group. Many seemed to get it. It was my first opportunity to use my revise power point program. I liked the new format and it seemed to have a better impact. Those of you who attended, feel free to comment here.

New Name

Hi everyone. I have changed the name of my blog to more closely relate to what I am up top these days. Those of you who follow my work know about my thought watching technique. I call it Witness Thought Transformation™ or WTT. Also, it’s time to make this blog less preachy/teachy and more newsy. So enjoy the new format and emphasis!

Thinking vs. Knowing

"The Most Direct Means To Eternal Bliss" is the name of the book by Michael Langford. It is a quirky little book, but boy is it powerful. The ideas are expressed directly and to the point. I have to thank Del Martinis for calling it to my attention. In the book, Langford makes the point that Thinking and our addiction to thinking have convinced us that conceptual knowing is the same thing as insight-awareness and direct knowing.

If you study your mental activity carefully, you will soon see that there is a distinction between this knowing-insight-awareness and thinking or conceptualizing. Another distinction that we might make is the difference between thinking and intuitive knowing. When we intuit, we just know. There is no internal verbalization or dialogue, we just know.

I have long come to the conclusion that what we intuit is the only thing of value in our heads. Thinking is of no intrinsic value. Oh, it has its place. It is a tool, kind of like an index finger. My left index finger has immense value and utility, but I would never ask for its advice. However we are skirting the real problem with thought.

The voice in our head that we think is me talking to me is not a me that lives in a familiar "I" position in the head. That "me" is a concept Langford says, "If your native language is English and you speak in English and you write in English, those same English words in your mind are thoughts."

This "me" that speaks to us from inside is nothing more than an artifact of the ego that produces a thing we call ourselves. What is humorous about looking at it the way Langford words it is that if you are a native Spanish speaker, your self is probably Mexican. While, since I am an English speaker, my self is an American.
This is really getting absurd if you think about it. How can this so called self be linked to a culture? It can't be. That would make no sense. So the entire idea of a self linked to the voice in our heads collapses and the ego is exposed for what it is - a fraud masquerading as a so-called self.

I had never thought of this English/Spanish twist until I read Langford's book and started playing with his English in your head idea. But it sure helped put into perspective this lie that humanity has lived with. Finally, thought itself has no inherent intelligence. It is a maze of concepts that the ego uses to keep us trapped in the belief that we are the ultimate concept - a self.

The sad fact is that this deception keeps us from knowing who we really are which is the One - the SELF.

SuccessTracs

The last couple of months have been very busy. I want to announce the availability of my inteview with SuccessTracs. You can click on the link to the right to get a free copy of the mp3 file. It ran about an hour. In it I reveal what happened to me that led to all of this and my work on the voice in the head. It really is the story of how Witness Thought Tranformation was born and how it works. I hope you listen to it and give me any feedback or ask any questions.

In case you have never heard of SuccessTracs, it is part of Harv Eker's Peak Potentials organization.

A Crisis of Ego

“There is such terrible darkness within me as if everything is dead. It has been like this more or less since the beginning of the work.” Imagine yourself feeling like you had been called of God to do a Holy Work only to be filled with darkness from the effort. The person quoted above is shockingly Mother Teresa from a recently published book that, against her wishes, exposes her private letters.

Ironically, I have often posed the following question in my workshops, “Did Mother Teresa minister to the poor in India because she was called or because she was trying to prove to her father or mother that she was good enough?”

This new book answers my rhetorical question – she was called and then ego needs took over and it became about whether or not she was good enough. She recounts in her letters that after Pope Pius XII died, she prayed to him for proof that God was pleased with her work. In short she wanted approval.

Those of you familiar with my Lion/Unicorn model of relationships you can indentify Mother Teresa right away. She is a Lion. While Unicorns are seeking safety, Lions seek approval. Where does this come from? When we are children, we all have unmet emotional needs. Unicorns need more safety than they seem to get, while Lions need more approval from parental interaction than they perceive they get. When we grow up, the burden of supplying these emotional needs is transferred to our spouse, pastor, therapist, God, or whoever meets the frame of reference of that parent in our lives. This is a trick of the limbic system in the brain, the monkey brain. It cannot tell the difference between Dad or God or Mom or one's wife. So the burden of emotional fulfillment gets put on someone in our lives who represents that early parental relationship.

So for Mother Teresa, what started as a “call of God” turned into the effort of her ego-mind to fulfill her unmet emotional need for approval. This twist of purpose was without a doubt the source of her experience of internal darkness.  Her work was hijacked by her limbic system – that ego-mind. And as we know from scripture, that work is like dirty rags in the side of the Lord. Ironically, the very Lord she sought to serve became the parent from which she also sought approval thereby negating the fulfillment of doing the work with pure motives and innocent perception.
The author of this tell all book argues that the “depth of Mother Teresa’s spiritual suffering increases her saintliness.” No, in fact it increased her unconsciousness. The revelations in Mother Teresa’s letters show that the “wages of sin is death.” In other words, when we don’t get it and allow ego motives to pollute our lives, spiritual death is the result, and darkness ensues.

The lesson of the life of Mother Teresa is that good works don’t make us a saint – awareness does. She was unaware of her ego motives. They took over the work, and suffering resulted. The story of Mother Teresa therefore becomes a cautionary tale and another example of how the “no pain- no gain” philosophy at the center of religion is a blind alley that leads to spiritual death.

Only by becoming aware of the tricks of the ego-mind can we truly inherit the life laid out before us and do the work we are meant to do. It is a life free of hidden motives and agendas, free of the need to prove ourselves worthy.

EastWest Book Store

I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who came to my workshop Sunday at the EastWest book store in Mountain View, California. What a fantastic book store! Wow. We had a great group and I look forward to corresponding with you all in the future. The bookstore itself was well prepared and they made me feel most welcome. Even the introduction I received was well done. So thanks to EastWest for a most successful event!

The World of the Flesh vs.The World of the Spirit

 
I am currently writing a book about awakening as it is explained in the New Testament. One of the puzzles of Paul’s writings is his tendency to have one foot in one world and the other foot in an entirely different world. Elaine Pagels explores this dilemma in her book, The Gnostic Paul. These two worlds that Paul speaks about are the world according to the “flesh” and the world according to the “Spirit.” What are these two worlds?

The world of the Spirit seems obvious. In us and all around us is this invisible “Kingdom” that we can’t seem to see, but the mystics of the ages have seen it plainly. The world of the flesh is very different. The Greek word that is translated as “flesh” means literally “the meat that hangs on the bones.” Paul uses this term to mean that which is superficial – those things we see on the surface or what is obvious. We are in the world of the flesh when we are taking things literally. Paul tries to explain this in Roman’s chapter 4. Paul says that if we look at Abraham according to the flesh, or in other words the standards of the external world, we see that his “works” make him a man among men. Abraham was a success by all earthly measures. What are works? In the Greek of Paul’s letters, it means labors or doing.

But Paul goes on to say that according to the world of the Spirit none of this mattered. What he did as a man was of no account. His material accomplishments were of no importance. It was his connection to Spiritual reality that made him “justified by faith.” Faith by the way does not mean convincing ourselves of something we hope. It means confidence. When we turn inward and discover the Truth of who we are, we become confident because it is knowledge that cannot be taken away since it grows out of direct experience. If you eat hot peppers you don’t need to hope they are spicy. If you never have another pepper, your faith in their spiciness will be unshaken. This is what Paul is saying about Abraham. His certainty of the world according to the Spirit set in motion the process of spiritual vindication very much like a condemned man being acquitted. I am using Paul here since it is all over my desk at the moment. But I could have referred to Ramana Maharshi, the Buddha, or any number of awakened teachers who have said the same thing using other words.

Self-realization or enlightenment or whatever it is to have the Truth revealed to us comes by Grace. Paul hammers this point. It is a gift the timing of which cannot be calculated in the world of the flesh. To prepare for the ultimate, we are told by sages for thousands of years to surrender, to give up. Only when the false self collapses will the true Self be revealed.

One of the concepts I try to get across in my counseling sessions and workshops is the idea of Presence. If we go back to our catechism or whatever religious training we may have had, we are taught that God has three characteristics: all powerful, all knowing, and Omni-present. Omni-present means infinitely present. A good way to think about this is that we, human beings, are in existence, but God is Existence Itself. The point of view of Existence Itself is the world of the Spirit that Paul talks about.

Think of it another way. Your life is a wonderful novel called “You.” But who or what is reading the story of “You?” It certainly can’t be the little “you” that you think you are. From the point of view of “you,” life is filled with ups and downs: politics, pathos, and pathology. This is the world of the flesh.

From the Reader's point of view, nothing in the novel is actually real, serious, or threatening. That is the world of the Spirit. That’s why Paul tells us that from this point of view there is no law, there is no condemnation, and there is no death. Just because the character in a novel dies, it does mean the reader dies too!
In our spiritual pursuits and practices, we constantly straddle the line between these two worlds. We need to clearly distinguish what practices are of the flesh or are focused on the external, superficial world and what practices take us deep into and closer to the world of the Spirit. Below are several comparative examples of each. My criteria for making these distinctions are simple. Is the purpose of the practice to enhance the world of the flesh or deepen one’s experience of the Spirit? 

The World of the Flesh/ The World of the Spirit
Goal setting/ Surrender
Law of Attraction/ Non-attachment
Affirmations/ Attention to what is
Hypnotism, reprogramming,
psychotherapy, mental manipulation/ Deep insight, witnessing, self-observation
Prayer, supplication/Radical acceptance
Self improvement/No-self, self-transcendence
Creating, co-creating reality/Seeing reality
Individual human potential/Oneness, Unity
New Age practices/Stillness beyond fascination
7 habits, success principles/Living in Harmony with what is
Positive thinking/Disidentification with thinking

So we need to make a decision. Are we going to live in the world of the flesh or the Spirit? The world of the flesh produces a spiritual practice based on self enhancement. In other words, the target of our spiritual practice is the betterment of the objective world of form – our life situation. But there is a hopeless truth in this. The destination is death. The story of “you” always ends with a funeral. So if you have worked diligently for a better "story," it pretty much always ends the same way.
For the Reader of the story of “you” with feet planted firmly in the world according to the Spirit, there is abundant, never ending, everlasting life. Because when the pages of the book are closed, the Reader opens another story and another in a never ending saga of Life unfolding; the Divine Expression revealing its own Self to Itself through the story of Bob, and Suzy, and Benedict Arnold, and the bird on my roof and the scorpion in the desert and the rock.
The Reader is our Natural State. It is who we really are. The world of the flesh will never satisfy. Meanwhile the world according to the Spirit is life and peace.
 
 

Being More Present

So many people these days are telling me they need to be more present. They need to be in the now moment. They want to be grounded in the present moment. I tell them something that often times surprises them. You are present. You are the very definition of presence. The problem is that we have become experts at leaving presence.

The key to staying present is so simple it is absurd. Pay attention! When we pay attention, we are present. We are here. We experience now. So how is it we stop paying attention to now? That is the simple part – we think. When we are thinking, we can only be thinking of the remembered past or the imagined future. So by definition, thinking takes us away from presence. So when we go up in our heads and start believing in and identifying with our thoughts we go away. It is just that simple.

Of course there is a terrible price that we pay and that is suffering. For when we go into our heads, one thought leads to the next. Soon when are into a story then into drama. This results in feeling like hell inside. We want to get out of hell, so we struggle. We react, we fight, and we beg God to end our suffering. We turn to drugs and alcohol. We want a different sex partner. We desperately rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic in an effort to change our internal state. None of this was necessary if we had only stayed present.

Thinking is this terrible compulsion we have to take the peace of the present moment and turn it into an intolerable experience. Such is the human condition. Oh, and by the way, we are going to turn it into an intolerable experience for those closest to us also.

Try this experiment for a moment. Stay present and search for the past. Where is the past? Is it in your current experience? What were you doing five minutes ago? Is that in your current experience? No, of course not. Five minutes ago is a function of your head. Inside your head is this psychological experience we call the remembered past. It doesn’t exist in the present moment.

Now staying present, try to find the future? Look around. Do you see the future? Did you know that in the now there never is a future? The future literally and figuratively never happens. Now is the only thing that ever happens. Try as you might, you can only experience the past or the future in your head. Therefore it is not real!

In our current experience, there seem to be what we call memories of the past. Who cares about them? The present is so overwhelming, such a perfect Divine expression, who would ever want to waste the present by recreating the past in their head? The same thing with the future. The imagined future is a place of fear and stress. Who wants to leave “the peace that passes all understanding” to start speculating about an uncertain future? Does anticipation affect the future? It gives us the illusion of control. But ultimately we have no real control. It is the trick of the ego-mind to think so, and yet it grips us, moment by moment.

The past and the future do not exist in the present. But there is something wonderful that does. It is the Presence of Life. The Truth of what we have always been looking for. The fulfillment that was supposed to be just around the corner is here now, if we will only look now. Want to be more present? Pay very close attention to what is. Marvel at its beauty and perfection with all of its adventure, and pathos, and pain, and joy. Life might just turn out to be the heaven you were longing for.

Life Happens - Action vs. Doing

For some time now there has been a popular bumper sticker that says, “(Blank) happens.” We all know what goes in the blank. If we place the words “Life” in the blank, we get “Life happens.” Let me ask you a question, is Life “happening” to you or are you “doing” Life? This is an important distinction since in the one instance we are being lived by Life. In the other instance we have control over Life. This is action vs. doing.

In the dictionary, action is a noun that is defined by words like exertion, process, or activity. Doing is always defined with an infinitive “to” in front of it. The “to” takes the place of a subject or person that is doing the doing. Being the “doer” brings with it an enormous responsibility. We have to anticipate the coming of each moment. This means we must constantly be projecting ourselves into an imagined future. We must get ready, we must take control, and we must “make it happen.” The illusion of our efforts is that sometimes this does seem to work. Work harder – you make more money, if you are vigilant, you avoid accidents, if you look forward, you see obstacles.

However, the doer lives a miserable life. The doer lives with the illusion of control that the world is run by cause and effect. If we want the kind of life we want, we must constantly be the cause. If things don’t turn out the way we want, we must have failed. Or we resort to saying, “(blank) happens.” Doing requires a “doer” doing the doing. The ego wants to take credit for this doing. We point with pride to our doing. After all, don’t we all believe that, “my doing is better than your doing?” Of course, the illusion of doing collapses when you are run over by a truck or are diagnosed with cancer or your child is killed by a stray bullet. Where was the cause and effect in that?

The illusion of doing ran smack into a road block back in the 80’s. It happened in a Berkley research lab where scientists found that our awareness of doing happens a half second after action has actually started. Literally, what was discovered was that action is taken and then the ego-mind steps up to take credit for the effort.
Try this little experiment. Try to predict the exact moment you will next stand up or sit down or go the kitchen or scratch your elbow. Really analyze the mental process that goes into making an effort to take action at any given time. Unless you love the “doer’s” lie, you will discover even though you planned action or thought about taking it, decision, and action are never simultaneous. What actually happens is that we discover ourselves in the process of taking action. You may have been thinking of getting up or scratching, you may have planned to start the car, but the actual moment of volition cannot be experienced!

Life happens. Life does not need a doer. The doer is an illusion. For all of the enormous head of steam we build up to conquer Life, to control it, to live it, it is all for not. The shoe is on the other foot. The doer is being done, and there is nothing any of us can “do” about it.

Action happens. When we take action, we don’t rehearse, we don’t plan. We don’t anticipate. Action is the spontaneous expression of Life. It will be expressed. Action has an intuitive sense about it once you get the illusion of the “doer” out of the way.

But does that mean we just give up? No, we can’t give up. We are going to do what we do. Action will happen. Life will happen. But what this all does is to put us in a situation where it is no longer quite so serious. Life is an “E” ticket that comes with the illusion of doing. What could be more exciting! When we read a great novel, we become identified with the hero or heroine. Now, that makes for an exciting read. However, we never forget that we are the reader. In Life, we have forgotten who we really are. And in doing so, we have become invested in our version of an outcome. The illusory “doer” emerges along with much misery and suffering.

We cannot give up. We have been given a role and we are going to play our role. But Life is expressing itself spontaneously without our version of cause and effect. Knowing that, we relax and surrender to the process of living. Without the illusion of “doing,” each moment is unfettered by expectations and anticipations. We begin to see What Is as the Divine Expression – the only expression of Life.

When we stop worrying about what to do next, we are free to notice What Is. We find that What Is is enough. It is perfect and sufficient. The fulfillment that we have always been struggling for has been within our grasp all along. Living Life requires none of striving, struggle, or toil.

What is the purpose of Life? Life itself. How then shall we live? It is happening right now. Have you noticed? Living is happening. Life happens. Forget doing. Become involved in the action of living. They are mutually exclusive. Doing presupposes that Now is not enough. Action is the process of living Life without ever really knowing what will happen next. If that frightens you, perhaps it’s time to question your assumptions. The tragedy of the “doer” is that the action of Life has passed by by the time the “doer” becomes aware of it.

The awakened teacher Byron Katie says in her new book, A Thousand Names for Joy, “The only time you suffer is when you believe a thought that argues with reality.” The “doer” is an argument with reality. “Once you no longer believe your own thoughts, you act without doing anything, because there is no other possibility.”

Passivity is not Spirituality

“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.

The Voice in Your Head

The Hijacking of the Limbic System

Perception - Seeing is Believing