Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Identification with Your Mind

3 months ago, I came across this book. The title of the book is ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle. It was shown in Oprah Show and this book has become an international bestseller. It is a guide to spiritual enlightment (it is not creating a new religion, trust me) but what fascinated me is that he said a lot of conflict, war and other predicaments are cause by our mind. In other words, identification with your mind. This what Eckhart Tolle says.
“Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.
The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with being and identify with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested – at one with Being. Enlightment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is.
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other”. You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By ‘forget’, I mean that you no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
I am not sure whether this book is kind of atheist or spiritual book.

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