There’s a saying – something about what should you do if you ever meet the Buddha on the road, the answer being ‘Kill him!’ Well, I’ve my own take on that.
To me, this has to do with the teachings or advice you expose yourself to when you listen to would-be well-wishers, do-good gurus and proselytizing pimps. It is dangerous stuff and you’d better watch out.
The Next Neale Donald Walsch
The you in me salutes the I in you
Hello Neale. This is your next book, which I’m starting on your behalf – well, on both our behalves, really. You could say that we’re both the halves of a whole, and you will say it. But not just now, all right? For now, let me put the words in your mouth; let me do the talking. You’ll join in later when it’s time.
Again, I’m coming at you from an unexpected direction. You’ll remember that first time, when you picked up that pencil and started venting. Oh boy! And just look where that led!
This time, again, it’s going to be an eye-opening experience. We’re going to share another incredible journey. It will seem stranger, more difficult than before. Instead of communicating with each other through the medium of your self, one that was familiar and comfortable, I’ll be coming at you from left field. Initially you won’t find that as easy nor as comforting. These past few years you’ve become comfortable with your new control. It will be hard to give some of that up.
Also, my voice will at first sound foreign. It’ll have a different accent, vocabulary, style, cadence and so forth and so on. It will not be as predictable. I have started writing not so much a dangerous book but in a dangerous persona. You will not trust me right away. You’ll be wanting to know that this isn’t simply some prank, and it will be a while before you recognize yourself in me.
All in good time.
But when you are ready, when you are ready to trust in the universe and open up to this dialogue, we’ll travel as far again as you’ve already traveled, in tandem. Neale, up to now you’ve given me a free ride. Sit back and relax now, you’ve earned yourself a rest. Take a breather. Let me do the pedaling for a change. Let the force be with me for a spell.
This is not to say that Neale has not yet contributed. Neale has had a lot to say already, to me. To us. And so this is the start of my response which, again, will lead to a dialogue that will lead us I don’t exactly know where. All I know is that its destination is where I want to go, be and exist, and so does Neale. And so do you.
This book, once again, will be written in the form of a dialogue. It will be, or is, a conversation between Neale and I; where I, simply, am Neale in another guise. True, I’m another and distinct person. I have a name and an address. Nevertheless, there’s no essential difference between Neale and I, just as there’s no difference between Neal and God, or God and I, or you and God, or you and I and Neale and God . . .
All this has yet to become clear. That’s what the book will be about. This conversation will be hugely beneficial for everyone concerned. Neale and I will communicate, openly, without any pre-knowledge of where our talk will lead, but trusting that the universe will lead us to where we’re meant to be. We’ll arrive there together.
Neale and I will discover that we are one – really one – and that there is absolutely no difference between us. Reading that, sharing Neal’s and my discovery, you too will see that you’re part of the equation. You too belong and are included. We are all-inclusive. We are all one.
Input that has left its mark:
Eckhart Tolle and his ‘The Power of Now’. Yes! This holds the explanation and answer to my problem with free-floating anxiety. The guts of the man’s thinking is that you live right here and now. You be in the present, since the past and the future are unreal. Unreal! Absolutely spot on. And a little easier to take than Neale Donald Walsch, although the later does take to you to incredible highs of this-ness, that-ness.
Not The Meaning of Life, but the Being
Having mentioned, a few posts back, the need for a good relationship with yourself before considering relationships with others, I was struck by a passage in ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle. Someone asks him, “Is it not true that you have to have a good relationship with yourself and love yourself before you can have a fulfilling relationship with another person?” Eckhart replies:
“If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.
“All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at peace with yourself.
“But do you need to have a relationship wit yourself at all? Why can’t you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: “I” and “myself,” subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life. In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself – “you” and “yourself” merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no “self” that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.”
That’s it in a nutshell, and nicely, I think. This mirrors what I’ve recently thought: that it is better to refrain from saying, thinking or feeling, “I am”. Best hold onto “I” or “Am”. Cause if you put them together you are doing that same sort of splitting which Tolle refers to. The doer and the action are one. Only in English should we separate the subject from the verb.
I am – no. I or am. Just beingness.
What are you listening to?
Before you consider your relationship to others, I think it’s important to have a good relationship with yourself. I don’t think that you can have a deep and satisfying partnership or friendship or family bonding unless you are healthily at peace with yourself.
But on the subject of relationships – the conventional one-on-one kind – it is interesting to think of what determines the potential of the interaction that can develop between any two people.
Watched a film/video/DVD last night (the technology changes). ‘Monsieur Ibrahim’ with Omar Sharif in his old age. French it is, and subtitled. I started to listen to the commentary that he speaks, in English, alongside the movie. Omar reminds me of my uncle (on my father’s side) – that same slow, measured way of talking. Elegant in a second-language kind of way. Even their way of chuckling is similar. So what I’m saying is that the guy resonates with me.
Robert Heinlein also, but in his own way. For me, he is a little too familiar. The man is a little too bolshy. And he has a thing about red-heads that to me seems quirky. Nevertheless, the man’s writing smokes, probably more so when I was younger. That’s another thing, the relationship you have with others can change over time, though that might be stating the obvious.
Before I forget, I must make mention of Robert’s first-ever short story, Lifeline, written in 1939. I suspect that I read it when I was young. It may have been the source of ‘Jabberwocky’, my term for a four-dimensional body. Robert’s protagonist speaks of it in this fashion:
You are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen eighties. Imagine this space-time even … as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here, and the cross-section we see appears to be a single discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is liken a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.
The third and fourth people I’d like to conjure up are Neale Donald Walsch and Eckhart Tolle. Now, because of who they are, how they write and how they appear, I’m drawn to them in different degrees. Walsch seems cocky, clever, political and materialistic. And yet his words inspire me to swoop and soar like no one else I’ve ever known has caused me to. Eckhart seems drier, more insubstantial, more matter-of-fact. He also reminds me of a gnome. A gnome whose face twitches and burps. But I like the neutral, balanced and eloquent way in which he writes. He’s like the boy next door.
You need to pick and choose among people. I think that everyone has something to say, and that you can learn from almost any other. However, you gravitate naturally towards certain individuals, and that may mean something although I’m not sure what. This affinity that you or I feel, well, the ideal, I suppose, would be for everything you learn to issue forth from inside yourself. And they say, these people that delve in self-growth and spirituality, that the answers are latent, and that all they do is help them to bubble forth from within.
So if there’s someone reading this who isn’t me . . . well, better take these words with a grain of salt too. As far as you are concerned, I’m in that category also. For me, my rantings are fine and dandy (at least they are if I just let the words flow, without trying to write prose, for God’s sake). But everyone else had better use a filter.
I guess it’s like music and musicians. There are artists that I feel a kinship with – The Doors, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix. To me they can do no wrong. There are others I admire greatly, but I cannot listen to them all day long. The Beatles, U2, Oasis. And then there are those who I know are eminently worthy – Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, David Bowie – but for some reason or another they grate in some indefinable way. So, what’s my point, and what’s the answer?
Listen to or read everyone. Give them all a chance (and here I’m going to have to give Deepak Chopra a chance – the look of the guy!). We’re all branches on the vine. But listen more, or heed, those who speak more closely to or from your particular heart. And in the final analysis, hopefully, you’ll come to the stage of hearing first-hand, from your own mouth, in your own style and school, those important lessons that you will find you already, miraculously know.
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