T H E  P U R P O S E  O F  T H I S  B O O K
Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner
flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of
plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human
beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become
like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of
consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and
materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in
place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality? The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of
the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers Buddha,
Jesus, and others, not all of them known were humanitys early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings. A widespread flowering
was not yet possible at that time, and their message became lar gely
misunderstood and often greatly distorted. It certainly did not transform
human behavior , except in a small minority of people. Is humanity more ready now than at the time of those early teachers? Why should this be so? What can you do, if anything, to bring about or
accelerate this inner shift? What is it that characterizes the old egoic state
of consciousness, and by what signs is the new emer ging consciousness
recognized? These and other essential questions will be addressed in this
book. More important, this book itself is a transformational device that
has
come out of the arising new consciousness. The ideas and concepts
presented here may be important, but they are secondary . They are no
more than signposts pointing toward awakening. As you read, a shift
takes place within you. This books main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your
mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in
consciousness; that is to say , to awaken. In that sense, this book is not
interesting. Interesting means you can keep your distance, play around
with ideas and concepts in your mind, agree or disagree. This book is
about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will bemeaningless. It can only awaken those who are ready . Not everyone is
ready yet, but many are, and with each person who awakens, the
momentum in the collective consciousness grows, and it becomes easier
for others. If you dont know what awakening means, read on. Only by
awakening can you know the true meaning of that word. A glimpse is
enough to initiate the awakening process, which is irreversible. For
some, that glimpse will come while reading this book. For many others
who may not even have realized it, the process has already begun. This
book will help them recognize it. For some, it may have begun through
loss or suf fering; for others, through coming into contact with a spiritual
teacher or teaching, through reading The Power of Now or some other
spiritually alive and therefore transformational book or any combination
of the above. If the awakening process has begun in you , the reading of
this book will accelerate and intensify it. An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened
you, the ego as it thinks, speaks and acts, as well as the recognition of the
collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the
unawakened state. That is why this book shows the main aspects of the
ego and how they operate in the individual as well as in the collective. This is important for two related reasons: The first is that unless you
know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, you wont
recognize it, and it will trick you into identifying with it again and again. This means it takes you over , an impostor pretending to be you. The
second reason is that the act of recognition itself is one of the ways in
which awakening happens. When you recognize the unconsciousness in
you, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising
consciousness, is awakening. Y ou cannot fight against the ego and win,
just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is
all that is necessary . Y ou are that light.C H A P T E R  O N E  T H E  F L O W E R I N G  O F
H U M A N  C O N S C I O U S N E S S
EVOCA TION Earth, 1 14 million years ago, one morning just after
sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive
the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event that heralds an
evolutionary transformation in the life of plants, the planet had already
been covered in vegetation for millions of years. The first flower
probably did not survive for long, and flowers must have remained rare
and isolated phenomena, since conditions were most likely not yet
favorable for a widespread flowering to occur . One day , however , a
critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an
explosion of color and scent all over the planet if a perceiving
consciousness had been there to witness it. Much later , those delicate and fragrant beings we call flowers would
come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of
another species. Humans would increasingly be drawn to and fascinated
by them. As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were
most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian
purpose for them, that is to say , was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics. Jesus
tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from then how to live. The
Buddha is said to have given a silent sermon once during which he held
up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk
called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only
one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile
(that is to say , realization) was handed down by twenty? eight successive
masters and much later became the origin of Zen. Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly , to the
beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true
nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant
events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and
love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. W ithout our fully
realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that
which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within
ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal and more delicate thanthe plants out of which they emer ged, would become like messengers
from another realm, like a bridge
between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had
a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a
fragrance from the realm of spirit. Using the word enlightenment in a
wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon
flowers as the enlightenment of plants. Any life?form in any realm mineral, vegetable, animal, or human can be
said to under go enlightenment. It is, however , an extremely rare
occurrence since it is more than an evolutionary progression: It also
implies a discontinuity in its development, a leap to an entirely dif ferent
level of Being and, most important, a lessening of materiality . What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of
all forms? And yet some rocks under go a change in their molecular
structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some
carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and
some heavy minerals into other precious stones. Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have
remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however , grew feathers
and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that
had held them for so long. They didnt become better at crawling or
walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely . Since time immemorial, flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds
have held special significance for the human spirit. Like all life?forms,
they are, of course, temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life,
one Consciousness. Their special significance and the reason why
humans feel such fascination for and af finity with them can be attributed
to their ethereal quality . Once there is a certain degree of presence, of still and alert attention in
human beings perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one
indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life?form,
recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves. Until this happens, however , most humans see only the outer forms,
unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their ownessence and identify only with their own physical and psychological
form. In the case of a flower , a crystal, precious stone, or bird, however , even
someone with little or no Presence can occasionally sense that there is
more than the mere physical existence of that form, without knowing that
this is the reason why he or she is drawn toward it, feels an af finity with
it. Because of its ethereal nature, its form obscures the indwelling spirit
to a lesser
degree than is the case with other life?forms. The exception to this are all
newborn life?forms babies, puppies, kittens, lambs, and so on. They are
fragile, delicate, not yet firmly established in materiality . An innocence,
a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans. So when you are alert and contemplate a flower , crystal, or bird without
naming it mentally , it becomes a window for you into the formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm of spirit. This is
why these three en?lightened life?forms have played such an important
part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; why ,
for example, the jewel in the lotus flower is a central symbol of
Buddhism and a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in
Christianity . They have been preparing the ground for a more profound
shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take place in the
human species. This is the spiritual awakening that we are beginning to
witness now .A New Earth
O U R  I N H E R I T E D  D Y S F U N C T I O N
If we look more deeply into humanitys ancient religions and spiritual
traditions, we will find that underneath the many surface dif ferences
there are two core insights that most of them agree on. The words they
use to describe those insights dif fer , yet they all point to a twofold
fundamental truth. The first part of this truth is the realization that the
normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of
what we might call dysfunction or even madness. Certain teachings at
the heart of Hinduism perhaps come closest to seeing this dysfunction as
a form of collective mental illness. They call it maya, the veil of
delusion. Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest Indian sages, bluntly
states: The mind is maya. Buddhism uses dif ferent terms. According to the Buddha, the human
mind in its normal state generates dukkha, which can be translated as
suf fering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery . He sees it as a
characteristic of the human condition. Wherever you go, whatever you
do, says the Buddha, you will encounter dukkha, and it will manifest in
every situation sooner or later . According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity
is one of original sin. Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood
and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which
the New T estament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an
archer who misses the tar get, so to sin means to miss the point of human
existence. It means to live unskillfully , blindly , and thus to suf fer and
cause suf fering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and
misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human
condition. The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable. W e have
created sublime works of music, literature, painting, architecture, and
sculpture. More recently , science and technology have brought about
radical changes in the way we live and have enabled us to do and createthings that would have been considered miraculous even two hundred
years ago. No doubt: The human mind is highly intelligent. Y et its very
intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have
magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind
has upon the planet, other life?forms, and upon humans themselves. That
is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that
collective insanity , can be most clearly recognized. A further factor is
that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating. The First W orld W ar broke out in 1914. Destructive and cruel wars,
motivated by fear , greed, and the desire for power , had been common
occurrences throughout human history , as had slavery , torture, and
widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suf fered more at the hands of each other than through natural
disasters. By the year 1914, however , the highly intelligent human mind
had invented not only the internal combustion engine, but also bombs,
machine guns, submarines, flame throwers, and poison gas. Intelligence
in the service of madness! In static trench warfare in France and
Belgium, millions of men perished to gain a few miles of mud. When the
war was over in 1918, the survivors look in horror and incomprehension
upon the devastation left behind: ten million human beings killed and
many more maimed or disfigured. Never before had human madness
been so destructive in its ef fect, so clearly visible. Little did they know
that this was only the beginning. By the end of the century , the number of people who died a violent death
at the hand of their fellow humans would rise to more than one hundred
million. They died not only through wars between nations, but also
through mass exterminations and genocide, such as the murder of twenty
million class enemies, spies, and traitors in the Soviet Union under Stalin
or the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany . They also
died in countless smaller internal conflicts, such as the Spanish civil war
or during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when a quarter of that
countrys population was murdered. W e only need to watch the daily news on television to realize that the
madness has not abated, that is continuing into the twenty?first century . Another aspect of the collective dysfunction of the human mind is the
unprecedented violence that humans are inflicting on other life?forms
and the planet itself the destruction of oxygen?producing forests andother plant and animal life; ill?treatment of animals in factory farms; and
poisoning of rivers, oceans, and air . Driven by greed, ignorant of their
connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued
unchecked, can only result in their own destruction. The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the
human condition constitute the greater part of human history . It is to a
lar ge extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the
clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have
to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit
murder and
acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived enemies his
own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few
brief lucid intervals. Fear , greed, and the desire for power are the psychological motivating
forces not only behind warfare and violence between nations, tribes,
religions, and ideologies, but also the cause of incessant conflict in
personal relationships. They bring about a distortion in your perception
of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every
situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and
satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled. It is important to realize, however , that fear , greed, and the desire for
power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of but are themselves
created by the dysfunction which is a deep?seated collective delusion
that lies within the mind of each human being. A number of spiritual
teachings tell us to let go of fear and desire. But those spiritual practices
are usually unsuccessful. They havent gone to the root of the
dysfunction. Fear , greed, and desire for power are not the ultimate causal
factors. T rying to become a good or better human being sounds like a
commendable and high?minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you
cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness. This
is because it is still part of the same dysfunction, a more subtle and
rarefied form of self?enhancement, of desire for more and a
strengthening of ones conceptual identity , ones self?image. Y ou do not
become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is
already within you, and allowing that goodness to emer ge. But it canonly emer ge if something fundamental changes in your state of
consciousness. The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideals, clearly
illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality
create a new earth without any prior change in their inner reality , their
state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the
blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.A New Earth
T H E  A R I S I N G  N E W  C O N S C I O U S N E S S
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common
insight that our normal state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However , out of this insight into the nature of the human condition we
may call it the bad news arises a second insight: the good news of the
possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu
teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is
called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in
Buddhism, it is the end of suf fering. Liberation and awakening are other
terms used to describe this transformation. The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or
technology , but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A
man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was
perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity . Later the title Buddha
was conferred upon him. Buddha means the awakened one. At abut the
same time, another of humanitys early awakened teachers emer ged in
China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the
form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the T ao T e
Ching. T o recognize ones own insanity , is of course, the arising of sanity , the
beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of
consciousness had begun to emer ge on the planet, a first tentative
flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suf fering, of delusion. They said, Look how you
live. See what you are doing, the suf fering you create. They then pointed
to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of normal
human existence. They showed the way . The world was not yet ready for them, and yet they were a vital and
necessary part of human awakening. Inevitably , they were mostlymisunderstood by their contemporaries, as well as by subsequent
generations. Their teachings, although both simple and powerful, became
distorted and misinterpreted, in some cases even as they were recorded in
writing by their disciples. Over the centuries, many things were added
that had nothing to do with the original teachings, but were reflections of
a fundamental misunderstanding. Some of the teachers were ridiculed,
reviled, or killed; others came to be worshipped as gods. T eachings that
pointed the way beyond the dysfunction o the human mind, the way out
of the collective insanity , were distorted and became themselves part of
the insanity . And so religions, to a lar ge extent, became divisive rather than unifying
forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred
through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought
more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as
between dif ferent religions and even withing the same religion. They
became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use
them to
enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make
themselves right and others wrong and thus define their identity through
their enemies, the others, the nonbelievers or wrong believers who not
infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made God in
his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to
a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as my god or our
god. And yet... and yet... in spite of all the insane deeds perpetrated in the
name of religion, the T ruth to which they point still shines at their core. It still shines, however dimly , through layers upon layers of distortion
and misinterpretation. It is unlikely , however , that you will be able to
perceive it there unless you have at least already had glimpse of that
T ruth within yourself. Throughout history , there have always been rare
individuals who experienced a shift in consciousness and so realized
within themselves that toward which all religions point. T o describe that
non?conceptual T ruth, they then used the conceptual framework of their
own religions. Through some of those men and women, schools or movements
developed within all major religions that represented not only arediscovery , but in some cases an intensification of the light of the
original teaching. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism came into
existence in early and medieval Christianity , Sufism in the Islamic
religion, Hasidism and Kabbala in Judaism, Advaita V edanta in
Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. Most of these schools were
iconoclastic. They did away with layers upon layers of deadening
conceptualization and mental belief structures, and for this reason most
of them were viewed with suspicion and often hostility by the
established religious hierarchies. Unlike mainstream religion, their
teachings emphasized realization and inner transformation. It is through
those esoteric schools or movements that the major religions regained the
transformative power of the original teachings, although in most cases,
only a small minority of people had access to them. Their numbers were
never lar ge enough to have any significant impact on the deep collective
unconsciousness of the majority . Over time, some of those schools
themselves became too rigidly formalized or conceptualized to remain
ef fective.A New Earth
S P I R I T U A L I T Y  A N D  R E L I G I O N
What is the role o the established religions in the arising of the new
consciousness? Many people are already aware of the dif ference between
spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system? a set
of
thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth does not make you spiritual
no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make
your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity , the more cut of f you are from
the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many religious people are stuck
at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely
identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession
of the truth in a n unconscious attempt to protect their identity . They dont
realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as
they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not?too?distant past, they
would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even
now . The new spirituality , the transformation of consciousness, is arising to a
lar ge extent outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized
religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind? dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt
threatened by them and often tried to suppress them. A lar ge?scale
opening of spirituality outside of the religious structures is an entirely
new development. In the past, this would have been inconceivable,
especially in the W est, the most mind?dominated of all cultures, where
the Christian church had a virtual franchise on spirituality . Y ou couldnt
just stand up and give a spiritual talk or publish a spiritual book unless
you were sanctioned by the church, and if you were not, they would
quickly silence you. But now , even within certain churches and religions,
there are signs of change. It is heartwarming, and one is grateful for even
the slightest signs of openness, such as Pope John Paul II visiting a
mosque as well as a synagogue.Partly as a result of the spiritual teachings that have arisen outside the
established religions, but also due to an influx of the ancient Eastern
wisdom teachings, a growing number of followers of traditional religions
are able to let go of identification with form, dogma, and rigid belief
systems and discover the original depth that is hidden within their own
spiritual tradition at the same time as they discover the depth within
themselves. They realize that how spiritual you are has nothing to do
with what you believe but everything to do with your state of
consciousness. This, in turn, determines how you act in the world and
interact with others. Those unable to look beyond form become even more deeply entrenched
in their beliefs, that is to say , in their mind. W e are witnessing not only
an unprecedented influx of consciousness at this time but also an
entrenchment and intensification of the ego. Some religious institutions
will be open to the new consciousness; others will harden their doctrinal
positions and become part of all those other man?made structures
through which the collective ego will defend itself and fight back. Some
churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective
egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the
followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative
interpretation of reality . But the ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether
they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will
disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear
to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will
collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet
Communism. How deeply entrenched, how solid and monolithic it
appeared, and yet within a few years, it disintegrated from within. No
one foresaw this. All were taken by surprise. There are many more such
surprises in store for us.A New Earth
T H E  U R G E N C Y  O F  T R A N S F O R M A T I O N
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world,
of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesnt work
anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable
problems, an individual life?form or a species will either die or become
extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an
evolutionary leap. It is believed that the life?forms on this planet first evolved in the sea. When there were no animals yet to be found on land, the sea was already
teeming with life. Then at some point, one of the sea creatures must have
started to venture onto dry land. It would perhaps crawl a few inches at
first, then exhausted by the enormous gravitational pull of the planet, it
would return to the water , where gravity is almost nonexistent and where
it could live with much greater ease. And then it tried again and again
and again, and much later would adapt to life on land, grow feet instead
of fins, develop lungs instead of gills. It seems unlikely that a species
would venture into such an alien environment and under go an
evolutionary transformation unless it was compelled to do so by some
crisis situation. There may have been a lar ge sea area that got cut of f
from the main ocean where the water gradually receded over thousands
of years, forcing fish to leave their habitat and evolve. Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival this is
humanitys challenge now . The dysfunction of the egoic human mind,
recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom
teachers and now magnified through science and technology , is for the
first time threatening the survival of the planet. Until very recently , the
transformation of human consciousness also pointed to by the ancient
teachers was no more than a possibility , realized by a few rare
individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious
background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not
happen because it was not yet imperative.A significant portion of the earths population will soon recognize, if they
havent already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice:
Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of
humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the
old egoic mind patterns and the emer gence of a new dimension of
consciousness. What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion, spiritual
ideology , or mythology . W e are coming to the end not only of
mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes
deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact,
at the heart of the new consciousness is the transcendence of thought, the
newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within
yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. Y ou then no longer
derive your identity , your sense of who you are, from the incessant
stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself. What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to
thought, the space in which the thought or the emotion or sense
perception happens. Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily
means thought forms. If evil has any reality and it has a relative, not an
absolute, reality this is also its definition: complete identification with
form physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a
total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic
oneness with every other as well as with the Source. This for getfulness is
original sin, suf fering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness
underlies and governs whatever I think, say , and do, what kind of world
do I create? T o find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to
each other , read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight. If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always
end up re?creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the
same dysfunction.A New Earth
A  N E W  H E A V E N  A N D  A  N E W  E A R T H
The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy
that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history . It occurs in both the Old and the New T estament and speaks of the
collapse of the existing world order and the arising of a new heaven and
a new earth. W e need to understand here that heaven is not a location but
refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning
of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth,
on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a
reflection of the inner . Collective human consciousness and life on our
planet are intrinsically connected. A new heaven is the emer gence of a
transformed state of human consciousness, and a new earth is its
reflection in the physical realm. Since human life and human
consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old
consciousness dissolves, there are bound to be synchronistic geographic
and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of
which we are already witnessing now .C H A P T E R  T W O  E G O :  T H E  C U R R E N T
S T A T E  O F  H U M A N I T Y
W ords, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon
you. Y ou easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly
believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know
what it is. The fact is: Y ou dont know what it is. Y ou have only covered
up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple
stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is
because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience,
think about, is the surface layer of reality , less than the tip of an iceber g.
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected
with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it
came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you
the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or
hold it and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a
sense of awe, of wonder , arises within you. Its essence silently
communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you. This is what great artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art. V an
Gogh didnt say: Thats just an old chair . He looked, and looked, and
looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair . Then he sat in front of the
canvas and took up the brush. The chair itself would have sold for the
equivalent of a few dollars. The painting of that same chair today would
fetch in excess of $25 million. When you dont cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the
miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when
humanity , instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A
depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as
prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to
happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all
the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say , identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things,
people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes,
and the more deadened you become to reality , the miracle of life that
continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way , cleverness may
be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy , love, creativity , and
aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and
the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They
have their own beauty but do we need to become imprisoned in them? W ords reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isnt
very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the
vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are
consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe
some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are,
or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in
its depth?A New Earth
T H E  I L L U S O R Y  S E L F
The word I embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending
on how it is used. In conventional usage, it is not only one of the most
frequently used words in the language (together with the related words:
me, my , mine, and myself) but also one of the most misleading. In
normal everyday usage, I embodies the primordial error , a misperception
of who you are, an illusory sense of identity . This is the ego. This
illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not
only in to the reality of space and time but also into human nature,
referred to as an optical illusion of consciousness. That illusory self then
becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather
misinterpretations of reality , all thought processes, interactions, and
relationships. Y our reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion. The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on
your mistaking it for reality . In the seeing of who you are not, the reality
of who you are emer ges by itself. This is what happens as you slowly
and carefully read this and the next chapter , which are about the
mechanics of the false self we call the ego. So what is the nature of this
illusory self? What you usually refer to when you say I is not who you are. By a
monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is
confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of I in
your mind and whatever the I has identified with. So what do the usual I
and the related me, my , or mine refer to? When a young child learns that a sequence o sounds produced by the
parents vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word,
which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that
stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person. Johnny is
hungry . Soon after , they learn the magic word I and equate it with their
name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then otherthoughts come and mer ge with the original I?thought. The next step are
thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of I. This is identification with objects, which means investing things, but
ultimately thoughts that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby
deriving an identity from them. When my toy breaks or is taken away ,
intense suf fering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy
has the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other
toys, other objects but because of the thought of mine. The toy became
part of the childs developing sense of self, of I. And so as the child grows up, the original I?thought attracts other
thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender , possessions, the
sense?perceived body , a nationality , race, religion, profession. Other
things the I identifies with are roles mother , father , husband, wife, and so
on accumulated knowledge or opinions, likes and dislikes, and also
things that happened to me in the past, the memory of which are thoughts
that further define my sense of self as me and my story . These are only
some of the things people derive their sense of identity form. They are
ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact
that they are all invested with a sense of self. This mental construct is
what you normally refer to when you say I. T o be more precise: Most of
the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think I but some
aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you
still use the word I, but it will come from a much deeper place within
yourself. Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of
mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There
is no I apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with
them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told
that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say ,
What voice? or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the
thinker , is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an
entity that has taken possession of them. Some people never for get the first tie they disidentified from their
thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the
content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For
others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just
notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.A New Earth
T H E  V O I C E  I N  T H E  H E A D
That first glimpse of awareness came to me when I was a first?year
student at the University of London. I would take the tube (subway)
twice a week to go to the university library , usually around nine oclock
in the morning, toward the end of the rush hour . One time a woman in
her early thirties sat opposite me. I had seen her before a few times on
that train. One could not help but notice her . Although the train was full,
the seats on either side of her were unoccupied, the reason being, no
doubt, that she appeared to be quite insane. She looked extremely tense
and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice. She was so
absorbed in her thoughts that she was totally unaware, in seemed, of
other people or her surroundings. Her head was facing downward and
slightly to the left, as if she were addressing someone sitting in the empty
seat next to her . Although I dont remember the precise content, her
monologue went something like this: And then she said to me... so I said
to her you are a liar how dare you accuse me of... when you are the one
who has always taken advantage of me I trusted you and you betrayed
my trust... There was the angry tone in her voice of someone who has
been wronged, who needs to defend her position lest she become
annihilated. As the train approached T ottenham Court Road Station, she stood up and
walked toward the door with still no break in the stream of words
coming out of her mouth. That was my stop too, so I got of f behind her . At street level, she began to walk toward Bedford Square, still engaged
in her imaginary dialogue, still angrily accusing and asserting her
position. My curiosity aroused, I decided to follow her as long as she
was walking in the same general direction I had to go in. Although
engrossed in her imaginary dialogue, she seemed to know where she was
going. Soon we were within sight of the imposing structure of Senate
House, a 1930s high?rise, the universitys central administrative building
and library . I was shocked. W as it possible that we were going to thesame place? Y es, thats where she was heading. W as she a teacher ,
student, an of fice worker , a librarian? Maybe she
was some psychologists research project. I never knew the answer . I
walked twenty steps behind her , and by the time I entered the building
(which ironically was the location of the headquarters of the Mind Police
in the film version of Geor ge Orwells novel, 1984), she had already been
swallowed up by one of the elevators. I was somewhat taken aback by what I had just witnessed. A mature
first?year student at twenty?five, I saw myself as an intellectual in the
making, and I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of
human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say , by
thinking. I didnt realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main
dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who
had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her be part of this? I was still thinking about her when I was in the mens room prior to
entering the library . As I was washing my hands, I thought: I hope I dont
end up like her . The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I
suddenly was shocked when I realized that I hadnt just thought those
words, but mumbled them aloud. Oh my God, Im already like her , I
thought. W asnt my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only
minor dif ferences between us. The predominant underlying emotion
behind her thinking seemed to be anger . In my case, it was mostly
anxiety . She thought out loud. I thought mostly in my head. If she was
mad, then everyone was mad, including myself. There were dif ferences
in degree only . For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it
from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from
thinking to awareness. I was still in the mens room, but alone now ,
looking at my face in the mirror . At that moment of detachment from my
mind, I laughed out loud. It may have sounded insane, but it was the
laughter of sanity , the laughter of the big?bellied Buddha. Life isnt as
serious as my mind makes it out to be. Thats what the laughter seemed to
be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be for gotten. I
would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely
identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awarenessreturned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of
compulsive thinking and of the false, mind?made I. The above incident not only gave me a first glimpse of awareness, it also
planted the first doubt as to the absolute validity of the human intellect. A few months later , something tragic happened that made my doubt row . On a Monday morning, we arrived for a lecture to be given by a
professor whose mind I admired greatly , only to be told that sadly he had
committed suicide sometime during the weekend by shooting himself. I
was stunned. He was a highly respected teacher and seemed to have all
the answers. However , I could as yet see no alternative to the cultivation
of thought. I didnt realize yet that thinking is only a tiny aspect of the
consciousness that we are, nor did I know anything about the ego, let
alone being able to detect it within myself.A New Earth
C O N T E N T  A N D  S T R U C T U R E  O F  T H E  E G O
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning
is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In the case of a child who cries in deep suf fering because his toy has
been taken away , the toy represents content. It is interchangeable with
any other content, any other toy or object. The content you identify with
is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding
culture. Whether the child is rich or poor , whether the toy is a piece of
wood shaped like an animal or a sophisticated electronic gadget makes
no dif ference as far as the suf fering caused by its loss is concerned. The
reason why such acute suf fering occurs is concealed in the word my , and
it is structural. The unconscious compulsion to enhance ones identity
through association with an object is built into the very structure of the
egoic mind. One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into
existence is identification. The word identification is derived from the
Latin word idem, meaning same and facere, which means to make. So
when I identify with something, I make it the same. The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of
my identity . One of the most basic levels of identification is with things:
My toy later becomes my car , my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to
find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in
them. That is the fate of the ego.A New Earth
I D E N T I F I C A T I O N  W I T H  T H I N G S
The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to
sell things that people dont really need, they must convince them that
those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen
by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self. They do
this, for example, by telling you that you will stand out from the crowd
by using this product and so by implication be more fully yourself. Or
they may create an association in your mind between the product and a
famous person, or a youthful, attractive, or happy?looking person. Even
pictures of old or deceased celebrities in their prime work well for that
purpose. The unspoken assumption is that by buying this product,
through some magical act of appropriation, you become like them, or
rather the surface image of them. And so in many cases you are not
buying a product but an identity enhancer . Designer labels are primarily
collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore
exclusive. If everybody could buy them, they would lose their
psychological value and all you would be left with would be their
material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. What kind of things you identify with will vary from person to person
according to age, gender , income, social class, fashion, the surrounding
culture, and so on. What you identify with is all to do with content;
whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural. It is one of
the most basic ways in which the egoic mind operates. Paradoxically , what keeps the so?called consumer society going is the
fact that trying to find yourself through things doesnt work: The ego
satisfaction is short?lived and so you keep looking for more, keep
buying, keep consuming. Of course, in this physical dimension that our surface selves inhabit,
things are a necessary and inescapable part of our lives. W e need
housing, clothes, furniture, tools, transportation. There may also be
things in our lives that we value because of their beauty or inherentquality . W e need to honor the world of things, not despise it. Each thing
has Beingness, is a temporary form that has its origin within the formless
one Life, the source of all things, all bodies, all forms. In most ancient
cultures, people believed that everything, even so?called inanimate
objects, had an indwelling spirit, and in
this respect they were closer to the truth than we are today . When you
live in a world deadened by mental abstraction, you dont sense the
aliveness of the universe anymore. Most people dont inhabit a living
reality , but a conceptualized one. But we cannot really honor things if we use them as a means to self? enhancement, that is to say , if we try to find ourselves through them. This is exactly what the ego does. Ego?identification with things creates
attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our
consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of
progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless
growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the
cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware
that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the or ganism
of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of
growth that they cant let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a
time of negative growth. A lar ge part of many peoples lives is consumed by an obsessive
preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is
object proliferation. When you can no feel the life that you are, you are
likely to fill up your life with things. As a spiritual practice, I suggest
that you investigate your relationship with the world of things through
self?observation, and in particular , things that are designated with the
word my . Y ou need to be alert and honest to find out, for example,
whether your sense of self?worth is bound up with things you possess. Do certain things induce a subtle feeling of importance or superiority? Does the lack of them make you feel inferior to others who have more
than you? Do you casually mention things you own or show them of f to
increase your sense of worth in someone elses eyes and through them in
your own? Do you feel resentful or angry and somehow diminished in
your sense of self when someone else has more than you or when you
lose a prized possession?A New Earth
T H E  L O S T  R I N G
When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher , I would
visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer . She
was a schoolteacher in her mid?forties and had been given no more than
a few
months to live by her doctors. Sometimes a few words were spoken
during those visits, but mostly we would sit together in silence, and as
we did, she had her first glimpses of the stillness within herself that she
never knew existed during her busy life as a schoolteacher . One day , however , I arrived to find her in a state of great distress and
anger . What happened I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as
well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said she was sure it
had been stolen by the woman who came to look after her for a few
hours every day . She said she didnt understand how anybody could be so
callous and heartless as to do this to her . She asked me whether she
should confront the woman or whether it would be better to call the
police immediately . I said I couldnt tell her what to do, but asked her to
find out how important a rig or anything else was at this point in hr life. Y ou dont understand, she said. This was my grandmothers ring. I used to
wear it every day until I got ill and my hands became too swollen. Its
more than just a ring to me. How can I not b upset? The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her
voice were indications that she had not yet become present enough to
look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe
them both. Her anger and defensiveness were signs that the ego was still
speaking through her . I said, I am going to ask you a few questions, but
instead of answering them now , see if you can find the answers within
you. I will pause briefly after each question. When an answer comes, it
may not necessarily come in the form of words. She said she was ready
to listen. I asked: Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at
some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you needbefore you will be ready to let go of it? W ill you become less when you
let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss? There were
a few minutes of silence after the last question. When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face, and she
seemed at peace. The last question made me realize something
important. First I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said, Y es,
f course you have been diminished. Then I asked myself the question
again, Has who I am become diminished? This time I tried to feel rather
than think the answer . And suddenly I could feel my I Am?ness. I have
never felt
that before. If I can feel the I Am so strongly , then who I am hasnt been
diminished at all. I can still feel it now , something peaceful but very
alive. That is the joy of Being, I said. Y ou can only feel it when you get out of
your head. Being must be felt. It cant be thought. The ego doesnt know
about it because thought is what it consists of. The ring was really in
your head as a thought that you confused with the sense of I Am. Y ou
thought the I Am or a part of it was in the ring. Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being
that it cannot feel. Y ou can value and care for things, but whenever you
get attached to them, you will know its the ego. And you are never really
attached to a thing but to a thought that has I, me, or mine in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who
you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emer ges. She said, Now I understand something Jesus said that never made much
sense to me before: If someone takes your shirt, let him have your coat
as well. Thats right, I said. It doesnt mean you should never lock your door . All it
means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power
than defending or hanging on. In the last few weeks of her life as her body became weaker , she became
more and more radiant, as if light were shining through her . She gave
many of her possessions away , some to the woman she thought had
stolen the ring, and with each thing she gave away , her joy deepened.When her mother called me to let me know she had passed away , she
also mentioned that after her death they found her ring in the medicine
cabinet in the bathroom. Did the woman return the ring, or had it been
there all the time? Nobody will ever know . One thing we do know: Life
will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of
your consciousness. How do you now this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment. Is it wrong then to be proud of ones possessions or to feel resentful
toward people to have more than you? Not at all. That sense of pride, of
needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of ones self through
more than and diminishment through less than is neither right nor wrong
it is
the ego. The ego isnt wrong; its just unconscious. When you observe the
ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Dont take the ego too
seriously . When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times
you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for
so long? Above all, know that the ego isnt personal. It isnt who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, thats just more ego.A New Earth
T H E  I L L U S I O N  O F  O W N E R S H I P
T o own something what does it really mean? What does it mean to make
something mine? If you stand on a street in New Y ork, point to a huge
skyscraper and say , That building is mine. I own it, you are either very
wealthy or you are delusional or a liar . In any case, you are telling a story
in which the thought form I and the thought form building mer ge into
one. Thats how the mental concept of ownership works. If everybody
agrees with your story , there will be signed pieces of paper to certify
their agreement with it. Y ou are wealthy . If nobody agrees with the story ,
they will send you to a psychiatrist. Y ou are delusional, or a compulsive
liar . It is important to recognize here that the story and the thought forms that
make up the story , whether people agree with it or not, have absolutely
nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree with it, it is
ultimately a fiction. Many people dont realize until they are on their
deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had
anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole
concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the
last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were
looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what
they were really looking for , their Being, had actually always already
been there, but had been lar gely obscured by their identification with
things, which ultimately means identification with their mind. Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus said, for theirs will be the kingdom
of heaven. What does poor in spirit mean? No inner baggage, no
identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a
sense of self in them. And what is the kingdom of heaven The simple but
profound joy of Being that is there when you let og of identifications and
so become poor in spirit. This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient spiritual
practice in both East and W est. Renunciation of possessions, however ,will not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure its
survival by finding something else to identify with, for example, a
mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in
material possessions and is therefore superior , is more spiritual than
others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a
bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of
identification, the ego will quickly find another . It ultimately doesnt
mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity . Anti? consumerism or anti?private ownership would be another thought form,
another mental position, that can replace identification with possessions. Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong. As we shall
see later , making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal
egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other
words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps
it alive does not. One of the unconscious assumptions is that by identifying with an object
through the fiction of ownership, the apparent solidity and permanency
of that material object will endow your sense of self with greater solidity
and permanency . This applies particularly to buildings and even more so
to land since it is the only thing you think you can own that cannot be
destroyed. The absurdity of owning something becomes even more
apparent in the case of land. In the days of the white settlement, the
natives of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible
concept. And so they lost it when the Europeans made them signs pieces
of paper that were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they
belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to them. The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And
the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How
you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived
in a mansion or everyone was wealthy , your mansion or your wealth
would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self. Y ou could then
move to a simple cabin, give up our wealth, and regain an identity by
seeing yourself and being seen as more spiritual than others. How you
are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like
and who you are. The egos sense of self?worth is in most cases bound up
with the worth you havein the eyes of others. Y ou need others to give you a sense of self, and if
you live in a culture that to a lar ge extent equates self?worth with how
much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective
delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of
your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your
sense of self there. How do you let go of attachment to things? Dont even try . Its impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to
find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment
to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to
something, which is to say , until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is
no longer total. I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment. Thats the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.A New Earth
W A N T I N G :  T H E  N E E D  F O R  M O R E
The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a
relatively shallow and short?lived one. Concealed within it remains a
deep? seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of not enough. I
don't have enough yet, by which the ego really means, I am not enough
yet. As we have seen, having the concept of ownership is a fiction created by
the ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make itself stand out,
make itself special. Since you cannot find yourself through having,
however , there is another more powerful drive underneath it that pertains
to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we could also call
wanting. No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore,
wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to
want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of
having is always replaced by more wanting. This is the psychological
need for more, that is to say , more things to identify with. It is an
addictive need, not an authentic one. In some cases, the psychological need for more or the feeling of not
enough that is so characteristic of the ego becomes transferred to the
physical level and so turns into insatiable hunger . The suf ferers of
bulimia will often make themselves vomit so they can continue eating. Their mind is
hungry , not their body . This eating disorder would become healed if the
suf ferers, instead of being identified with their mind, could get in touch
with their body and so feel the true needs of the body rather than the
pseudo? needs of the egoic mind. Some egos know what they want and pursue their aim with grim and
ruthless determination Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler , to give just a few
lar ger?than?life examples. The ener gy behind their wanting, however ,
creates an opposing ener gy of equal intensity that in the end leads to
their downfall. in the meantime, they make themselves and many othersunhappy , or , in the lar ger?than?life examples, create hell on earth. Most
egos have conflicting wants. They want dif ferent things at dif ferent times
or may not even know what they want except that they don't want what
is: the present moment. Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety ,
dissatisfaction , are the result of unfulfilled wanting. W anting is
structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as
long as that mental structure remains in place. Intense wanting that has
no specific object can often be found in the still?
_OceanofPDF.com_A_New_Earth_-_Tolle_Eckhart.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        T H E  P U R P O S E  O F  T H I S  B O O K
Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner
flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of
plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection. Can human
beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become
like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of
consciousness. Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and
materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in
place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality. The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of
the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers Buddha,
Jesus, and others, not all of them known were humanitys early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings. A widespread flowering
was not yet possible at that time, and their message became lar gely
misunderstood and often greatly distorted. It certainly did not transform
human behavior, except in a small minority of people. Is humanity more ready now than at the time of those early teachers. Why should this be so. What can you do, if anything, to bring about or
accelerate this inner shift. What is it that characterizes the old egoic state
of consciousness, and by what signs is the new emer ging consciousness
recognized. These and other essential questions will be addressed in this
book. More important, this book itself is a transformational device that
has
come out of the arising new consciousness. The ideas and concepts
presented here may be important, but they are secondary. They are no
more than signposts pointing toward awakening. As you read, a shift
takes place within you. This books main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your
mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in
consciousness; that is to say, to awaken. In that sense, this book is not
interesting. Interesting means you can keep your distance, play around
with ideas and concepts in your mind, agree or disagree. This book is
about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will bemeaningless. It can only awaken those who are ready. Not everyone is
ready yet, but many are, and with each person who awakens, the
momentum in the collective consciousness grows, and it becomes easier
for others. If you dont know what awakening means, read on. Only by
awakening can you know the true meaning of that word. A glimpse is
enough to initiate the awakening process, which is irreversible. For
some, that glimpse will come while reading this book. For many others
who may not even have realized it, the process has already begun. This
book will help them recognize it. For some, it may have begun through
loss or suf fering; for others, through coming into contact with a spiritual
teacher or teaching, through reading The Power of Now or some other
spiritually alive and therefore transformational book or any combination
of the above. If the awakening process has begun in you, the reading of
this book will accelerate and intensify it. An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened
you, the ego as it thinks, speaks and acts, as well as the recognition of the
collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the
unawakened state. That is why this book shows the main aspects of the
ego and how they operate in the individual as well as in the collective. This is important for two related reasons: The first is that unless you
know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, you wont
recognize it, and it will trick you into identifying with it again and again. This means it takes you over, an impostor pretending to be you. The
second reason is that the act of recognition itself is one of the ways in
which awakening happens. When you recognize the unconsciousness in
you, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising
consciousness, is awakening. Y ou cannot fight against the ego and win,
just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is
all that is necessary. Y ou are that light. C H A P T E R  O N E  T H E  F L O W E R I N G  O F
H U M A N  C O N S C I O U S N E S S
EVOCA TION Earth, 1 14 million years ago, one morning just after
sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive
the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event that heralds an
evolutionary transformation in the life of plants, the planet had already
been covered in vegetation for millions of years. The first flower
probably did not survive for long, and flowers must have remained rare
and isolated phenomena, since conditions were most likely not yet
favorable for a widespread flowering to occur. One day, however, a
critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an
explosion of color and scent all over the planet if a perceiving
consciousness had been there to witness it. Much later, those delicate and fragrant beings we call flowers would
come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of
another species. Humans would increasingly be drawn to and fascinated
by them. As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were
most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian
purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics. Jesus
tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from then how to live. The
Buddha is said to have given a silent sermon once during which he held
up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk
called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only
one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile
(that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty. eight successive
masters and much later became the origin of Zen. Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the
beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true
nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant
events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and
love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. W ithout our fully
realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that
which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within
ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal and more delicate thanthe plants out of which they emer ged, would become like messengers
from another realm, like a bridge
between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had
a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a
fragrance from the realm of spirit. Using the word enlightenment in a
wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon
flowers as the enlightenment of plants. Any life. form in any realm mineral, vegetable, animal, or human can be
said to under go enlightenment. It is, however, an extremely rare
occurrence since it is more than an evolutionary progression: It also
implies a discontinuity in its development, a leap to an entirely dif ferent
level of Being and, most important, a lessening of materiality. What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of
all forms. And yet some rocks under go a change in their molecular
structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some
carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and
some heavy minerals into other precious stones. Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have
remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers
and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that
had held them for so long. They didnt become better at crawling or
walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely. Since time immemorial, flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds
have held special significance for the human spirit. Like all life. forms,
they are, of course, temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life,
one Consciousness. Their special significance and the reason why
humans feel such fascination for and af finity with them can be attributed
to their ethereal quality. Once there is a certain degree of presence, of still and alert attention in
human beings perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one
indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life. form,
recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves. Until this happens, however, most humans see only the outer forms,
unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their ownessence and identify only with their own physical and psychological
form. In the case of a flower, a crystal, precious stone, or bird, however, even
someone with little or no Presence can occasionally sense that there is
more than the mere physical existence of that form, without knowing that
this is the reason why he or she is drawn toward it, feels an af finity with
it. Because of its ethereal nature, its form obscures the indwelling spirit
to a lesser
degree than is the case with other life. forms. The exception to this are all
newborn life. forms babies, puppies, kittens, lambs, and so on. They are
fragile, delicate, not yet firmly established in materiality. An innocence,
a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans. So when you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal, or bird without
naming it mentally, it becomes a window for you into the formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm of spirit. This is
why these three en. lightened life. forms have played such an important
part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; why,
for example, the jewel in the lotus flower is a central symbol of
Buddhism and a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in
Christianity. They have been preparing the ground for a more profound
shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take place in the
human species. This is the spiritual awakening that we are beginning to
witness now. A New Earth
O U R  I N H E R I T E D  D Y S F U N C T I O N
If we look more deeply into humanitys ancient religions and spiritual
traditions, we will find that underneath the many surface dif ferences
there are two core insights that most of them agree on. The words they
use to describe those insights dif fer, yet they all point to a twofold
fundamental truth. The first part of this truth is the realization that the
normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of
what we might call dysfunction or even madness. Certain teachings at
the heart of Hinduism perhaps come closest to seeing this dysfunction as
a form of collective mental illness. They call it maya, the veil of
delusion. Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest Indian sages, bluntly
states: The mind is maya. Buddhism uses dif ferent terms. According to the Buddha, the human
mind in its normal state generates dukkha, which can be translated as
suf fering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery. He sees it as a
characteristic of the human condition. Wherever you go, whatever you
do, says the Buddha, you will encounter dukkha, and it will manifest in
every situation sooner or later. According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity
is one of original sin. Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood
and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which
the New T estament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an
archer who misses the tar get, so to sin means to miss the point of human
existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suf fer and
cause suf fering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and
misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human
condition. The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable. W e have
created sublime works of music, literature, painting, architecture, and
sculpture. More recently, science and technology have brought about
radical changes in the way we live and have enabled us to do and createthings that would have been considered miraculous even two hundred
years ago. No doubt: The human mind is highly intelligent. Y et its very
intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have
magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind
has upon the planet, other life. forms, and upon humans themselves. That
is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that
collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized. A further factor is
that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating. The First W orld W ar broke out in 1914. Destructive and cruel wars,
motivated by fear, greed, and the desire for power, had been common
occurrences throughout human history, as had slavery, torture, and
widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suf fered more at the hands of each other than through natural
disasters. By the year 1914, however, the highly intelligent human mind
had invented not only the internal combustion engine, but also bombs,
machine guns, submarines, flame throwers, and poison gas. Intelligence
in the service of madness. In static trench warfare in France and
Belgium, millions of men perished to gain a few miles of mud. When the
war was over in 1918, the survivors look in horror and incomprehension
upon the devastation left behind: ten million human beings killed and
many more maimed or disfigured. Never before had human madness
been so destructive in its ef fect, so clearly visible. Little did they know
that this was only the beginning. By the end of the century, the number of people who died a violent death
at the hand of their fellow humans would rise to more than one hundred
million. They died not only through wars between nations, but also
through mass exterminations and genocide, such as the murder of twenty
million class enemies, spies, and traitors in the Soviet Union under Stalin
or the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. They also
died in countless smaller internal conflicts, such as the Spanish civil war
or during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when a quarter of that
countrys population was murdered. W e only need to watch the daily news on television to realize that the
madness has not abated, that is continuing into the twenty. first century. Another aspect of the collective dysfunction of the human mind is the
unprecedented violence that humans are inflicting on other life. forms
and the planet itself the destruction of oxygen. producing forests andother plant and animal life; ill. treatment of animals in factory farms; and
poisoning of rivers, oceans, and air. Driven by greed, ignorant of their
connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued
unchecked, can only result in their own destruction. The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the
human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a
lar ge extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the
clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have
to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit
murder and
acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived enemies his
own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few
brief lucid intervals. Fear, greed, and the desire for power are the psychological motivating
forces not only behind warfare and violence between nations, tribes,
religions, and ideologies, but also the cause of incessant conflict in
personal relationships. They bring about a distortion in your perception
of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every
situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and
satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled. It is important to realize, however, that fear, greed, and the desire for
power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of but are themselves
created by the dysfunction which is a deep. seated collective delusion
that lies within the mind of each human being. A number of spiritual
teachings tell us to let go of fear and desire. But those spiritual practices
are usually unsuccessful. They havent gone to the root of the
dysfunction. Fear, greed, and desire for power are not the ultimate causal
factors. T rying to become a good or better human being sounds like a
commendable and high. minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you
cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness. This
is because it is still part of the same dysfunction, a more subtle and
rarefied form of self. enhancement, of desire for more and a
strengthening of ones conceptual identity, ones self. image. Y ou do not
become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is
already within you, and allowing that goodness to emer ge. But it canonly emer ge if something fundamental changes in your state of
consciousness. The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideals, clearly
illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality
create a new earth without any prior change in their inner reality, their
state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the
blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego. A New Earth
T H E  A R I S I N G  N E W  C O N S C I O U S N E S S
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common
insight that our normal state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human condition we
may call it the bad news arises a second insight: the good news of the
possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu
teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is
called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in
Buddhism, it is the end of suf fering. Liberation and awakening are other
terms used to describe this transformation. The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or
technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A
man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was
perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha
was conferred upon him. Buddha means the awakened one. At abut the
same time, another of humanitys early awakened teachers emer ged in
China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the
form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the T ao T e
Ching. T o recognize ones own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the
beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of
consciousness had begun to emer ge on the planet, a first tentative
flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suf fering, of delusion. They said, Look how you
live. See what you are doing, the suf fering you create. They then pointed
to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of normal
human existence. They showed the way. The world was not yet ready for them, and yet they were a vital and
necessary part of human awakening. Inevitably, they were mostlymisunderstood by their contemporaries, as well as by subsequent
generations. Their teachings, although both simple and powerful, became
distorted and misinterpreted, in some cases even as they were recorded in
writing by their disciples. Over the centuries, many things were added
that had nothing to do with the original teachings, but were reflections of
a fundamental misunderstanding. Some of the teachers were ridiculed,
reviled, or killed; others came to be worshipped as gods. T eachings that
pointed the way beyond the dysfunction o the human mind, the way out
of the collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of
the insanity. And so religions, to a lar ge extent, became divisive rather than unifying
forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred
through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought
more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as
between dif ferent religions and even withing the same religion. They
became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use
them to
enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make
themselves right and others wrong and thus define their identity through
their enemies, the others, the nonbelievers or wrong believers who not
infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made God in
his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to
a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as my god or our
god. And yet. and yet. in spite of all the insane deeds perpetrated in the
name of religion, the T ruth to which they point still shines at their core. It still shines, however dimly, through layers upon layers of distortion
and misinterpretation. It is unlikely, however, that you will be able to
perceive it there unless you have at least already had glimpse of that
T ruth within yourself. Throughout history, there have always been rare
individuals who experienced a shift in consciousness and so realized
within themselves that toward which all religions point. T o describe that
non. conceptual T ruth, they then used the conceptual framework of their
own religions. Through some of those men and women, schools or movements
developed within all major religions that represented not only arediscovery, but in some cases an intensification of the light of the
original teaching. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism came into
existence in early and medieval Christianity, Sufism in the Islamic
religion, Hasidism and Kabbala in Judaism, Advaita V edanta in
Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. Most of these schools were
iconoclastic. They did away with layers upon layers of deadening
conceptualization and mental belief structures, and for this reason most
of them were viewed with suspicion and often hostility by the
established religious hierarchies. Unlike mainstream religion, their
teachings emphasized realization and inner transformation. It is through
those esoteric schools or movements that the major religions regained the
transformative power of the original teachings, although in most cases,
only a small minority of people had access to them. Their numbers were
never lar ge enough to have any significant impact on the deep collective
unconsciousness of the majority. Over time, some of those schools
themselves became too rigidly formalized or conceptualized to remain
ef fective. A New Earth
S P I R I T U A L I T Y  A N D  R E L I G I O N
What is the role o the established religions in the arising of the new
consciousness. Many people are already aware of the dif ference between
spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system. a set
of
thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth does not make you spiritual
no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make
your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut of f you are from
the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many religious people are stuck
at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely
identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession
of the truth in a n unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They dont
realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as
they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not. too. distant past, they
would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even
now. The new spirituality, the transformation of consciousness, is arising to a
lar ge extent outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized
religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind. dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt
threatened by them and often tried to suppress them. A lar ge. scale
opening of spirituality outside of the religious structures is an entirely
new development. In the past, this would have been inconceivable,
especially in the W est, the most mind. dominated of all cultures, where
the Christian church had a virtual franchise on spirituality. Y ou couldnt
just stand up and give a spiritual talk or publish a spiritual book unless
you were sanctioned by the church, and if you were not, they would
quickly silence you. But now, even within certain churches and religions,
there are signs of change. It is heartwarming, and one is grateful for even
the slightest signs of openness, such as Pope John Paul II visiting a
mosque as well as a synagogue. Partly as a result of the spiritual teachings that have arisen outside the
established religions, but also due to an influx of the ancient Eastern
wisdom teachings, a growing number of followers of traditional religions
are able to let go of identification with form, dogma, and rigid belief
systems and discover the original depth that is hidden within their own
spiritual tradition at the same time as they discover the depth within
themselves. They realize that how spiritual you are has nothing to do
with what you believe but everything to do with your state of
consciousness. This, in turn, determines how you act in the world and
interact with others. Those unable to look beyond form become even more deeply entrenched
in their beliefs, that is to say, in their mind. W e are witnessing not only
an unprecedented influx of consciousness at this time but also an
entrenchment and intensification of the ego. Some religious institutions
will be open to the new consciousness; others will harden their doctrinal
positions and become part of all those other man. made structures
through which the collective ego will defend itself and fight back. Some
churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective
egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the
followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative
interpretation of reality. But the ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether
they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will
disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear
to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will
collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet
Communism. How deeply entrenched, how solid and monolithic it
appeared, and yet within a few years, it disintegrated from within. No
one foresaw this. All were taken by surprise. There are many more such
surprises in store for us. A New Earth
T H E  U R G E N C Y  O F  T R A N S F O R M A T I O N
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world,
of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesnt work
anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable
problems, an individual life. form or a species will either die or become
extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an
evolutionary leap. It is believed that the life. forms on this planet first evolved in the sea. When there were no animals yet to be found on land, the sea was already
teeming with life. Then at some point, one of the sea creatures must have
started to venture onto dry land. It would perhaps crawl a few inches at
first, then exhausted by the enormous gravitational pull of the planet, it
would return to the water, where gravity is almost nonexistent and where
it could live with much greater ease. And then it tried again and again
and again, and much later would adapt to life on land, grow feet instead
of fins, develop lungs instead of gills. It seems unlikely that a species
would venture into such an alien environment and under go an
evolutionary transformation unless it was compelled to do so by some
crisis situation. There may have been a lar ge sea area that got cut of f
from the main ocean where the water gradually receded over thousands
of years, forcing fish to leave their habitat and evolve. Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival this is
humanitys challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind,
recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom
teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the
first time threatening the survival of the planet. Until very recently, the
transformation of human consciousness also pointed to by the ancient
teachers was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare
individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious
background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not
happen because it was not yet imperative. A significant portion of the earths population will soon recognize, if they
havent already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice:
Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of
humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the
old egoic mind patterns and the emer gence of a new dimension of
consciousness. What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion, spiritual
ideology, or mythology. W e are coming to the end not only of
mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes
deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact,
at the heart of the new consciousness is the transcendence of thought, the
newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within
yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. Y ou then no longer
derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from the incessant
stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself. What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then. The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to
thought, the space in which the thought or the emotion or sense
perception happens. Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily
means thought forms. If evil has any reality and it has a relative, not an
absolute, reality this is also its definition: complete identification with
form physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a
total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic
oneness with every other as well as with the Source. This for getfulness is
original sin, suf fering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness
underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world
do I create. T o find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to
each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight. If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always
end up re. creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the
same dysfunction. A New Earth
A  N E W  H E A V E N  A N D  A  N E W  E A R T H
The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy
that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New T estament and speaks of the
collapse of the existing world order and the arising of a new heaven and
a new earth. W e need to understand here that heaven is not a location but
refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning
of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth,
on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a
reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our
planet are intrinsically connected. A new heaven is the emer gence of a
transformed state of human consciousness, and a new earth is its
reflection in the physical realm. Since human life and human
consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old
consciousness dissolves, there are bound to be synchronistic geographic
and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of
which we are already witnessing now. C H A P T E R  T W O  E G O :  T H E  C U R R E N T
S T A T E  O F  H U M A N I T Y
W ords, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon
you. Y ou easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly
believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know
what it is. The fact is: Y ou dont know what it is. Y ou have only covered
up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple
stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is
because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience,
think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceber g. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected
with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it
came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you
the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or
hold it and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a
sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently
communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you. This is what great artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art. V an
Gogh didnt say: Thats just an old chair. He looked, and looked, and
looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair. Then he sat in front of the
canvas and took up the brush. The chair itself would have sold for the
equivalent of a few dollars. The painting of that same chair today would
fetch in excess of $25 million. When you dont cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the
miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when
humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A
depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as
prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to
happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all
the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about. The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things,
people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes,
and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that
continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may
be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and
aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and
the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They
have their own beauty but do we need to become imprisoned in them. W ords reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isnt
very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the
vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are
consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe
some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are,
or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in
its depth. A New Earth
T H E  I L L U S O R Y  S E L F
The word I embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending
on how it is used. In conventional usage, it is not only one of the most
frequently used words in the language (together with the related words:
me, my, mine, and myself) but also one of the most misleading. In
normal everyday usage, I embodies the primordial error, a misperception
of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This
illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not
only in to the reality of space and time but also into human nature,
referred to as an optical illusion of consciousness. That illusory self then
becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather
misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and
relationships. Y our reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion. The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on
your mistaking it for reality. In the seeing of who you are not, the reality
of who you are emer ges by itself. This is what happens as you slowly
and carefully read this and the next chapter, which are about the
mechanics of the false self we call the ego. So what is the nature of this
illusory self. What you usually refer to when you say I is not who you are. By a
monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is
confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of I in
your mind and whatever the I has identified with. So what do the usual I
and the related me, my, or mine refer to. When a young child learns that a sequence o sounds produced by the
parents vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word,
which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that
stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person. Johnny is
hungry. Soon after, they learn the magic word I and equate it with their
name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then otherthoughts come and mer ge with the original I. thought. The next step are
thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of I. This is identification with objects, which means investing things, but
ultimately thoughts that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby
deriving an identity from them. When my toy breaks or is taken away,
intense suf fering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy
has the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other
toys, other objects but because of the thought of mine. The toy became
part of the childs developing sense of self, of I. And so as the child grows up, the original I. thought attracts other
thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the
sense. perceived body, a nationality, race, religion, profession. Other
things the I identifies with are roles mother, father, husband, wife, and so
on accumulated knowledge or opinions, likes and dislikes, and also
things that happened to me in the past, the memory of which are thoughts
that further define my sense of self as me and my story. These are only
some of the things people derive their sense of identity form. They are
ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact
that they are all invested with a sense of self. This mental construct is
what you normally refer to when you say I. T o be more precise: Most of
the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think I but some
aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you
still use the word I, but it will come from a much deeper place within
yourself. Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of
mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There
is no I apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with
them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told
that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say,
What voice. or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the
thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an
entity that has taken possession of them. Some people never for get the first tie they disidentified from their
thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the
content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For
others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just
notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason. A New Earth
T H E  V O I C E  I N  T H E  H E A D
That first glimpse of awareness came to me when I was a first. year
student at the University of London. I would take the tube (subway)
twice a week to go to the university library, usually around nine oclock
in the morning, toward the end of the rush hour. One time a woman in
her early thirties sat opposite me. I had seen her before a few times on
that train. One could not help but notice her. Although the train was full,
the seats on either side of her were unoccupied, the reason being, no
doubt, that she appeared to be quite insane. She looked extremely tense
and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice. She was so
absorbed in her thoughts that she was totally unaware, in seemed, of
other people or her surroundings. Her head was facing downward and
slightly to the left, as if she were addressing someone sitting in the empty
seat next to her. Although I dont remember the precise content, her
monologue went something like this: And then she said to me. so I said
to her you are a liar how dare you accuse me of. when you are the one
who has always taken advantage of me I trusted you and you betrayed
my trust. There was the angry tone in her voice of someone who has
been wronged, who needs to defend her position lest she become
annihilated. As the train approached T ottenham Court Road Station, she stood up and
walked toward the door with still no break in the stream of words
coming out of her mouth. That was my stop too, so I got of f behind her. At street level, she began to walk toward Bedford Square, still engaged
in her imaginary dialogue, still angrily accusing and asserting her
position. My curiosity aroused, I decided to follow her as long as she
was walking in the same general direction I had to go in. Although
engrossed in her imaginary dialogue, she seemed to know where she was
going. Soon we were within sight of the imposing structure of Senate
House, a 1930s high. rise, the universitys central administrative building
and library. I was shocked. W as it possible that we were going to thesame place. Y es, thats where she was heading. W as she a teacher,
student, an of fice worker, a librarian. Maybe she
was some psychologists research project. I never knew the answer. I
walked twenty steps behind her, and by the time I entered the building
(which ironically was the location of the headquarters of the Mind Police
in the film version of Geor ge Orwells novel, 1984), she had already been
swallowed up by one of the elevators. I was somewhat taken aback by what I had just witnessed. A mature
first. year student at twenty. five, I saw myself as an intellectual in the
making, and I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of
human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by
thinking. I didnt realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main
dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who
had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her be part of this. I was still thinking about her when I was in the mens room prior to
entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I thought: I hope I dont
end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I
suddenly was shocked when I realized that I hadnt just thought those
words, but mumbled them aloud. Oh my God, Im already like her, I
thought. W asnt my mind as incessantly active as hers. There were only
minor dif ferences between us. The predominant underlying emotion
behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case, it was mostly
anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought mostly in my head. If she was
mad, then everyone was mad, including myself. There were dif ferences
in degree only. For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it
from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from
thinking to awareness. I was still in the mens room, but alone now,
looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my
mind, I laughed out loud. It may have sounded insane, but it was the
laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big. bellied Buddha. Life isnt as
serious as my mind makes it out to be. Thats what the laughter seemed to
be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be for gotten. I
would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely
identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awarenessreturned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of
compulsive thinking and of the false, mind. made I. The above incident not only gave me a first glimpse of awareness, it also
planted the first doubt as to the absolute validity of the human intellect. A few months later, something tragic happened that made my doubt row. On a Monday morning, we arrived for a lecture to be given by a
professor whose mind I admired greatly, only to be told that sadly he had
committed suicide sometime during the weekend by shooting himself. I
was stunned. He was a highly respected teacher and seemed to have all
the answers. However, I could as yet see no alternative to the cultivation
of thought. I didnt realize yet that thinking is only a tiny aspect of the
consciousness that we are, nor did I know anything about the ego, let
alone being able to detect it within myself. A New Earth
C O N T E N T  A N D  S T R U C T U R E  O F  T H E  E G O
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning
is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In the case of a child who cries in deep suf fering because his toy has
been taken away, the toy represents content. It is interchangeable with
any other content, any other toy or object. The content you identify with
is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding
culture. Whether the child is rich or poor, whether the toy is a piece of
wood shaped like an animal or a sophisticated electronic gadget makes
no dif ference as far as the suf fering caused by its loss is concerned. The
reason why such acute suf fering occurs is concealed in the word my, and
it is structural. The unconscious compulsion to enhance ones identity
through association with an object is built into the very structure of the
egoic mind. One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into
existence is identification. The word identification is derived from the
Latin word idem, meaning same and facere, which means to make. So
when I identify with something, I make it the same. The same as what. The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of
my identity. One of the most basic levels of identification is with things:
My toy later becomes my car, my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to
find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in
them. That is the fate of the ego. A New Earth
I D E N T I F I C A T I O N  W I T H  T H I N G S
The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to
sell things that people dont really need, they must convince them that
those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen
by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self. They do
this, for example, by telling you that you will stand out from the crowd
by using this product and so by implication be more fully yourself. Or
they may create an association in your mind between the product and a
famous person, or a youthful, attractive, or happy. looking person. Even
pictures of old or deceased celebrities in their prime work well for that
purpose. The unspoken assumption is that by buying this product,
through some magical act of appropriation, you become like them, or
rather the surface image of them. And so in many cases you are not
buying a product but an identity enhancer. Designer labels are primarily
collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore
exclusive. If everybody could buy them, they would lose their
psychological value and all you would be left with would be their
material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. What kind of things you identify with will vary from person to person
according to age, gender, income, social class, fashion, the surrounding
culture, and so on. What you identify with is all to do with content;
whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural. It is one of
the most basic ways in which the egoic mind operates. Paradoxically, what keeps the so. called consumer society going is the
fact that trying to find yourself through things doesnt work: The ego
satisfaction is short. lived and so you keep looking for more, keep
buying, keep consuming. Of course, in this physical dimension that our surface selves inhabit,
things are a necessary and inescapable part of our lives. W e need
housing, clothes, furniture, tools, transportation. There may also be
things in our lives that we value because of their beauty or inherentquality. W e need to honor the world of things, not despise it. Each thing
has Beingness, is a temporary form that has its origin within the formless
one Life, the source of all things, all bodies, all forms. In most ancient
cultures, people believed that everything, even so. called inanimate
objects, had an indwelling spirit, and in
this respect they were closer to the truth than we are today. When you
live in a world deadened by mental abstraction, you dont sense the
aliveness of the universe anymore. Most people dont inhabit a living
reality, but a conceptualized one. But we cannot really honor things if we use them as a means to self. enhancement, that is to say, if we try to find ourselves through them. This is exactly what the ego does. Ego. identification with things creates
attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our
consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of
progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless
growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the
cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware
that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the or ganism
of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of
growth that they cant let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a
time of negative growth. A lar ge part of many peoples lives is consumed by an obsessive
preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is
object proliferation. When you can no feel the life that you are, you are
likely to fill up your life with things. As a spiritual practice, I suggest
that you investigate your relationship with the world of things through
self. observation, and in particular, things that are designated with the
word my. Y ou need to be alert and honest to find out, for example,
whether your sense of self. worth is bound up with things you possess. Do certain things induce a subtle feeling of importance or superiority. Does the lack of them make you feel inferior to others who have more
than you. Do you casually mention things you own or show them of f to
increase your sense of worth in someone elses eyes and through them in
your own. Do you feel resentful or angry and somehow diminished in
your sense of self when someone else has more than you or when you
lose a prized possession. A New Earth
T H E  L O S T  R I N G
When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I would
visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer. She
was a schoolteacher in her mid. forties and had been given no more than
a few
months to live by her doctors. Sometimes a few words were spoken
during those visits, but mostly we would sit together in silence, and as
we did, she had her first glimpses of the stillness within herself that she
never knew existed during her busy life as a schoolteacher. One day, however, I arrived to find her in a state of great distress and
anger. What happened I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as
well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said she was sure it
had been stolen by the woman who came to look after her for a few
hours every day. She said she didnt understand how anybody could be so
callous and heartless as to do this to her. She asked me whether she
should confront the woman or whether it would be better to call the
police immediately. I said I couldnt tell her what to do, but asked her to
find out how important a rig or anything else was at this point in hr life. Y ou dont understand, she said. This was my grandmothers ring. I used to
wear it every day until I got ill and my hands became too swollen. Its
more than just a ring to me. How can I not b upset. The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her
voice were indications that she had not yet become present enough to
look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe
them both. Her anger and defensiveness were signs that the ego was still
speaking through her. I said, I am going to ask you a few questions, but
instead of answering them now, see if you can find the answers within
you. I will pause briefly after each question. When an answer comes, it
may not necessarily come in the form of words. She said she was ready
to listen. I asked: Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at
some point, perhaps quite soon. How much more time do you needbefore you will be ready to let go of it. W ill you become less when you
let go of it. Has who you are become diminished by the loss. There were
a few minutes of silence after the last question. When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face, and she
seemed at peace. The last question made me realize something
important. First I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said, Y es,
f course you have been diminished. Then I asked myself the question
again, Has who I am become diminished. This time I tried to feel rather
than think the answer. And suddenly I could feel my I Am. ness. I have
never felt
that before. If I can feel the I Am so strongly, then who I am hasnt been
diminished at all. I can still feel it now, something peaceful but very
alive. That is the joy of Being, I said. Y ou can only feel it when you get out of
your head. Being must be felt. It cant be thought. The ego doesnt know
about it because thought is what it consists of. The ring was really in
your head as a thought that you confused with the sense of I Am. Y ou
thought the I Am or a part of it was in the ring. Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being
that it cannot feel. Y ou can value and care for things, but whenever you
get attached to them, you will know its the ego. And you are never really
attached to a thing but to a thought that has I, me, or mine in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who
you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emer ges. She said, Now I understand something Jesus said that never made much
sense to me before: If someone takes your shirt, let him have your coat
as well. Thats right, I said. It doesnt mean you should never lock your door. All it
means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power
than defending or hanging on. In the last few weeks of her life as her body became weaker, she became
more and more radiant, as if light were shining through her. She gave
many of her possessions away, some to the woman she thought had
stolen the ring, and with each thing she gave away, her joy deepened. When her mother called me to let me know she had passed away, she
also mentioned that after her death they found her ring in the medicine
cabinet in the bathroom. Did the woman return the ring, or had it been
there all the time. Nobody will ever know. One thing we do know: Life
will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of
your consciousness. How do you now this is the experience you need. Because this is the experience you are having at this moment. Is it wrong then to be proud of ones possessions or to feel resentful
toward people to have more than you. Not at all. That sense of pride, of
needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of ones self through
more than and diminishment through less than is neither right nor wrong
it is
the ego. The ego isnt wrong; its just unconscious. When you observe the
ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Dont take the ego too
seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times
you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for
so long. Above all, know that the ego isnt personal. It isnt who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, thats just more ego. A New Earth
T H E  I L L U S I O N  O F  O W N E R S H I P
T o own something what does it really mean. What does it mean to make
something mine. If you stand on a street in New Y ork, point to a huge
skyscraper and say, That building is mine. I own it, you are either very
wealthy or you are delusional or a liar. In any case, you are telling a story
in which the thought form I and the thought form building mer ge into
one. Thats how the mental concept of ownership works. If everybody
agrees with your story, there will be signed pieces of paper to certify
their agreement with it. Y ou are wealthy. If nobody agrees with the story,
they will send you to a psychiatrist. Y ou are delusional, or a compulsive
liar. It is important to recognize here that the story and the thought forms that
make up the story, whether people agree with it or not, have absolutely
nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree with it, it is
ultimately a fiction. Many people dont realize until they are on their
deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had
anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole
concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the
last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were
looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what
they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already
been there, but had been lar gely obscured by their identification with
things, which ultimately means identification with their mind. Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus said, for theirs will be the kingdom
of heaven. What does poor in spirit mean. No inner baggage, no
identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a
sense of self in them. And what is the kingdom of heaven The simple but
profound joy of Being that is there when you let og of identifications and
so become poor in spirit. This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient spiritual
practice in both East and W est. Renunciation of possessions, however,will not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure its
survival by finding something else to identify with, for example, a
mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in
material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than
others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a
bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of
identification, the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesnt
mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity. Anti. consumerism or anti. private ownership would be another thought form,
another mental position, that can replace identification with possessions. Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong. As we shall
see later, making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal
egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other
words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps
it alive does not. One of the unconscious assumptions is that by identifying with an object
through the fiction of ownership, the apparent solidity and permanency
of that material object will endow your sense of self with greater solidity
and permanency. This applies particularly to buildings and even more so
to land since it is the only thing you think you can own that cannot be
destroyed. The absurdity of owning something becomes even more
apparent in the case of land. In the days of the white settlement, the
natives of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible
concept. And so they lost it when the Europeans made them signs pieces
of paper that were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they
belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to them. The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And
the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How
you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived
in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth
would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self. Y ou could then
move to a simple cabin, give up our wealth, and regain an identity by
seeing yourself and being seen as more spiritual than others. How you
are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like
and who you are. The egos sense of self. worth is in most cases bound up
with the worth you havein the eyes of others. Y ou need others to give you a sense of self, and if
you live in a culture that to a lar ge extent equates self. worth with how
much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective
delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of
your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your
sense of self there. How do you let go of attachment to things. Dont even try. Its impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to
find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment
to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to
something, which is to say, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is
no longer total. I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment. Thats the beginning of the transformation of consciousness. A New Earth
W A N T I N G :  T H E  N E E D  F O R  M O R E
The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a
relatively shallow and short. lived one. Concealed within it remains a
deep. seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of not enough. I
don't have enough yet, by which the ego really means, I am not enough
yet. As we have seen, having the concept of ownership is a fiction created by
the ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make itself stand out,
make itself special. Since you cannot find yourself through having,
however, there is another more powerful drive underneath it that pertains
to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we could also call
wanting. No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore,
wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to
want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of
having is always replaced by more wanting. This is the psychological
need for more, that is to say, more things to identify with. It is an
addictive need, not an authentic one. In some cases, the psychological need for more or the feeling of not
enough that is so characteristic of the ego becomes transferred to the
physical level and so turns into insatiable hunger. The suf ferers of
bulimia will often make themselves vomit so they can continue eating. Their mind is
hungry, not their body. This eating disorder would become healed if the
suf ferers, instead of being identified with their mind, could get in touch
with their body and so feel the true needs of the body rather than the
pseudo. needs of the egoic mind. Some egos know what they want and pursue their aim with grim and
ruthless determination Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, to give just a few
lar ger. than. life examples. The ener gy behind their wanting, however,
creates an opposing ener gy of equal intensity that in the end leads to
their downfall. in the meantime, they make themselves and many othersunhappy, or, in the lar ger.
The book's main purpose is not to add new information or convince the reader of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness and awaken the reader.
What is the purpose of this book?
The author suggests that established religions have often been misinterpreted and distorted, and that true spiritual growth cannot occur within their rigid structures.
What is the author's view on the role of established religions in the transformation of human consciousness?
The author emphasizes that the egoic mind is the root of humanity's problems, and that trying to change the world through intellectual or material means will not be effective.
What is the author's stance on the idea of trying to change the world through intellectual or material means?
The author argues that the concept of "I" or self-identity is an illusion created by the ego to give itself solidity and permanence, and that true spiritual growth can only occur by recognizing and transcending this illusion.
What is the author's view on the concept of "I" or self-identity?
The author suggests that attachment to things and the need for more (wanting) are fundamental aspects of the ego's structure and are driving forces behind human suffering and unhappiness.
What is the author's perspective on the role of attachment and wanting in the egoic state of consciousness?