EGO: THE CURRENT STATE OF HUMANITY - ECKHART TOLLE
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you.
You 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: You don’t know what it is. You 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 iceberg.
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.
Van Gogh didn’t say: “That’s 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 don’t 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.
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?
--
Thanks and best regards
J.Suresh
New No.3, Old No.7,
Chamiers road - 1st Lane,
Alwarpet,
Chennai - 600018
Ph: 044 42030947
Mobile: 91 9884071738
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