Tag: freedom from suffering

Happy Halloween!


“You know, most haunted houses aren’t haunted until someone walks inside it. (Laughter)  We do the haunting ourselves and don’t know it. You’d better remember that little figure of speech so you won’t make the same mistake again.”

– Vernon Howard‘s Higher World – MP3 CD Volume 33, talk 823

 

Have you met a teacher of spiritual awakening?

Have you met or studied in person with any of the teachers listed in the sidebar of the home page here?  I would love to hear from you if you have!!

It is exciting to see ‘spiritual awakening’ become a more commonplace interest.  Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle seem to be the most popular voices right now; they both present the teaching in a way that jives with living a typical modern life.

If you are familiar with Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, probably you have wondered, as I have – what was it like to be with these teachers before they got famous?    How did they teach before they were booking huge, sold-out venues?  Who were their first students?

Perhaps our task of discernment is easier with teachers who already have an established following of relatively intelligent, ‘normal’ people (whatever that means :)

Perhaps it’s easier to recognize teachers who have published books and videos because we can digest the message from a distance.  We can sit back, comfortable in our own homes, and run the material through our BS detectors.  We can check to see if it’s the same message (different expression/terminology) given by the true teachers we already recognize.  We can check to see if the inner teacher says, “yes!”

But before Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now, and before Byron Katie wrote Loving What Is,  I wonder… how did people respond to them?  What was it like to be with them?

Here is a written interview in which Byron Katie talks about the early days after her ‘transition’.  And a super fun video interview with Eckhart Tolle on Canadian TV show The Hour.  In it, Eckhart talks about his childhood.

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I started a Twitter account today… let’s connect if you are there too!

Stress

I got interested in this teaching because I was stressed, and distressed.

I appreciated all the comforts, privileges and pleasures I had in my life, but I could never shake the underlying sensation of dissatisfaction.  (I also felt guilty for feeling dissatisfied, because I had the comforts and privileges.)  I tried to talk myself out of the dissatisfaction.  I worked jobs in social services.  Nothing seemed to help.  I have a serious case of The Dreaded Gom-Boo.

Some may say that stress is just a part of life, that it is wise to just accept it and treat the symptoms – with humor, philosophy, religion, alcohol, etc.  For me, ignoring the haunting dissatisfaction (or temporarily covering it up) has never worked.  I want to get to the bottom of it.

When I discovered this teaching, I learned that I do not have to continue living with stress.

I learned that it is extremely important to focus my attention precisely on the sensation of dissatisfaction, not to avoid it.  It was important to get serious about examining it.

I learned that there are people, even people living now, in modern times and situations, who are free of suffering.  And they are not sitting around enjoying their own personal contentment.  Pain continues to arise in others, so they are busy teaching.  It’s like in action movies, when the heroes fall in love – they do not, will not, stop to enjoy the honeymoon.  They have more people to save, more villains to defeat, and they just keep going, hardly missing a beat, in love and fighting the good fight.

This is a great talk, recently posted on James Wood’s website, that addresses the importance of witnessing the stressful self-contraction without judgment.