I suppose this whole "Spring Break" thing is allowing me to blog on the regular. Waking up at any old time I want and sitting outside in my pajamas with a coffee and a book really are conducive to penning * typing * your thoughts. This book I'm reading, "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle is supposed to awaken me to my life's purpose as the tag line suggests.
For the first 125 pages I really enjoyed what Tolle had to say. He suggests that we all have an inner ego that drives all of our decisions, all of our anger and depression. We are all egoic beings that thrive on ourselves and not much else. This I can agree with. He writes, "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 ." This is something I've been working on pretty hard lately, trying to allow my life to just "be" as it were. After going through a really painful, nasty break-up that had labels and boxes and so much anger attached to it I'm trying my hardest to experience new, beautiful things in life that don't require a name or a label to make it genuine and real. I feel good about what I'm experiencing and the people I'm connecting to, I feel genuinely happy to be free of those old ties, I feel free and light!
The second point I'm attempting to work on is erasing the ego of ownership from my mind. Tolle says that "the ego tends to equate having with Being; I have, therefore I am." We live in such a consumer driven society and I am 100% guilty of basking in this, of rushing to Target for 'one more thing,' of reading Glamour and lusting after every item, of feeling somehow more complete with every new purchase I add to my already bulging closet. So while I am trying to curtail my materialistic spending, I'd also like to believe Tolle meant this on an even deeper, more spiritual level, and this is where I'm really focusing my energy. I will never stop 'buying things' but I can stop placing ownership on people and on superficial values. This ownership of people ties into my first point of labeling everything and everyone, so in a way the two go hand in hand. I will stop trying to label my relationships with others and thus I will cease the idea of ownership over them.
While I agree with Tolle on so many broad issues so far (I've yet to complete the book) I take issue with his notion that when you build a solid relationship with "your life," that is to say you take stock in the idea of "your life" you are acting with delusion. Tolle says that "the moment you say or think 'my life' and believe in what you are saying (rather than it just being a linguistic conversation), you have entered the realm of delusion." Maybe I'm not far enough along on my journey of awakening to fully believe what he says here, but I find it hard to separate myself from me. And yes, that is the ego talking, but I'd like to believe that in order to succeed in life I need to value my life and what it does for me. Sometimes we need to conceptualize our future or our reality to make it so, the future we want depends on us and our ideas of what our lives can do for us.
***I don't have all the answers, I am not even pretending to. I do have an interest in making myself better though, an invested interest in myself and my ideals and my future (again, the ego talking, damn me). Maybe for me I have to find a balance between living with my ego and trying to kill it, like a comic book battle of epic proportions in real life!
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