BLOG 174
It’s a breezy autumn day as I lie on my sun-warmed yoga mat in front of the sliding doors to our outdoor deck. As my online yoga class winds down into Savasana (corpse pose) I note the tension in my body and ask myself: “why am I always on “amber alert”? There could not be less cause for tension. And yet my jaw is tight and my mind active with a jumble of distractions.
To interrupt these uninvited thoughts I repeat to myself: “with every inhalation, awareness increases. With every exhalation, relaxation deepens”. After a few minutes of this repetition, a brief mental quiet is created, and a question arises: “is this state of “amber alert” a function of ego? And if so, how can I liberate myself from its grip?”
After the class, and having done my usual internet searches, I came up with a brilliant explanation of ego in a YouTube talk by Eckhart Tollé:
“The ego is a sense of self that arises when the mind is completely unobserved. The unobserved mind brings about the ego, in fact the unobserved mind is the ego. These are mental structures which are energy formations, because every thought is an energy formation, energy formations in your head that say “That’s me. That’s me and my life.”
All of these ever-present ideas form one’s sense of self or personality.
Tollé continues with:
“There are certain characteristics to this egoic state; one characteristic is that it exists in a state of frequent dissatisfaction, discontent, and there’s an underlying current, an undercurrent of “something is missing in my life.”
I did a mental happy dance when I heard this explanation because I had expressed these same feelings, particularly the sense of lack, on a walk with a friend the previous weekend. I’d questioned why there would be a sense of lack if indeed nothing was lacking?
In order to better understand what was happening when these impoverished feelings arose, I read on about Tollés transcendent dimension of consciousness, described by IA as “an unconditioned, formless dimension of pure awareness that exists prior to thought or individual personality.”
As this idea is almost impossible for me to grasp, I gravitate to Michael Singer’s metaphor of consciousness as a movie screen: I, as the audience, am observing the action on this screen, but I am distinctly separate from it. That would be an ideal state of being, and indeed is what Tollé is trying to explain as the transcendent dimension of consciousness.
That said, how often does one forget this separation and get so absorbed in, and identified with, the action on the screen that we don’t even know where we’re sitting? This is what is happening when we let circumstances and people outside of us determine our sense of who, what and where we are.
It also echoes what I quoted in my last blog: the person who looks outwards dreams, the person who looks inwards, awakens.” Awakening in the case of our movie screen metaphor would mean going up to the projection room and turning off the projector. The projector being all the thoughts and illusions, the beliefs and conditioning that one has picked up through a lifetime of looking outwards.
My own strategy, recently developed to deal with the voices in my head that create a sense of lack, dissatisfaction and unhappiness, is to stop and ask “who are you?” Almost invariably when I do that, the voice stops. It’s like turning on a high beam and catching a thief picking the lock in a dark alley. All action freezes for at least a few seconds. It’s really quite amazing. I can see the part of me that wants to chase the thief, the thought, chase it down to its lair in the ground, but in so doing I’m just caught up once again in that constant stream of mental talk.
When that happens I go back to my breath, the focus on inhalation and exhalation that creates inner space and quietness in the mind. Pema Chödrön offers this:
“Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being.”
The unbiased state of being is the blank movie screen. And with any luck, the lights go up and we permanently walk out of the ego-mind’s theatre!