Fresh and important reasons for being a Witness

On being a witness, I am in the middle of reading Eckhart Tolle's new book – The New Earth This article gives my views on this book.

Eckhart Tolle's first book – The Power of Now – is a modern spiritual classic. I agree with almost every word written in that book and I consider it one of the most important books I have read.

The New Earth is Eckhart Tolle's first book in eight years. It is different in focus from his first book in that The Power of Now tells us what we can do from moment to moment to live happily and grow spiritually. The New Earth however focuses on all that we are now doing that is wrong and which causes our unhappiness and the insanity in the world that we are living in now.

Eckhart Tolle's analysis of this insanity is simplicity itself. According to him it is the ego – this sense of an identity separate from the rest of existence.

You may think this is going too far. You may regard the ego as a necessary evil. Necessary it may be but evil it definitely is.

Try this exercise. Sit for 15 minutes with your eyes closed and observe your thoughts. Just observe. If you meditate regularly then this will be a very familiar experience to you.

You will observe that there is a non-stop sequence of thoughts and feelings arising in your head whether you like it or not. And it is never ending. You cannot be free even for a moment from this constant chatter inside your head.

In Vipassana and in Buddhist literature, this jumping from one thought or feeling to another is compared to a restless monkey jumping from one branch to the next. Most people find this sequence of thoughts and feelings to be unpleasant. This racket – in my head at least – is negative and filled with anger, dislike, fear and many other unpleasant feelings. A lot of people do not meditate and cannot stand to be alone by themselves even for a moment. It is because of this racket. They just cannot tolerate this unpleasant chatter and do not know how to end it or otherwise be free of it.

Eckhart Tolle calls this racket, this non-stop chatter inside our heads insane and I agree with him.

However, we are not these thoughts and feelings. We are the awareness, the consciousness, or the space within which these thoughts and feelings arise. And we can be free of this non-stop chatter by learning to witness and by not identifying with these thoughts and feelings.

It is when we identify with this unpleasant cacophony inside our heads that the ego arises. This causes all the misery, the hate and the violence present in this world. It also robs us of our happiness in this present moment, in the Here and Now.

Yet we need the mind in order to survive and function in this world.

There is a sentence that has made a big difference in my life. I read this sentence in Lin Yu Tang's excellent book, The Importance of Living. The sentence is this – "The human brain is as much an organ for finding food as a pig's snout."

This is what the human mind is. Now what are the implications of this statement if we accept it as true?

We know that we cannot avoid death. All we can do is to some extent postpone death but we cannot avoid it. All the thinking in this world is useless for this purpose.

If through meditation on death and impermanence we can get to be less serious and less single-mindedly focused on the problem of our survival then we can take the antics of the mind less seriously. We can take the thoughts and feelings that arise in our minds less seriously. We can witness them without identifying with them and not be influenced by the insanity of it. We can thus do away with the ego, which, according to Eckhart Tolle is the root of evil.

It is a simple concept to understand. The human mind is as much an organ for finding food as a pig's snout. And what does a pig do with its snout when it is not hungry? It does not use its snout. It sits back and enjoys life.

And that is all we need to learn to do. Meditation on Death will make us more relaxed and less fearful at the thought of our passing. We will take the enticements and temptations of this materialistic world less seriously. And so we will not feel the need to think as much as we did before. We can simply witness it and let it go. What difference can thinking make anyway? We cannot avoid death in any way.

There are other methods or philosophies that teach us the how and why of not taking ourselves, and the insane chatter inside of our heads so seriously. The Hindu method – based on the Vedanta – is that of understanding intellectually and to the marrow of our bones that we are not the Body or the Mind or the Intellect. We are something other than that. This also enables us to take ourselves, and the racket inside our heads less seriously.

I recommend Paul Brunton's meditation technique and Vipassana to those interested. Both methods work.

Please visit the web page Vipassana Meditation describing Vipassana and these pages on Paul Brunton's Meditation technique

I hope you enjoyed this article and that it will be useful to you.

Stay tuned for more in this continuing series.

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