Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

6

Postscript: Emerging Insights

In the opening chapter of this book I have stated that I have yet to understand fully the intent of the Wisdom of the universe in bringing me into contact with Eckhart at the present stage of my inner journey. During the months that have elapsed since beginning of writing this book, that intent has become gradually more and more discernible. This postscript is an attempt to formulate some of the insights gained during this slow process, which is still continuing.

In the first chapter I have mentioned some of the chief characteristics of the ordinary consciousness described by Eckhart, which have made a particularly powerful impression on me. From previous study and introspection, I already had some insights into most of these characteristics of the egoic self. What Eckhart's teachings have done is to give me a keener and deeper insight into some of these characteristics, making me more acutely aware of their pervasiveness than I have ever been before. Three things seem to have made for this increased awareness. First, Eckhart's descriptions of the characteristics of the ordinary consciousness in terms of everyday attitudes such as "complaining" and "waiting" have made these characteristics of the egoic self more readily recognizable. Secondly, Eckhart lends force and vividness to his descriptions by acting them out in sounds and gestures, enabling one to feel what he describes. Thirdly, and

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above all, Eckhart's words—especially the spoken words—charged with Presence and the stillness from which they emanate, exercise a powerful influence and tend to intensify Presence in the reader or the hearer.

A revelation insight gained from Eckhart is about the role of the mind in concealing and distorting the reality of what we perceive. From Eckhart's descriptions of things, I have come to realize how someone who has gone beyond the mind perceives everything quite differently from the way things are perceived through the veil of the mind. What appears to the mind as inanimate is described by Eckhart as vibrant with incredible aliveness. Flowers and trees are described by him as expressions of incredible beauty, stillness, and sacredness. He sees animals living primarily in the joy of being rather than involved merely in a perpetual struggle for existence as they appear through the mental screen. A human being is perceived by him as a beautiful though unconscious form of the One Being in temporary disguise that is thick or thin, depending on the transparency of the human form. I do nor know or do not recall if Eckhart has given a description of the One Reality—popularly called God—but I guess it would be as Sri Aurobindo has described the Divine—a Reality "not only as concrete bur more concrete than anything sensed by ear or eye or touch in the world of Matter ... a certitude not of mental thought but of essential experience."¹

In the story of my spiritual quest, narrated in the first chapter, it did not occur to me to mention what I now realize to have been a significant landmark in my inner journey. Around 1971 I came in contact with Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett of Shasta Abbey, a Zen monastery at Mt. Shasta, California, close to the city where I lived. I was strongly drawn to Rev. Jiyu-Kennett and, over a period of about ten years, visited the Shasta Abbey on numerous occasions and attended several retreats led by the reverend Master. Besides the light I saw in her, what impressed me was the relative rapidity with which the monks at the Abbey seemed to progress on the path. As I recall, the monks were generally able to complete their training successfully, as judged by the Master, in about five years so as to be ordained as

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a Roshi or teacher. One of the criteria for the successful completion of the training was to have had at least the first kensho² experience. Some of the monks experienced a kensho long before the completion of their training, and there I was, having been practicing yoga for nearly two decades, including about seven years of concentrated practice in an Ashram, without having had what is generally regarded as a spiritual experience. I tried several times to take up the practice of zazen,³, which I learned at the abbey, but was never able to persist with it for lack of zest. I could not understand the significance of present-moment awareness, which is the essence of zazen. I found the Zen view of enlightenment as just living in the present moment quite incomprehensible. I felt meditation in the form of breath awareness to be quite dry compared to concentrating on the Divine.

Eckhart's teaching that the Now is the Divine has come to me as a revelation, in the light of which I am beginning to see an integration of the Buddhist and yogic approaches to spiritual practice. I now see that the yogic practice of consecrating oneself to the Divine in every act in order to be one with the Divine's Will, and the Buddhist practice of living in the present moment, the Now, are essentially two aspects of the same practice. To do either, one has to rise above self-seeking, the central knot that ties us to ordinary consciousness.

On the path such as that of yoga, which envisages a distant goal that can be attained only in the more or less remote future, there are two common pitfalls, to which, unconsciously, one almost always succumbs. First, one is apt to compartmentalize one's daily life and to regard part of it, such as the routine acts and necessary chores of daily living, as belonging to one's outer or ordinary life, and meditation, consecrated work, and the like as constituting one's inner or spiritual life. Acts pertaining to the outer life are done with ordinary consciousness and are governed by physical, vital, and mental motives of ordinary consciousness. This defeats the yogic ideal, which is to regard all life as yoga and to perform all acts with yogic consciousness. Secondly, in striving to attain something in the future rather than to

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be at each moment, one unconsciously tends to introduce self-seeking through the back door. Life becomes a struggle and brings stress and tension, instead of the peace and joy that come from consecrating oneself to the Divine in each act and at every moment.

This insight has been brought to me by Eckhart's words: "If there is not joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle."⁴ Living in the present moment and regarding each act as an end in itself rather than as a means for attaining a distant goal provides the necessary corrective. It enables one to live for the Divine at each moment and to experience what in Buddhism is regarded as enlightenment—the state in which one lives only in the present moment, forgetful of the self—in the here and now. In other words, the teaching of yoga to consecrate oneself at all times to the Divine, and the Buddhist teaching to be attentive only to the present moment, have one essential thing in common—they both require self-forgetfulness. To consecrate oneself to the Divine, the Eternal, without at the same time living in the present moment—the eternal Now—is to cease to be self-consecrated and to slip into self-seeking. Eckhart teaches a profound way for eliminating the self from the seeking. He says: "If you bring the intensity that is behind seeking into the now, then that intensity becomes attention that you give to this moment, to now. That which was seeking before brings the seeking into the now. Seek in the now instead of in the future."⁵

Another insight I may mention pertains to the Buddhist teaching regarding self-acceptance, which I first came across when I came in contact with Zen in the 1970s. I always found the teaching difficult to comprehend because yoga does not speak about self-acceptance; rather, it teaches disidentifying from what in our ordinary consciousness is felt to be the self, and regarding it as not a part of one's true self. In thus looking upon one's normal self as a false self while one is still identified with it, one tends to experience inner conflict and disturbance. What Eckhart says about such a state of inner disturbance or non-peace has now enabled me to sense obscurely the truth of

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the Buddhist teaching about self-acceptance. He says: "Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will rake you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender."⁶ This teaching has given me an insight into self-acceptance as an aspect of surrender—surrender to the suchness of the present moment.

From a psychological viewpoint, one cannot be fully present in Eckhart's sense of the term as long as one is still completely identified with the egoic self. In yogic language, one cannot be a fully detached Witness when one is so identified, for detachment and identification are mutually exclusive states. When one is partly identified and parley detached—as all seekers are in varying degrees—one is necessarily divided within oneself. This understanding has reinforced in me the need for acceptance of oneself as necessarily a divided self as long as one is a seeker.

Related to what I have just stated is the insight regarding the importance of being liberated from the egoic self by becoming a misidentified Witness prior to trying to be its Master. I have come to realize that, because of the emphasis in Sri Aurobindo's yoga on mastery and transformation rather than mere liberation, I have tended to be somewhat oblivious of the indispensable need for liberation prior to hoping for mastery of the instrumental self. That led to my placing an excessive stress on rejection of the egoic movements rather than on disidentifying myself from them. Eckhart's teaching has served to bring a corrective to this self-defeating attitude. I realize that, in dealing with the egoic self, one needs to go through the three stages spoken of by Sri Aurobindo: first and foremost, becoming inwardly free by being the impartial Witness of the movements in one's outer egoic being; secondly, being the Sanctioner, consenting only to what accords with one's true inner nature; thirdly, becoming the Master of all the movements of one's body, vital, and mind.

Eckhart's teaching has also helped me to understand that what is called rejection in yoga is not the right thing if it involves a painful struggle. Simply standing back as a calm witness, neither supporting

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nor resisting whatever arises in one's nature—as Eckhart teaches— achieves the same result that is intended by yogic rejection. As Sri Aurobindo says, "When the calmness is there, all sorts of things may rise on the surface—they have not to be accepted, but simply looked at. In time the calmness will be so developed as to quell the vital and outer mind also and in that complete quietude the true perceptions will come."⁷

Yet another related insight-—something that I have for long intellectually known but have not realized deeply enough—is the relative impotence of mental will in bringing about a change in ordinary consciousness. Mental will can exercise a control and prevent ordinary consciousness—which is largely unconscious—from slipping into a deeper unconsciousness, but to free ordinary consciousness from its conditioned reactions and limitations, a consciousness deeper or higher than that of the mind needs to be invoked. Eckhart calls it Presence. In Sri Aurobindo's yoga it is called the Divine Force or the Mother's Force. I realize more than ever before that, to invoke the Divine Force, it is not enough merely to detach oneself and stand back as a witness but to offer all the movements of one's ordinary consciousness to the Divine.

I have come to understand that what Eckhart calls Presence is not a mere mental witnessing and awareness but the witnessing and awareness of the inner being, the Purusha as it is called in Sankhya. Mental awareness can lead only to mental control. What Eckhart teaches is allowing rather than controlling, but allowing, he says, always implies awareness—a state that is the opposite of the normal state in which one is either totally identified with whatever arises in one's nature and consequently acts it out, or, if partly (that is, only mentally) disidentified with what arises, one tries to control it. Another possibility is that one may be mentally detached and so have a mental awareness of an ignorant movement, but the mind feels powerless in the face of the strong downward movement, so one gives in to it out of weakness. Yet another possibility—especially in the case of someone who has come across Eckhart's teaching about allowing everything that arises in oneself—is to justify and rationalize an ignorant

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movement (with which one has not yet truly disidentified) by adopting the attitude that all movements that arise in oneself should be "allowed," that is, acted out, not repressed. Sri Aurobindo has often remarked about the way in which the mind is thus used by the desire-nature for rationalizing the urges of the vital being. Regarding this aspect of the mind, which he calls the vital mind, he writes:

The vital started in its evolution with obedience to impulse and no reason—as for strategy, the only strategy it understands is some tactics by which it can compass its desires. It does not like the voice of knowledge and wisdom—but curiously enough by the necessity which has grown up in man of justifying action by reason, the vital mind has developed a strategy of its own which is to get the reason to find out reasons for justifying its own feelings and impulses.⁸

In conclusion, my summary statement of the central messages of Eckhart's teachings has also undergone modification. I concluded the first chapter by stating what seemed to be Eckhart's two central messages: dwell in the Now, and surrender to what is. I now see the two messages to be two aspects of a single message that brings together the Buddhist teaching about living in the present moment and the yogic teaching about surrendering to the Divine. Eckhart's single message is: live in alignment with the Now; allow the power of Now to act in and through you. His corollary teaching is: be present and still; step out of the mental noise of thought, and step into the stillness of thoughtless awareness.

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