FOURTEENTH SUNDAY
A similar feeling in the small upstairs church at Osgodby staring through the window at the distant line of the Wolds.
I always love this passage from St. Paul to the Romans:
“Your interests are not in the unspiritual, but in the spiritual… ”
MONDAY
Tolle says that most people completely identify with the voice in their head. We are unaware of it.
I think the thinker is me. I am the thinker. But I am not. The soul is me.
Because the thinker is framed by its past and present position and hopes and resentments around it – many of them keep repeating themselves.
From boyhood I have very occasionally slipped out of this identification with thought and wondered if I was something separate. But I have never been able to follow this trail very far.
Tolle thinks the ego lives off identification and separation. Me & You. I have always wondered however if this sense of uniqueness is not false. If in fact we are not ourselves and others. That all of humanity is in some strange way us.
TUESDAY
One reason why I only occasionally keep a personal diary, which I suppose would have to be completely honest is that I would just complain in it constantly.
Tolle thinks that id others irritate us, we should view it as their ego acting, not them, and this fewer good advice to lessen irritation and complaining. Other people are kinder and nicer in reality than they often seem. Of course they are.
WEDNESDAY
We had a debate on the Srebrenica massacre in Westminster Hall. I spoke. Some people complained about the Dutch and the Belgians. To me this misses the essential point that the evil lay in the massacre and this contagion of otherness is part of the human condition that given the right conditions, feelings of irritation at another’s ego can quickly dissolve into murderous intent.
I believe the only antidote is to remind of the fact that we are one humanity.
I suppose the gospels of Tuesday & Wednesday this week are about witness we are all in our different ways enjoined to bear witness
“The harvest is rich bit the labourers are few.” (Matthew 9)
THURSDAY
Tolle rightly says that trying to get rid of a grievance by being good will rarely work. The ego is too strong. But recognising them as the work of the ego will start to put them in perspective it is entirely impossible for the ego to obey today’s Gospel:
“You received without change, give without change” (Matthew 10:7-11)
But we can recognise resistance to it as a thought of the ego?
FRIDAY
As Tolle says when I assert light travels faster than sound, I am not asserting the ego, but when I say I know this because I see lightening before I hear thunder, the ego is creeping in. It always does. You can read or write something like this and in a second it is back.
But Tolle is wrong in thinking if he does that he can make real progress if we try this alone, outwith of ordinary religion:
“Have mercy on me God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence” (Ps 50, today’s psalm)
SATURDAY
Tolle quotes Jesus – “I am the way, the truth and the light” – to illustrate his contention that the truth is in every one of us. This must be true.
But if several billion of us state ‘I am the truth’ not my ego but my soul is that not moral relativism and a recipe for chaos to an extreme order.
Perhaps not if it is the soul and not the ego that is the way, the truth and the light. But on a practical level do we not need organised religion as a guide?
People say that these focus and rules create persecution but only if we allow it. I can say I practice Christianity, I do not need to say another cannot practice Islam and that is equally valid for him.
Amongst all the dross in the papers this week are pictures, it was only a picture which caught my eye. It was of a monk of Pluscarden. He looked serene. His surrender of all his liberty, of all his ego, his grinding daily vocation starting at 4 am, of singing 150 psalms every week has given his real I, not his ego, almost complete freedom. Then if we “assume” the rightness of rules and liturgies, then I can be freed from the ever restless ego.