http://www.zenthinking.net/blog/tag/transcending+the+ego
I listened to Eckhart Tolle this morning in an address he gave in Winnipeg a couple of years ago and I allowed certain words he shared to become stuck in my head. I did exactly what he encouraged the audience not to do in that first hour of his address: Don't give excessive attention to words. Don't collect sign posts confusing them with the destination. (Tolle 2018...loosely paraphrased) .
A Note Taker
You see, I am one of those people who sits there and takes notes instead of just allowing what is said to sink in. I am a bit of a word addict. I suppose I have to be if I want to call myself a writer but I do take it a step further.
I am an eternal student trained in the "standardized learning" method. I have already spent too many years jotting down the words of professors, lecturers and authors in both my formal and informal learning that it has become a habit, I suppose, to seek out and jot down the words of others. I collect those that I think I can use in my own life and share in my writing. I became a very good note taker even though I can barely make out my own handwriting anymore. :)
A Hoarder of Sign Posts
I pay too much attention to words and I collect sign posts! In fact, I am a bit of a hoarder in that department. My desk is covered in books, scriptures from different religious sectors, philosophies, poetry, sticky notes, quotes written on scraps of paper, note books full of the messages I collected from the people I listened to or read recently. It is a mess really but it all seems so important to me. D. often suggest I throw this or that out and I resist mightily. Someday I may need these words, these sign posts, I argue.
Why?
Well, yes I am a writer and writers need words to do what they do. I am a learner so I feel I need the lessons and wisdom shared by others jotted down somewhere I can retrieve it later just in case I forget. I am also a conceptualizer.
I have this habitual need to understand things with my mind so I can explain them to others with my words. In order to articulate, I need to read, listen, think, analyze, interpret, translate, understand, and transform. So much has to go on in my mind, it seems, before it comes down on the paper. And I seem to need it on the paper before I can learn.
A Deeper Knowing
At the same time I know that I am learning at a deeper level beneath the words, the mess on my desk and the notes I am taking. I am feeling and experiencing something that I cannot describe here. I am not really learning something new...I am...it seems...remembering what I already knew. And I can't explain that in any depth that will make sense with words. Thee is deeper reality that exists beneath each word, label or name we use.
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching as translated by Gia Fu-Feng; https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh)
I do agree with Tolle and most of the spiritual masters I have read or listened to....there is a knowing in us that is not conceptual...that goes beyond thinking and the mind. There is something which is really no-thing within us that can not be reduced to a label or a name. All the word does, the name does, the verbal teaching does...is point us in the direction we need to go, in order to truly know who we are. The words are not the "wisdom" we seek...they simply point to it, like guide posts on a side of the road we are travelling down on. They simply show us the way. They are not the way...they just point to it.
Recognizing Shunyata
I will still use words to teach and to learn but I will constantly try to remind myself that they do not give me what I need. They just point me inward to where what I need is and always has been.
I like how Tolle explains that: around the word and between each word is the essence of everything. The word, name, label comes from and onto this background of infinite spaciousness...what the Buddhists call Shunyata.
Maybe we can use words in a different way. Maybe we can learn to listen to them or write them down without seeing them as the destination...just pointers to something Greater that really cannot be explained or defined with words. Becoming more mindful, as we do, of that spaciousness that is beneath them .
All is well!
Eckhart Tolle ( 2018) 2018 Winnipeg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTFt13dPHKc
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