“In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.” “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” ― Eckhart Tolle
In the last year of the 20th century, Eckhart Tolle gave a great gift to the world with his book, The Power of Now. In it, he presented the wisdom of Buddhist psychology and other great non-dual spiritual traditions in a completely contemporary manner. He presented wisdom, which, just past the one-quarter mark of the 21st century, is greatly needed as the world seems to be teetering on the edge of a coming era that feels so unstable, economically unbalanced, uncertain, dehumanized and without coherent values as to be, quite possibly, incapable of carrying us into the future safely. It must be dawning on many that we simply cannot continue on our current path for we seem to find ourselves in an evolutionary crisis, as when a species’ relationship with its environment is no longer sustainable.
When applying the word “environment” to humanity, we must see its application as far more complex than simply referring to the environment of nature, for humanity has already left that simple relationship behind, and this is a very important part of the challenge. “Environment” for humanity is nature plus the realm of thought and its creations. Humanity left nature as its primary context thousands of years ago as our unique biological evolutionary capacity, the ability to think abstractly, created the first version of artificial reality – civilizations. For thousands of years, this evolutionary phase advanced, creating evermore complex technology and political/social organization until now, within a span of roughly one hundred years, in the wake of radio, television, computers, and the internet creating artificial reality 2.0, we find ourselves, with artificial intelligence, in the beginning of artificial reality 3.0. From artificial reality 1.0 to 2.0 taking five thousand years, we moved from 2.0 to 3.0 in a dizzyingly fast one hundred years. Of course, we are disoriented. We can’t begin to grasp where it is all headed.
Indeed, we are certainly in a crisis vis-à-vis the environment of nature. Our civilization’s carbon-burning technology, exacerbated by materialistic consumer culture and environmentally destructive farming practices, has greatly contributed to growing climate instability threatening habitability and agricultural capacity in many regions of the globe. We are not passive victims here. The human environment of mind – to be specific, egoic mind – has responsibility for creating what may end up as our demise. Our problem is that we remain anchored in outmoded ego-based consciousness and seem unable to evolve the politics of our civilization in step with the challenges we have created for ourselves. Both government and the corporate culture, which is the true dominant entity of our society, continue shaping community consciousness through mass communication, not for community good but for profit and power. On top of the growing nature environmental crisis, we also seem incapable of the political will to completely break free of the existential threat we created with the weaponization of splitting the atom. We can’t even seem to break free once and for all from nationalistic authoritarianism, the extreme collective madness which could unleash Armageddon instantaneously. The situation seems impossible, but unlike non-human animals in an evolutionary crisis, we have the ability to shape our response. We have the ability to affect the quality of our survival, to even be architects of what sort of evolutionary adaptations we make.
This era of post-aboriginal human evolution, which is called civilization, might well also be called The Egoic Age – for it is the psychological capacity of the human mind to abstract and personalize its experience within the concept of time – which is called “ego” – that made civilizations possible. Civilizations are, in a sense, macro-egos, the composite of millions of individual egos in a feedback loop, each dimension shaping the other. Because the concept of “me” and “mine” are of primary importance to the ego, with the essential planetary collective “we” not registering at all – it is this planetary “we” which must rise into consciousness as the next stage of human evolution if we are to proceed into the future with our humanity and richly biodiverse planet still intact. The artificial reality of ego has always been the force that threatened our natural humanity, being the cause of wars, bigotry, cruelty, unjust government, persecution, exploitation, and the replacement of the natural and soulfully human with the artificial and superficial. Our successful evolution must be based in the reasoning power of the ego to realize the necessity of moving from the selfish orientation of “me” and “mine” into ever expanding circles of “we.”
Eckhart Tolle skillfully presents what the ancient wisdom traditions held in escrow for humanity in explaining that the mental dimension of ego is a magnificent capacity as a faculty, but is a disaster as identity, as our sense of who we are. Our crisis can be understood by realizing that, for five thousand years, we have lived within ego identification leading us to this present verge of disaster. Tolle also shared that the ancients taught that the key to our salvation is through awakening into our very essence, our natural Being, as harmonious expressions of the same balance and harmony that is Nature. Buddhism, for instance, calls upon us to reawaken into our “original nature” as Nature.
How do we do this? We must learn to stop – stop running around in our minds and in our lives obsessed with “me” and “mine” and all the artificiality. We must stop to realize the natural moment as all that is actual, true, and real, to experience our true nature as the intelligent, compassionate energy of consciousness when freed of ego domination. And yes, this is difficult to do because we have lost connection with our very Being, and the Being of the life that is our planet, and so we stumble along. But we must try. We must bring our intention and attention to the Being of all life, as well as of our own lives. We must begin to realize the quiet dimension of awareness beneath the noise of the egoic mind and our egoic society to feel with increasing urgency the need for “we” as our orientation if we are not to be pulled down by individual and collective ego into catastrophe.
“It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.” “You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” ― Eckhart Tolle
This is called enlightenment. Buddhism refers to the infinite interconnectedness and interdependence of all that exists as “dependent origination.” In other words, everything exists only because of the existence of everything else. Life is an infinite interconnected web, but of course, we do not experience existence in this way. This awakening into ultimate Reality is only experienceable when all the cultural bias for individual and group specialness and separateness, that is, egoic thinking, is suspended and we open our field of awareness out of the prison of “me and mine.” The ancient traditions tell us that we are essentially a channel through which the Universe experiences and interacts with itself, the same being true for everyone and everything. This is the most dramatic and worldview shattering realization one can have. Instead of the materialist view of the world, which holds everyone and everything as separate parts independent of each other, these traditions offer more of a biological view of existence. Life is understood as interdependent organisms within greater organisms, within The One that is All Life, that is the Universe. This has been called Dharma in Buddhism, also, The Tao. Tolle calls it the Realm of Being.
Almost immediately, in the first chapter of The Power of Now, Tolle shares – “The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.”
We are here as an evolving species to break free of this confusion and fear, to move in our sense of self from ego to Being. Of course, this can only happen one person at a time within the feedback loop that is society. Each person who breaks free and realizes that all the limiting identifiers they have carried all their lives and the limiting concepts society insists upon are, in the vernacular of Buddhism, “Illusion,” is contributing to the awakening of the human species into its necessary next stage of evolution. The meditational practices of Buddhism and other wisdom traditions hold the key to this awakening, into realizing that who we are is the energy of awareness WITH a human body, mind, and circumstance. We are not white, brown, or black, American or Chinese. We are one human species manifesting in rich great diversity inextricably linked with the rich great diversity of life that is this planet
We are here with our human bodies and minds to create a harmonious planetary civilization symbiotic with all Nature – but first we must find our own natural harmony within awareness. We must open our awareness to see through that which is artificial to discover that which is real and true. Then, ego and its capacity for inventive, creative thought, when used rightly as this magnificent human faculty, can take us from disharmony and crisis into harmonious and lasting peace, both personally and collectively. Human civilization does not have to be the dead-end it increasingly threatens to be. The ancient traditions teach us how to “stop”- through meditational, contemplational, and mindfulness practices. These traditions, and their new interpreters such as Tolle, teach us how to transcend ego orientation into our essential beingness, shared with all that is, in a harmonious civilization. Humanity’s evolutionary destiny is meant to be a new Eden, this planet and all its human, animal and plant life living together as “we.” But first, we must “wake up” from the spell of selfish and small-minded ego.