A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

This week I finished reading three books: When Fear Falls Away by Jan Frazier, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and A New Earth; Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose also by Eckhart Tolle. They all had the same message: the source of joy, love, and fulfillment lies inside you in the space that is usually covered by ego — mind, emotions, and identification with aspects of the outer world.

A New Earth was the basis of our most recent Wednesday morning class at Unity. We spent a lot of time discussing “ego” and what Tolle calls the “pain-body” and we reached a consensus that ego is a necessary thing which all humans develop in order to be able to deal with the world. It is not quite as all-bad as Tolle seems to say; his term “pain-body” incorporates the more negative aspects of the ego, what in the American vernacular is referred to as “baggage.”

Tolle’s description of ego and our class’s concurrent discussion of it made us all very aware of how we are unconsciously manipulated by our egos. The ego rushes to defend itself from challenges to the opinions, values, and priorities it has latched onto. Because these things make up our sense of identity, a challenge to them is a challenge to our identity, our very sense of self. It is quite natural to fear dissolution of self. And it takes a good deal of enlightenment not to feel threatened by challenges to those opinions that lie close to our hearts.

When who-you-are becomes too tied up in defense mechanisms, ingrained attitudes, or external situations (job, possessions, hobbies, relationships, causes, etc.), you forget to look for that quiet place inside you where mind and emotions dissolve and you can begin to touch base with simple Being.

It’s that quiet place of Being that Tolle suggests is the divine part of us all. If we can bring it to the fore, we find our true selves there and we are as close to universal divinity as we can get. At that most profound level, we cannot in any way be threatened or challenged or diminished or hurt — and certainly not destroyed. It is also the level at which we begin to experience joy in simple Being and that is our purpose in life: simply to be who we are.

From that place of inner peace and joy, you cannot help but send out love to the world around you. And it is not that you lose your ability to participate in the world — to speak out, to help others, to do the daily necessary activities of life. It is just that your mind and body become tools to support those activities while your sense of self is centered in the divine.

Tolle is not formulaic about how to achieve this. He suggests observing your mind and emotions and identifying ego activity. Meditating, clearing the mind of thought or paying close attention to your breathing might help to move you to more awareness of your inner self. For most of us awareness comes about as we try to open up to it.

However, some people (“rare beings” according to Tolle) experience this connection in a more sudden and unexpected way. Serendipitously, I came across a book which is an example of that sudden awakening. Jan Frazier calls her memoir When Fear Falls Away, but she says that it was much more than simple loss of fearfulness. She found a joy beyond words and an ability to let go of fear and anxiety that was entirely new to her and changed her whole experience of life.

Even though I am very different from Jan Frazier, I was grateful to have found her book while reading Tolle, because it was a first person account of everything Tolle was talking about. The only thing I really balked at in When Fear Falls Away was the author’s devotion to a guru. “Learn from everybody, worship nobody” is my personal philosophy — or as one of my Unity classmates said, “You’re nobody’s groupie.”

One issue that both Tolle and Frazier touch upon is that of feeling too detached from life. In the faith and happiness I’ve developed in the last few years, I have sometimes felt that I might be getting too detached. It’s an acceptance of things as they are, a feeling that “this, too, shall pass.” Also, if you believe that ultimately there is no such thing as good and evil, if it’s all just part of a benign universe experiencing itself, if death simply reunites you with universal consciousness, then there really is no reason to take things of this world too much to heart.

Some defenders of more conventional religious beliefs might criticize this understanding of God as taking away motivation for behaving well. Personally, I believe that it is just common sense to follow the rules of civilized living. You don’t have to threaten me with “hell” to get me to refrain from killing my neighbor; I’m quite happy to agree that if he doesn’t kill me, I won’t kill him.

Zero; The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

At last I think I've found the answer to my question, "Is there any such thing as nothing?" Here is how Charles Seife puts it in his book "Zero; The Biography of a Dangerous Idea:"

"A zero in quantum mechanics means that the entire universe -- including the vacuum -- is filled with an infinite amount of energy: the zero-point energy. This, in turn, leads to the most bizarre zero in the universe: the phantom force of nothing."

And

"The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing."

While I am a long way from understanding the math and physics of this, I believe it points to the idea that all of space is filled with a force that can manifest as particles. I call this force God, but you may call it "stuff" or anything else. The point is simply that you can't get away from existence.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

I am trying to rush-read Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now because tomorrow I start a class on a later book of his called A New Earth; Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. Well, it's just impossible to rush-read Tolle. Everything he writes reverberates with cosmic significance and you have to stop and ask yourself "Is this true? Do I believe this?" and you work to fit it in with your own thoughts and emotions and experience.

In one paragraph on page 99 he has what could be a statement of my own faith:

"Everything that exists has Being, has God-essence, has some degree of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans -- all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form."

And then, wham! bang! on the next page he hits you over the head with this: "In present-day humans, consciousness is completely identified with its disguise."

By "disguise" I think he means the separate physical form in which God-consciousness is expressing itself. We humans see ourselves as separate entities rather than what we really are which is drops of God-consciousness in the greater ocean of God.

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Neurological sciences are flourishing and the results have been creeping into our literature. First there was its popularization by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Then there was a substantial chunk of it in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Ian McEwan puts you in the head of a fictional neurosurgeon in Saturday. And now Richard Powers really digs deep in his novel called The Echo Maker.

I hadn't recognized Richard Powers' name when I bought The Echo Maker based on its description in a listing of National Book Award finalists. When it arrived, I realized that I'd read a previous work of his entitled The Gold Bug Variations, a heavy-duty novel that attempts to connect the elements of DNA to music (I'm still very confused about this book, so don't ask.)

In The Echo Maker Powers depicts Capgras syndrome in a young man who suffers exteme head trauma in an automobile accident. Capgras is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a close family member or spouse, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor. Powers uses this condition to set up tension between the accident victim and his only living relative, a sister who arrives on the scene hoping to take care of him.

I fell in love with this book relishing it until about two-thirds of the way through. Then the author started getting a little too artsy for my taste with long unintelligible paragraphs pedanticly mixing science, philosophy, and intuition. Since Powers was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (those genius grants), I will kindly assume that he was simply writing over my head -- although the words "failure to communicate" come to mind.

The God Code by Gregg Braden

Last night I finished reading Gregg Braden's The God Code skimming lightly over the last chapter where he discusses all the problems in the world. I was in that peculiar place where I agree with the author's conclusions but absolutely reject the way he got there.

Braden invents his own number system (using atomic mass) for the elements that make up our DNA (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen). He then finds that the Kabbalah numbers for the letters of God's name (YHWH) are the same as his manipulated data. Voila! This proves that God's name is written in our genes.

I believe that all of existence is God, so I would never argue that God (or his "name") is not in our genes. However Braden's approach is so contrived and convoluted that I laughed when he actually mentioned Occam's Razor -- his is far from the simplest answer to questions of God and the Universe. Indeed, it had me thinking I should be searching my cereal boxes for a secret de-coder ring.

I kept thinking "Does God have a name? Aren't names an invention of the human mind? Isn't 'I am that I am' an expression of simple existence? Why would God favor the Hebrew language over others?"

Still, I am totally with Braden when he writes that quantum physics suggests that the "laws of science" and the "God" of spiritual traditions may actually be references to precisely the same force.

The G.O.D. Experiments by Gary Schwartz

I finally finished reading The G.O.D. Experiments by Gary Schwartz -- it was squeezed in between Quarking at the Observer, much proofreading I've been doing for my court reporter friend, Lois, and the study of Metaphysics II which is a course I'm taking at church.

Gary Schwartz is a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona and describes himself as "an agnostically raised scientist with an open and inquisitive mind who is following the data where it takes him."

Most of the book just affirms that there's an intelligence underlying the universe. Like a good little agnostic, Schwartz doesn't call that intelligence "God," but rather G.O.D. for a Guiding, Organizing, Designing principle. His book is an easy read and fun to argue with; it provided lots of suggestions for additional reading and made me think I should look into the work of a Stanford professor named William Tiller.

Schwartz's reference to the idea of "The All is in the Small" rang true to me. It fits the concept I was taught many years ago in geology class: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." We know scientifically that everything is made of atoms whose nuclei include subatomic particles. Given what quantum mechanics is saying about the impossibility of observing those particles without having an effect on them, it is not (in my judgment) a great leap of faith to think that those particles have consciousness. I call that consciousness "God" and because the particles are the basic stuff (as far as we know) of which everything is made, I believe that God and the universe are one. Unity!

The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall

The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall is a beautifully written account of the lives of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody who lived in the Boston area and associated with the intelligensia of the early 1800s. Mary married Horace Mann, known as "the father of American public education." Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter." Elizabeth was a teacher who knew Emerson and Thoreau and was involved in Boston's Unitarian movement led by William Ellery Channing. She also corresponded with the English poet William Wordsworth. The lives of the Peabody women are told from a personal point of view with thoughtful psychological insight. And for the historians among us, their association with the movers and shakers of the day in a place of intellectual ferment makes for compelling reading.