Eckhart Tolle

I found Tolle's The Power of Now one of the most profoundly practical, spiritual books I've ever read. You can read the distilled wisdom of that book in its companion Stillness Speaks. Here are just a few words, selected randomly:

'True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.'

'The human condition: lost in thought.'

'The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw you attention in completely. Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.'

'When you step into the Now, you step out of the content of your mind. The incessant stream of thinking slows down. Thoughts don't absorb all your attention anymore, don't draw you in totally. Gaps arise in between thoughts - spaciousness, stillness. You begin to realise how much vaster and deeper you are than your thoughts.'

'"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action - empowered action.'

'You don't need to be a Christian to understand the deep universal truth that is contained in symbolic form in the image of the cross. The cross is a torture instrument. It stands for the most extreme suffering, limitation, and helplessness a human being can encounter. Then suddenly that human being surrenders, suffers willingly, consciously, expressed through the words, "Not my will, but Thy will be done." At that moment, the cross, the torture instrument, shows its hidden face: it is also a sacred symbol, a symbol for the divine.

'That which seemed to deny the existence of any transcendental dimension to life, through surrender becomes an opening into that dimension.'

obama speech

It's rare that you wake up with renewed hope in your heart.

'This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.'

maladapted social comparison

The psychologist and author of Affluenza, Oliver James, told me in an interview that ‘human beings can be tempted by the ultimate in satanic ways of social esteem, of wanting to feel that they are successful in relation to their fellow man, and that those comparisons can be manipulated in such a way as to become central to one’s whole purpose.’

Heavy stuff, but fascinating nevertheless: ‘social esteem’, if I understand him correctly, is something we can fall for (and not something we should naturally accept as normal); in comparing ourselves to others, we leave ourselves vulnerable to believing that the outcome of such comparisons should drive our ultimate quest for success in life.

This is what he calls ‘maladapted social comparison’ – which can be dangerous and debilitating. The crucial thing is to ask whether your motives for craving money or high social status or fame (which are, in themselves, ‘neutral’) are intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motives are more spiritual, inward; extrinsic are about the surface appearance of things.

James is a child psychologist. ‘In the first six years’ he said, ‘it’s very possible to care for your children in such a way that they are extremely vulnerable to feeling insecure and to all the social prizes that are around in our society.’ We set our children up to compare themselves with everyone around them.

And what we learn in childhood, we take into adulthood. We compare ourselves relentlessly with those around us – our looks, our things, our intellect, our likeability – and we constantly find ourselves wanting. We find ourselves wanting more and more, to keep up with the Joneses, to prove that we have what it takes, to demonstrate to a watching world that we are outwardly successful in comparison with everyone else.

James, who spent time researching the effects of maladapted social comparison for his books Affluenza and Selfish Capitalism, did see an antidote, however.

An intrinsic, spiritual understanding of who you are can have great benefits. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I was really surprised, again and again, to find spirituality (while not being the only thing) was a significant component in helping people. People who go to church or who are spiritual and ethical – they quietly infect everybody else. That really interests me.’

Perhaps that’s because our spiritual intelligence tells us that if we compare ourselves favourably with others, we savour their lower status as well as exalt our own. In a culture of comparison, you need those who compare less favourably, in order to see yourself (and be seen) in a favourable light.

Extrinsic social comparison feeds our paranoia and insecurity. It looks at the surface of things and fails to take us deeper, into the realm of celebrating our incomparable uniqueness, as individual, inter-connected people made in the image of God.

It’s different, of course, to look at the intrinsic worth of others, and to ask searching questions of yourself in the light of the way other inspiring people live. We must remember to awaken to the motives for comparing ourselves to others. One is about looking good, seeming successful, attaching ourselves to outward trappings; the other is about inner growth, being well, and detaching ourselves from the things that hinder.

the weapon of the warrior

A nice line from Matthew Fox, printed in Ode magazine:

“Creativity is the weapon, the sword, of the spiritual warrior - who … digs deep into a wellspring of wildness that provides the energy for new life, connections, images and moral imagination by which to change things in a deep, not superficial, way."

spiritual warfare

While we're on Fight Club, a reminder from Tyler that spiritual warfare doesn't have to be all about demons and deliverance:

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."

You are not...

When you're laying down your ego, it may sometimes seem a passive exercise. Almost wimpy-spiritual instead of warrior-spiritual. But remember what Tyler Durden says in Fight Club:

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f#$%*ing khakis."

Egodecentricity... with an edge.