Release Your Problems

Posts Tagged ‘Eckhart Tolle’

As readers will know, I often insert paragraphs from Lester Levenson’s collected talks to groups in NY in the 1960s. Under the collective title of ‘The Way To Complete Freedom – Sessions With a Master On Personal Transformation’, this 266 page book is like a bible to those seeking to understand what this life is really all about and the ways and means of rising above what has become known as ‘the human condition’.

It covers such ideas as The Basic Goal and Ways to Attainment, Happiness, Love, Ego, Mastering Mind and Matter, to Realization By Dropping the Unconscious and Why Not Go All the Way?

The more I read it, the more the knowledge is internalized, the more it becomes a part of me.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter “The Basic Goal’:

“Let’s now take a look at this so-called apparency, the world. The world is only an illusion that we created mentally. It is not external but in reality within us, within our mind.  Some day you’ll discover that you created this entire universe that you see.
The method of creating is by first creating what we call our mind. We create our mind which is nothing but a composite of all our thoughts, conscious and sub-conscious, and the thoughts create the material world.

Every little thing that happens to each and every one of us is created in our thinking. We mentally set up a thing called time which makes it even more difficult to see things, because we think now, and things happen years later.

But the only creator that is, is the mind – your mind. Is God a creator? Yes, because you are. Thou are that! You set up a mind and through the mind create. It is necessary and good to discover that everything happening is caused by our thinking. Everything that happens to us is created in our thought. It’s a stepping stone to realizing and recognizing that we are the creators.
First you discover that you created your trouble, then you discover that you can create anything you desire. After you discover that there’s nothing you cannot create, you’re still unhappy.  The reason is that you have separated yourself from the infinity. Only on recognizing your infinity are you perfectly satisfied.”

So what Lester is telling us is that we are cause of all our problems. Not consciously of course, but because of our lack of conscious awareness, we operate on ‘automatic’.  I.e. our ego is operated by the subconscious programs built in by reason of inherited patterns, upbringing and experiences (nature, nurture and more). But as he continually reminds us, we are infinite beings acting as though we are not. We think and act as though we are each individual and separate from the whole. The ego strongly re-inforces this concept since it depends for its life on having us think this way. Eckart Tolle expounds this idea in a simple, elegant way in his books.

So what to do about all this?
It seemed to our regular group, which has been meeting each month since 1997, that the thing to do was to prove to ourselves as much of these ideas as we could. If we are indeed creators, then let’s be positive creators and take control, instead of being at the mercy of  ‘cruel circumstance’.

In future posts, I’ll report to you on various experiences and results which have come about from working with ideas and techniques.

Please leave your comments and any questions you may have below this post. We appreciate your interest.

It is now some 20 odd years since Lester Levenson, considered by his close contacts as a genuine ‘American Spiritual Master’, passed away peacefully in Sedona, Arizona. Many of the ideas he discovered by virtue of his significant experiences are finding new champions throughout the US and Europe.

Although not directly connected, the philosophies of Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now and A New Earth) are, not surprisingly, attracting the attention and scrutiny of a section of the western world public. It hasn’t Read the rest of this entry »