the unbearable lightness of being

milan, forgive me the encroachment into your territory!  I AM unbearably light these days and, though I remember nothing from that story but the title, I am still inspired by the thought of being unbearably light!  Perhaps I shall read it again.  Perhaps not.

... secret confession ... 

I am sitting on my sofa (the couch, i guess, if you're from somewhere other than the Midwest), enjoying the late afternoon light and silence (muted noise, really).  I confess I have a secret.  But I cannot reveal it until August.  eeeK!  Today has been the most delicious day!  I have taken care of lots of small, nagging personal items (my 401k rollover earning 2.05% over 10 years????) and still managed to be productive in work.  I have connected with humankind and yet managed to remain separate and distinct.  

I read an interview of Eckhart Tolle in O (I love Oprah magazine!), the May 2008 issue.  People!  Buy his book!  Follow this man's thoughts!  The article in O is a minefield of explosive truths.  I can't even imagine what I'll find in his books.  An excerpt . . . 

OPRAH:  "In the beginning of The Power of Now, you describe how, at 29 years old and considering suicide, you thought, "I cannot live with myself any longer .... Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was.  Am I one or two?  If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.  Maybe ... only one of them is "real."  I love this because it's the first time I thought, When I say I'm going to tell myself something, who is the "I" and who is the "self" I'm telling?  That's the fundamental question, isn't it?

ECKHART:  That's right.  Most people are not aware that they have a little man or woman in their heads that keeps talking and talking and whom they are completely identified with.  In my case, and in many people's cases, the voice in the head is a predominantly unhappy one, so there's an enormous amount of negativity that is continuously generated by this unconscious internal dialogue.  

OPRAH:  What happened that enabled you to realize this?

ECKHART:  One night, at the moment you were referring to, a separation occurred between the voice that was the incessant stream of thinking and the sense of self that identified with that voice, and a deeper sense of self that I later recognized as consciousness itself, rather than something that consciousness had become through thinking. 

OPRAH:  When you realized that the voice in your head was separate from the awareness, did it blow your mind? 

ECKHART:  Yes, it did.  I didn't understand it; I just realized the next day that I was suddenly at peace.  There was a deep sense of inner calm, although externally nothing had changed, so I knew something drastic had happened.  A while after this transformation, I was talking to a Buddhist monk who said that Zen is very simple: You don't rely on thought anymore; you go beyond thinking.  Then I realized that's what had happened.  All that unhappy, repetitive thinking wasn't there anymore.  

OPRAH:  Where does our identification with these thoughts and this voice in our heads come from?

ECKHART:  That identification that is derived from our thinking - which includes all of one's memories, one's conditioning, and one's sense of self - is a conceptual one that is derived from the past.  It's essential for people to recognize that this voice is going on inside them incessantly, and it's always a breakthrough when people realize, Here are all my habitual, repetitive, negative thoughts, and here I am, knowing that these thoughts are going through my head.  The identification is suddenly broken. That, for many people, is the first real spiritual breakthrough.

I could copy the whole article!  It's divine.  But, for simplicity ... I am not my thoughts.  Don't believe everything you think. Deeeee lish uss!