Well, it's been a coon's-age since I've posted anything here. I've been working on another blog and forum at http://befreedom.org dedicated to learning about reclaiming our sovereignty (and understanding how we "lost it").

But the post I'm referring to above is on RealTruth, at http://realtruth.ws, called I Pledge Allegiance.

I hope that everyone is up on the Mayan Calendar (particularly as its timing is interpreted by Carl Johan Calleman - see The risks of believing that the Mayan calendar ends December 21, 2012).

Also, I will plug, as I do chronically, Ho'oponopono as part of a spiritual practice dedicated toward releasing separation and judgment within the mind. Ho'oponopono goes as deep as you may want to go - you can find a lot of info about it online.

Namaste, Bruce

It was after careful consideration, and several readings of the article from News With Views (http://www.newswithviews.com/Rae/debra39.htm) that is the subject of this commentary, that I decided to write this long reply. The ideas involved are hot button issues these days, often involving much fear and deeply ingrained belief systems that are difficult to examine impartially. With many of them this has been true for hundreds, even thousands of years, and it's now even more true in this time of social ferment, widespread stress, and personal and institutional transitions. I don't wish to attack any person or system of faith, but to question the unconscious assumptions underlying beliefs that seem to drive judgments against other people, in the hope that we can, with tolerance and good will, see beyond these apparent divisions.  – Bruce  (the Rae article is also posted at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_new_earth/message/75)
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Dear News with Views,

I was interested to see that you posted an editorial by Debra Rae that I've seen posted elsewhere by people who have a focus on alternative information about current events, called, confusingly, "ONLY IMAGINE TOLLE'S NEW EARTH," subtitled on your front page link as "Beware of New Age false prophets sweeping the planet." This article is a very negative, subjective, and often totally wrong presentation of Eckhart Tolle's work, and specifically of his webinars with Oprah Winfrey on his recent book, "A New Earth."

It presents a very few of the ideas covered in those webcasts, and those in distorted ways, either through a lack of attentiveness to what Eckhart actually said, or with deliberateness due to the apparent extreme disagreements with his information (understandable if she agrees with the assessment of him as a "false prophet"). Additionally, Ms. Rae, without linking references, associates Tolle with: what she call the 'esoterically "awakened" Beatles' (a code phrase, I assume, and an apparent reference to the word awakening as used by Eckhart); various unidentified "Humanist Manifestos;" the causes of the Cambodian genocide; advocates of something called "homonoeticus;" "New Age" solar occultism; and a "harmonized" utopian globalism she calls "common-ism," another term - and concept - that Tolle never, from my close readings of his work, begins to approach.

Repeatedly, without providing examples, Ms. Rae puts words into Tolle's mouth: he wants to end property; he doesn't think there's anything worth fighting for (implying, it seems that killing, though proscribed by the Ten Commandments she advocates, is appropriate for the godly), he teaches "grandiose interdependence" and "self-deification;" he perceives "global unity ... as imperative to proper flow of the god-force;" that Eckhart judges between "the perfect" and the "not-so-perfect" and (I guess) espouses perfection (of the ego?), making him an Aquarian "the sign of the perfected man" teacher (again, a code word for the instruction of apostate Christians under Tolle's sway); and he asserts that Jesus was "an ascended master" (one more term Tolle doesn't use). Little that she ascribes to him is really part of his very simple, clear, effective and non-confrontational expressions, which at points she actually compliments with the implication that his "ease and clarity" are diabolical.

She mistakenly identifies John Lennon's "Imagine" as having been a Beatles/Lennon/McCartney composition, and somehow, Eckhart Tolle's theme song, every word part of Eckhart's "gospel," a term she uses sarcastically. She says that Marianne Williamson channeled "A Course in Miracles" (actually created by Helen Shucman and William Thetford), and that the Course's use by Oprah is somehow suspect and "advances Tolle's wholly redefined spiritual mindset," a phrase that, again, attacks without clearly expressing supposed errors on his, or Oprah's parts. The above are, perhaps, trivial errors, but they speak to what seems a powerful emotional drive to use rhetoric to invalidate Tolle's work at whatever cost.

In particular, Ms. Rae seems to focus on her interpretation of what Eckhart seems to her to be talking about when he points out that the present moment is all that ever is, as if this viewpoint is a magic escape invented by him which eliminates responsibility for our actions "thus disallowing commensurate consequences (for choices made here-and-now) in the hereafter." She states that Tolle's "avowing" living in the Now is a denial of heaven and hell through which

"purportedly enlightened folks, as he, presume to wriggle free from accountability to a righteous God. In effect, these become self-proclaimed laws unto themselves."

Actually, what Eckhart, and other non-dual wisdom teachers in the unprecedented human awakening taking place now, are saying is more like - that the wholeness we are, which has been erroneously limited under the mental label "God," is innately, integrally, at the core of what we (and all things) truly, as opposed to any false ego-identity, are. This implies that when we are "at war" with anyone else, we are not experiencing life or our apparent "enemy" as they are, but through the interpretation of our ego - the imaginary "me" we tend to fall into assuming we are.

Moreover, and crucially, what Tolle is suggesting is that we are each always totally responsible for our state of awareness right now, very different from what Rae calls "assum(ing) some imagined state of transcendent Christhood while basking in the perpetual `Now.'" When we are out of alignment with our true natures, in a trance state based on living in the past or projecting into an imagined future, or on constantly retelling ourselves the story of our life of separation, we then start to create our own subjective hell, that is, an experience of suffering.

A Story Based on Fear

Early in her piece, Ms. Rae says "Today's changing world is increasingly threatening and all the more challenging to navigate." This is a kind of understatement in these days of increasing international warfare that threatens to go nuclear, financial and career instabilities, natural disasters and ecological degradation. I think perhaps she's offering this as a gesture of understanding to those who seem to be a key part of the audience for her article, Christians whose unquestioning faith is wavering in the face of "a Tolle-propelled "Cult of Oprah" embraced even by Christians unschooled in apologetics." Presumably, Debra Rae is offering these straying lambs a crash-course in "contending for the faith as the Bible admonishes them to do," based clearly on instilling fear in the loss of their places in the heavenly hereafter (the consequences of their "choices made here-and-now"). Falling back into such a belief colors the story of the imaginary separate self with a deeply hypnotic sense of reality, in which clarity is unlikely.

So while making a showing of countering Tolle's arguments (albeit inaccurately presented) rationally, Rae falls back heavily on basing her persuasion on belief in the infallibility of Biblical scripture: her interpretation of the meaning of Moses' burning bush; "the impending Millennial Rule of Christ on earth;" the labeling of (something?) she ascribes to Eckhart as "an outright lie" by the apostle Paul; the "reality" that "the "perfect" (mature) man of Ephesians (4) achieves "the measure of the stature that belongs to the fullness of Christ;" "the one whose name is above all names."

She mystically invokes "the sacred name of god," writing that Tolle attributes it to "a company of highly evolved masters... each of whom claims transcendent consciousness and common divinity with all life." While Eckhart clearly sees that the truth of our divine inner nature is at the heart of the teaching of many great masters, he has never, to my knowledge, spoken of a sacred name. Rae says that the claims of "transcendent consciousness and common divinity" are somehow also claims of "total power." However, any true spiritual master makes no such claims for his or her small self, and is intimately aware that total power rests only with the all-that-is, that which is sometimes labeled "god," paradoxically at the heart of each of us, yet never an ego-identity. Eckhart says that that heart IS what we truly are, but rather than some kind of mantle of power, is only realized through continual surrender to it without imposing the demands of ego in the least.

Ms. Rae says that the success of Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey's online class series, and particularly that Christians who give it credence without "contending for the faith," are "sure signs of the times." Another sign of the times is certainly the ongoing fascist globalist agenda. Nearly half of "ONLY IMAGINE TOLLE'S NEW EARTH" is devoted to associating Eckhart Tolle's work on self-awareness with the creation of this dictatorial one-world government. If "New Age" teachers are working hand-in-hand with the Rothschild's, Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, Round Table, Council of 300, Tavistock Institute, CFR, Club of Rome, etc., to bring this about, then certainly they need to be called on it. But Eckhart speaks repeatedly of the insanity of the human ego, as clearly exemplified by the efforts of hierarchical leaders to dominate the world situation to satisfy the inevitable demands of the ego-structures they're identified with.

One of Eckhart's principal teachings is about how projection is fundamental to the structure of the ego, and how, therefore, in order to strengthen its domination of our awareness it needs to have enemies. Anyone or anything that threatens the always-questionable stability of an ego is a prime candidate for enemy status – as is evident in Bush's infamous "you're either with us or against us," the prosecution of whistle-blowers, the demonization of figures like Martin Luther King or Wilhelm Reich. Eckhart Tolle has said that rigid religious structures are going to lose their hold over the minds of humanity as humans awaken to their direct connection to their living source. If one looks at the history of religions, going back to Babylon at the least, it's clear that they are human artifacts used by the power elite to manipulate and dominate the masses.

Ms. Rae speaks very emphatically of "the Lord Jesus" being in another class of being from the rest of humankind – "God incarnate, Lord of lords, Author and Finisher of our faith." But  is she aware that Jesus' deification was the product of a one-vote majority at the Council of Nicaea (where the accepted version of the Bible was also formalized as a political expedient), convened by then Roman Emperor Constantine, who was a follower of the same god Mithra whom she seems to abhor? It has been speculated by scholars that Constantine, in making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, was bringing forward Mithraism by another name – for one thing, he moved the Sabbath to Sunday, the day of the Sun. One of the highlights of Mithraism is apocalyptic millennialism.

Institutional religions, or traditional theism as Ms. Rae calls it, have controlled world populations by moving peoples' connection to the divine from within them (Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was within), to the priestcraft or to the pontiff (a title going back to the Babylonian mystery religion – Constantine was, like his preceding Emporers, Pontifex Maximus of the Babylonian religion before being the first Christian Pontifex). The collapse of this usurpation of our divine connection is what Eckhart Tolle is talking about, with the surrender of each of us at an egoic level to the formless one life within. If we cling to our slavery to this elite-ruled mystery-religion system that has kept us chained to the vampire-like structures of power throughout history, anything that threatens this will be seen as The Enemy.

Another aspect of the phenomenon of projection is our rejection of those parts of ourselves that we need to deny, which are then split off to become parts of our "Shadow," which are then projected off onto "The Others," by definition, our enemies, against whom any violence is justified. While Ms. Rae seems to scoff at Tolle's observations of the horrific violence that has been perpetrated in the name of the Christian religion, the cataloguing of only the easily found examples would take up bloody pages. And now it seems, Rae is arguing to add Eckhart Tolle and anyone unfortunate enough to be taken in by his "sweetly reasonable" snake oil to the list of Infidels who threaten the eternal well-being of the faithful. The only way out of this ongoing process of splinterization, through which the power elite divide and rule, is the path of wholeness, of reunification involving the recognition of how all of us are ultimately the same. We need to see that we each share the qualities of "otherness" that we see outside ourselves, and to reclaim them.

As Jesus himself is recorded as saying (Matthew 22: 36-40): "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Bruce Tanner

Like every one,
each moment strained against the terror of
the echoed whispers of what wasn’t done,
ill-perfumed, stained unworthy of that love
thirsted for by each daughter, every son,

bursting wounded, not equipped for it,
into the family way, coping they fend
with frantic needing and unending shit
from bairns and from each other, and so send
the tale down generations to the pit.

And this be worse,
if true enigma, partner, parent, child,
becomes, as with a glance, the enemy,
though integral to life, seen as a wild
berserker, heaped with calumny
even as ached for, undefiled.

II
Life, experienced as interpreted,
offers apparent poverty of choice.
The baby must be fed, the landlord paid,
and stifled, still, the unwelcomed voice.

It contends against these webs of inference
that buzz over the vital silence we
inhabit timelessly, pares that defense
driving the glance away and desperately
shoring up the fence.

We work from either side, the folks and me,
conspirators despite appearances.
Though I fucked up their lives, still, covertly
we worry at the bindings, taking chances,
breaking rule by rule and working free.

III
We share the family room, as mother tends,
she with that cigarette and a brandy.
We both know what she's doing, where it ends,
don't speak of it lest someone gets angry,
keeping embarrassed silence while she mends.

I know <something> of her gnawing shame,
remember fragments of admonishments
that rang yet with her mother’s voice, the same
humiliation. And I sense
that, as for my sins, she, too, shares the blame.

I'd say to her I know she did her best,
that anything that hurt I now release,
hoping only that she can find rest
in what we share, be blessed to finally cease
lashings of censure. But perhaps she guessed
that, faint, filling the moment, was but peace.

Bruce Tanner
January 2008

My partner and I ended up as a working group, on Consciousness as we saw it, at The Truth Emergency Media Summit, Jan. 25-27 in Santa Cruz, CA. (http://truthemergency.us/). So, in about an hour we cobbled together the "report" below...
--------------------------
Hello TruthEmergency/Media Summit,

Here is the report of our two-person Working Group on the topic designated as "Building Personal Skills." As most of goal statements under that topic seemed focussed on the general area of opening to awareness, we re-titled our little group "Becoming the Change that You Want to See."

The Working Group that reported just before us, Building One Big Movement, devoted a significant portion of their report to the idea that having a spiritual basis is crucial for empowering this movement. A key aspect of reclaiming our power to become the change we're looking for, is to understand how we have given it away in the first place, and how we are chronically manipulated into projecting what's uncomfortable to see within ourselves out onto situations or onto other people, like conspiracies such as the Neocons, who then use our fears to drive their agendas. Rather than resisting what we identify as wrong, which tends to lock it into place, we need to flow around it like water, and allow our creativity to flower.

The skillful adoption of these principles and methods of seeing how ego operates within ourselves is also vital in keeping our movement and all the various teams that arise as we pursue the goal of planetary liberation, from falling into argument and competition due to projection and efforts to control each other. It seems like time may be short. Timely awakening to these ideas may be pivotal in keeping ourselves on target.

The report pasted below has been edited very slightly from the one we gave on Sunday, Jan. 27th. I am also attaching a Word doc version of the report to this email. Thanks to all the people who made the Media Summit possible, and to all those who came and shared their ideas and vision.

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Report of the “Building Personal Skills” (Becoming the Change You Want to See) Working Group / Collaborators: Bruce Tanner, Cynthia Kasireddy

 A part of the Publicizing Truths with Consequence: Santa Cruz Media Strategy Summit, Jan. 25 – 27, 2008 / www.truthemergency.us

 Goal: Liberation, Personal and Political

 What it looks like:

• To be surrendered to the situation right now, just as it is.
• To be calm, alert, at peace.
• To experience life directly, free of interpretation or filters (understanding all forms rise from interpretation).
• To see what is as clearly as possible, without misperception, denial, blind-spots, etc.
• To be aware of what the moment requires (the next obvious thing).
• To be free of judgement of others, of events, or of ourselves, that creates an “imaginary self” through projection, self-blame or seeing separation as real.
• To be free of manipulation from others that plays on our filters (prejudices or fears) to control us.
• To be able to relax into anything that is physically or emotionally painful without resistance, thus transforming it.

 What steps are required?

• Understand the structure of the ego/imaginary self.
• Let go of psychosomatic tensions that lock our filters into place (free the breath).
• Observe tendencies to be unhappy with situations, project blame onto ourselves or others, or to be bored (waiting for another moment to conform to our demands).
• Bring awareness to any problems without needing our ego to “fix” them.
• Sense vibrant aliveness throughout our bodies and in the field around us.
• Be aware of gaps of peacefulness in the compulsive stream of thought.
• Always investigate any idea or theory for yourself (you are the only expert on what is true for you).
• Observe the flow of our breath.

 Resources:

• Set an earnest intention to be free.
• Teachers and lessons will emerge spontaneously to meet that intention.
• Observe opportunities to be of real service to others (they are also your teachers).
• The ultimate resource is the highly alive, peaceful, pervasive, loving consciousness at your very center. By releasing tendencies of obsessive thought, this awakeness will arise naturally into experience.

 
© copyright Bruce Tanner 2008. Please feel free to share freely with inclusion of copyright notice.

This is by way of response to something my father wrote at Christmas...

A Christmas Gift

Come with me now walking out into the morning
with luminous blessings ashine on each face,
the heart’s clear light blazing all through and adorning
each surface, each blade, with its rooting in grace.

Let us take leave of this warring of matter,
enough of this mutter of money and death,
enough of being herded like so many cattle
by life-crowding thought of the ebbing of breath.

Let’s go out together, if you can yet trust me,
why not let me closer, and into your heart
despite swarming proofs, the failings you must see,
the beach-sands of reasons to keep safe apart?

For what is wrong now with the wind in the redwoods,
with the feel of your boots on the rain-dampened earth?
Must we contend in each moment with said shoulds,
unseeing the stillness we lived before birth?

Tell, what of just sitting and watching the river,
and what of the inn at the close of the day,
and sharing the little we gather together?
Soon enough, other yearnings will call us away.

Yet, how could we ever be sundered forever?
In spirit we’ll stride, even if times twain-blind.
Never having left home, no parting can sever
our indwelling care and the commons that bind.

So come with me now, for the day is unfolding,
the birds are a chorus, and paths stretch ahead.
Let’s love each bright instant, the joy that it’s holding,
and walk in the sun till the breaking of bread.

Bruce Tanner
December, 2007

I just finished a new novel by L. D. Gussin that I started reading a while ago with the idea that it was going to be a quick read, of course not taking into account everything else going on in my life – work, a new exercise regimen, friends, and the ever-popular X-factor. More than that, however, I hadn’t counted on the density of The Seeker Academy, of the conceptual underpinnings, the relations of the ideas to the characters in the book, and of the internal world of Grace, the middle-aged suburban protagonist of this sojourn in a New Age encampment of workshops for people looking for alternatives to the Western homogeneous monoculture. I kept reflecting as I read about the resonances between Seeker and the Zaadz community. The academy is anything but homogeneous, is an intense experience for many there, and is full of differing opinions about what it is there for, which approaches to spiritual growth and healing are vital or important, what exactly the purpose of living might be. And some people are wounded, it’s not clear where they fit in.

Grace comes to Seeker for a workshop on “Embracing Sadness,” after several months, in which we’re introduced to her helping tend to her niece in a children’s’ hospital struggling with leukemia that finally goes into remission. Intrigued by her experience at the workshop, she decides to stay on for a term working with the unpaid staff at the Academy. As a perk for their free labor, the staff are allowed to participate in workshops and activities when they’re free, and we see Grace getting familiar and coming to grips with the Human Potential Movement, which is outside her prior experience. She’s trying to understand what is really offered by all the different approaches to spiritual growth and healing, and along the way seeing how different people at the Academy, whom she’s trying to categorize, meet what is offered there.

One of the things that I found both challenging and rewarding about the book was the complex interplay of ideas shared by multiple characters often conversing simultaneously. Each person speaks idiosyncratically, and it was sometimes difficult to wean out innuendos and meanings, and to keep up with how Grace is perceiving and processing her experiences of dialogs that the reader is experiencing for the first time with her. I found I really had to slow down and let the scenes come alive, rushing through them wasn’t an option if I wanted to share Grace’s journey. What Grace is living through her brief stay of less than three weeks is the heart of this novel, and I was a little surprised to find how much I was moved and was identifying with her hero’s journey of self-discovery. She is very concerned that she finds herself unable to “believe” in spirituality in a sense deeper than openness to others and honesty with herself. None of the characters we’re introduced to around her seem to have a clear experience of awakening to something truly transcendent of the world of form and time. One in particular, a contemporary to Grace self-named Monk, clearly lives life on a deeper level, and is rigorously making an approach to honesty with himself and others at Seeker. But, in one of the key scenes in the book, a performance art piece he stages near the end of the book, though he cuts through some of the comfortable illusions of Academy life, is unable to arrive at a value deeper for him than reason, presented as a sharing of the perspectives of heart and mind, but mediated by what doesn’t seem clear.

None-the-less, Grace’s stay at the Seeker Academy is marked by a continuous poignancy as she reiterates her determination to respond to what she strongly intuits is something of great value it offers her, possibly something that can bring a meaning to her life that she wistfully senses has become lost in the routines of a suburbia which from the perspective of some of the characters is the dread enemy of authentic living. As she goes through her work routines, shared time with other staff, exploration of the grounds, moments of introspection, the qualities of her life quest shine forth. She needs somehow to internalize what she’s experiencing, make it real enough that it has a chance of taking root in her life when she returns to her life as a wife, mother and middle-school drama teacher. She doesn’t know if or how she can succeed in this, and I found her uncertainty, earnestness and hope deeply resonant and affecting.

L. D. Gussin's blog for the novel is at:  http://theseekeracademy.com/

To the Beloved

Each moment bears the imprint, yes, is this
our hearts move into silence in embrace,
lost in rapt surrender to the kiss,
one energy, yet flowing face to face.

Each now, my heart opens to you from source,
is open to exactly all you are,
pours into you unhindered in its force,
direct to you, though you may be afar,

And knows that you accept without reserve,
flow back to it with all you have to give,
till nothing stands twixt us and that we serve,
and nothing but this instant that we live,

Till letting go of any else that seems,
we have our life in this, wake in our dreams.

Bruce Tanner - April 2007

Image: Paul Heussenstamm - "Tantric Fire" - http://mandalas.com/Tantra/tantricfire.php

My spiritual work was brought back on track thru encountering Tolle's "Power of Now," but was given a laser-sharp focus and intensity by working intensely with "A New Earth." It triggered several months of somewhat gritty disection of the structure of my "imaginary self" as Adyashanti aptly refers to "it," but I think laid the groundwork for letting go of seeing that as who I was in truth. Since I have begun to have direct contact with awareness, my natural state, "A New Earth" has blossomed and deepened again. There are layers and layers of interlaced, self-referencing "sign-posts" in this work. In the introduction Eckhart says that the book is more than a set of information, but is a tool for awakening to realization of the deep Self. I find that to be absolutely the case with me.

As with "The Power of Now," I first encountered "A New Earth" in audiobook form. I highly recommend this approach. Both I and several people I've talked to have experienced a transmission of Eckhart's state of consciousness, and an opening to the stillness within us thru listening to the sound of his voice reading his own words. Namaste

The ten thousand things
merge into their field
as the stars fall to the sky
eternally

Bruce Tanner - March 2007