Comfort or Truth?

Most of us tolerate "ordinary unhappiness" assuming that it's the best life has to offer. Seeking truth by seriously investigating & practicing a wisdom tradition is way outside our comfort zone - and most of us do value & prioritize comfort. And we gradually become habituated to a more or less "comfortably numb" existence. Our "ordinary mind" is not capable of imagining that a qualitatively different level of consciousness can even exist, never mind what embodying such a radically different level of consciousness could be like.

“Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, describes the way his ego-identification collapsed and revealed ‘pure consciousness.’

I woke up in the middle of the night. The fear, anxiety, and heaviness of depression were becoming so intense, it was almost unbearable…. Everything was totally alien and almost hostile…. And the thought came into my head, “I can’t live with myself any longer.” That thought kept repeating itself again and again.

And then suddenly there was a “standing back” from the thought and looking at that thought, at the structure of that thought, “If I cannot live with myself, who is that self that I cannot live with? Who am I? Am I one – or two?” And I saw that I was “two.” There was an “I” and here was a self. And the self was deeply unhappy, the miserable self. And the burden of that I could not live with. At that moment, a disidentification happened. “I” consciousness withdrew from its identification with the self, the mind-made fictitious entity, the unhappy “little me” and its story. And the fictitious entity collapsed completely in the moment, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What remained was a single sense of presence of “Beingness” which is pure consciousness prior to identification with form – the eternal I AM. I didn’t know all of that at the time, of course. It just happened, and for a long time there was no understanding of what had happened.

For Eckhart Tolle, the dissolution of ego-identification happened quickly and dramatically. We too can see how the process of self-awareness divided his consciousness into two parts, one of which was an unhappy ‘little me.’ Tolle’s story is an example of sudden, unintentional awakening. For me and for many others, the same process happened more gradually, through a series of shifts.” Loch Kelly. “Shift into Freedom. The Science and Practice of Open-hearted Awareness.” Sounds True, 2015.