7 Schizophrenic Dream'n Miguel Ruiz Eckhart Tolle

I think this is a good time to look back at a couple of things. And maybe to come at things from another angle here. I've been reading Eckhart Tolle this weekend and I think he offers such an opportunity. When Don Miguel speaks of Awareness and Story, he is speaking of two aspects of our being. But let's look at them from this different angle.

The first is the essential life force within us, our essence. You can call it awareness or spirit or essence or soul, but it's essentially un-nameable and un-knowable through our world of words and knowledge. It's that 'you' you feel in moments of great inspiration, say on a granite mountaintop overlooking dots of islands within an endless ocean. It's what Tolle calls true consciousness. It's always there, but often ignored in the daily workaday world. And mostly overlooked in the scientific materialistic one.

The second, our story, is what Tolle calls the egoic mind. This may be a useful way to look at things because we're all so well-conditioned from that psychological viewpoint. This is our story, the dream, what Buddhists would call illusion. It's the second me, an image we create of our self. It's not real. It's not the essence. And it's based on false belief. Tolle would say it's created with forms in order to compensate for the formlessness of our essence.

These forms could be material forms or thought forms. We identify with things, like cars we own, our homes we live in, the material things we feel the need to buy. And because these things cannot actually satisfy, we move on to the next and the next and the next. But we also identify with thought forms and social roles in the same way. You may think you're shy; you may play the role of Boss. These are beliefs about ourselves that are created through domestication and self-conditioning, and which are never the real you. They may fill your ego temporarily. But they are really insubstantial, illusionary. Never truly satisfying. You'll always be wanting more.

They are merely the story, what the Toltec also call the human form. But Don Miguel is re-telling us the good news. We can change our story by changing what we believe about ourselves. We can choose what we want to believe, based now in our newfound awareness. Given the improbability of our becoming an enlightened Buddha, we will always live out our story; we will always dwell in the egoic mind. But by being aware of our essential self our spirit, and recognizing that our egoic self is merely false belief, we can begin to change what we choose to believe, and in turn change our story. We can lose the human form, and then rebuild it. Through awareness. With love.