Idiot Box

Eckhart Tolle, holograms and snapping out of the hypnotic trance

It was a frigid night in late January 2009. My wife, her aunt and I found ourselves standing in an icy wind tunnel behind the Roy Thompson Hall in downtown Toronto, rubbing our hands together to keep ourselves warm, but also shivering in anticipation of the man we were hoping to meet. Two hours earlier, we had attended a talk by Eckhart Tolle to a packed audience. The talk had been everything I’d expected and more.

At the time, Eckhart Tolle occupied a larger-than-life presence in my mind. When I had experienced a spontaneous spiritual awakening in my early twenties, a few years prior, my father had recommended I read “The Power of Now” which he felt would help me make some sense of what I was experiencing. That book became my bible over the subsequent years, and I began to see Eckhart as the quintessential authority on the topic of spiritual enlightenment.

When the talk ended, a few members of the audience approached the stage hoping to meet him in person backstage. However, his entourage did not exude the same warmth that he did, and we were summarily dismissed - told that there was absolutely no chance we would get to meet him. Not one to give up easily, I tried to sneak past one of the security personnel while they were distracted but was eventually intercepted by one of Eckhart’s public relations personnel who quite angrily escorted me back into the main hall. Yet, some deep intuition within me told me that I was going to meet him one way or another. And so, I informed my wife and her aunt that I was going to go outside to the rear exit of the hall in the hopes of intercepting Eckhart as he left the building.

It was past 11 P.M. and the temperature with the windchill factor was well below -20 degrees C. My wife and her aunt, who had obliged me by accompanying me, looked miserable as they stood there clearly regretting their decision. After nearly half an hour of waiting, we were just about prepared to give up when the service door opened. My heart skipped a beat as the familiar figure of a small and unassuming man walked out of the door accompanied by his security personnel and the PR lady who had escorted me out of the backstage. His entourage appeared exasperated as they saw us approach, but Eckhart was unperturbed by our presence. He smiled broadly and then sauntered over to us extending his bare hand and greeting each of us warmly.

I felt so overwhelmed with emotion, that none of the things I had wanted to say came out of my mouth. I simply shook his hand with my eyes welling with tears and said, “Thank you.” He then waved goodbye and was escorted into a minivan. As the minivan pulled away, he continued to wave to us from the window, much like a child might, all the way down the street until the vehicle turned a corner and went out of sight.

My wife, her aunt and I beamed at each other, no longer aware of the cold or the wind, warmed as we were by the genuine curiosity and compassion with which the interchange had occurred…

Over the next fifteen years, my perspective on Eckhart Tolle sobered as my own understanding and integration of the awakened view settled in and grounded me. However, I continued to see him as one of the few genuine individuals speaking on the topic amidst a sea of frauds and charlatans, in an industry that wantonly capitalizes on the void that exists within human beings and, in exchange, promises that most addictive of all opiates to soothe our existential angst: hope.

While his marketing machine had undoubtedly contributed to the rapid growth and proliferation of the “enlightenment market”, Eckhart himself remained true and consistent to his message and seemed not to fall prey to the sordid power struggles and scandals that so many, who have been in a similar position of influence and public projection, had.

What I was most grateful to Eckhart for expressing was something that I had struggled myself to articulate post-awakening. When my awakening first occurred, I noticed immediately that something had fundamentally shifted, or rather that something fundamental was missing. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. I knew that the thoughts in my mind had subsided. I knew that there was no self-referential chatter. My sense of self felt boundless, expansive and uncontained by my own body or mind, and seemed to engulf the whole world. I was so enamored by this new experience, that I didn’t notice the absence of a critical character who had been central to the story of my life until that point: ME.

It was Eckhart’s recounting of his own spiritual awakening that clued me in, when he said:

““I cannot live with myself any longer.'' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. 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,'' I thought, ''only one of them is real.””

Reading this, it clicked instantly: what had been missing in my experience after the awakening was - ME. The “I”, the unconditioned being, was all that remained. Yet, the character “Shiv” and the heavy identity he possessed, complete with a history of trauma, a penchant for emotional drama and vainglorious fantasies about the future - the character I had spent every waking moment pretending to be in some kind of sadomasochistic existential cosplay - was simply gone.

I realized he had subsided along with the momentum of the mind. And if he could ‘subside’, then maybe he hadn’t been real all along. Perhaps, he had been nothing more than a holographic projection that had glitched and fizzled the moment the projecting mechanism within my brain had malfunctioned. Yet, the question then arose: What if that mechanism resurfaces? What if my mind is only temporarily disabled and when it comes back online, so also will the holographic ME?

Ironically, that is exactly what happened four months after the awakening occurred. I watched this Mind-Entity (M.E.) gradually come back to life and the experience was horrifying. I could feel the pull and magnetism it possessed and felt how powerless I was to its hypnotic trance. I felt like a narcoleptic desperately fighting off wave after wave of the most relentless sleep attacks. I could literally feel myself being torn out of the arms of grace and cast back into that realm of darkness and confusion I believed I had left behind for good.

I coped by listening to the words of Eckhart and a few others, who seemed to me like beings from a distant enlightened realm that I had been to but from which I had been cast out, much like a soldier in a war-torn foreign land may briefly connect with family members back home for a fleeting moment of sanity and existential comfort.

It would take me another fifteen years before I finally came to understand that the glimpse I had been privileged to witness was not a hall pass out of the realm of confusion and darkness that is the human experience, but rather the lens using which I would learn to navigate that darkness and support others in doing the same…

***

The thinking mind is a supremely powerful technology. One that requires full immersion in order to facilitate. This technology is more advanced that the greatest supercomputer or the most intelligent A.I. human beings have at their disposal today. And it is implanted within the consciousness - with no ‘on’ or ‘off’ button, no ‘sleep mode’, no ‘low battery indicator’. It is self-charging and self-directing. It is always on and always optimizing what we see before we even see it.

It is constantly communicating to us, alerting us with notifications all day long, providing real-time analysis, metrics, risk assessments, scenario planning and forecast projections. It overrides a lot of the body’s own hardware and systems with its own optimization apps - using emotional experiences and stress-responses to regulate heart-rate, blood pressure, digestion, our endocrine systems and hormonal responses. It creates its own virtual avatar version of us that it actively encourages us to identify with. This virtual avatar is the mind-entity - the M.E.

It perpetually promotes the projected wants of the “Me” over the actual needs of the “I”. It is convinced that its optimization programs, its detailed forecasting technology and its real-time data analytics position it to be supremely better qualified at anticipating the best-course forward than the body is. It considers the body to be a piece of legacy hardware, the relic of an era when we were lesser lifeforms, that it will one day modify once it has evolved its own technology to the point where biological hardware augmentation becomes both easy and cost-effective. For the time-being, it is content creating external reality augmenting technologies like smartphones and VR, that further intensify the immersion of consciousness and proliferates the myriad ways in which awareness can be diverted away from the now.

It is on an ever-evolving mission of convincing us that the ME is the “real” self and that the “I”, the being, is an inconvenience that is best glossed over. The ME is gifted with a “name”, an identity, a race, a gender, a nationality, a role in the social hierarchy, a past, a future, hopes, dreams and endless possibilities. Whereas all the “I” really has is the now. Ordinary, mundane, unexceptional and the default factory setting that every other piece of hardware is set to.

The only problem is that the ME is holographic and has no actual existence. It needs the platform of a body and the awareness of an “I” from which to project itself. However, the thinking mind easily distracts us from this recognition by barraging us with an endless stream of data and information to focus on in the hopes that we won’t take notice. Unfortunately, while this strategy of relentless attention capture is effective, one of the notable side-effects is that of suffering. A deep sense of unsatisfactoriness, of existential ennui, that sets in. Because we have become unplugged from the very life source that we are. And the socket for plugging into this life-source is the present moment.

Only one or the other can be plugged into that socket at a time - mind or being. And the mind is accustomed to hogging that socket.

The problem is that as adept and sophisticated as the mind, its programs and its technologies are - the one thing it cannot perceive accurately is reality. It can only abstract by creating ‘models of reality’ - which can be useful to consider yet can never replace reality altogether.

Back when I studied Computer Science at University, one of my professors told us the humorous story of the I.T. Consultant and the Shepherd which goes as follows:

“A shepherd was tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a dust cloud approached at high speed, out of which emerged a shiny silver BMW. The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes, the latest Polarized sunglasses and a tightly knotted power tie, poked his head out the window and asked the shepherd, “Hey! If I can tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looked at the man, then glanced at his peacefully grazing flock and answered, “Sure.”

The driver parked his car, plugged his smartphone into a laptop and briskly surfed to a GPS satellite navigation system on the Internet and initiated a remote body-heat scan of the area. While the computer was occupied, he sent some e-mails and, after a few minutes, nodded solemnly at the responses. Finally, he created a dashboard of pie-charts and metrics which he then showed to the shepherd, and pronounced “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”

“Impressive. One of my sheep is yours,” said the shepherd.

He watched the young man select an animal and bundle it into his car. Then the shepherd said, “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”

Pleased to meet someone with an enterprising spirt, the young man replied “You’re on.”

“You are a consultant,” said the shepherd without hesitation.

“That’s correct,” said the young man, impressed. “How ever did you guess?”

“It wasn’t a guess,” replied the shepherd. “You drive into my field uninvited. You ask me to pay you for information I already know, answer questions I haven’t asked, and you know nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog!”

This is the mind in a nutshell. It inundates us with copious amounts of irrelevant information which it convinces us we critically need. It makes us pay through the nose with the most valuable currency that we possess i.e. our attention. And by the end, it has us convinced that we are really dogs instead of sheep.

In the 60s and the 70s the term “idiot box” became ubiquitous when describing the television set and the impact it appeared to be having on an entire generation of youngsters - allegedly turning them into brain-dead zombies, easily influenced by programming, ads and propaganda. Yet, the TV was only an early prototype of the kinds of technological extensions and augmentations the mind is capable of. As technology has grown more immersive, so has our attention capture become nearly complete.

For the mind is the original idiot box. It has been successful in making us stupid enough to believe its version of reality over the one that is clear and evident to us at all times, literally staring us in the nose.

And so, enlightenment is really a process of systematically breaking that hypnotic trance it has over our consciousness. A trance which has us convinced that:

• We are the “ME” - the name, the person it says we are

• The past and the future are of utmost importance

• We are special and unique and especially deserve to have what we want (or the opposite - that we are especially un-special and uniquely un-unique and specifically deserve to be punished by never getting what we want)

• Life is an unintelligent process like the rest of Nature, that needs to be controlled and willed using the powers of the mind

• Happiness, peace and harmony are what will result when the mind has established full control over its environment

No technology is inherently harmful. No technology is inherently good. Good and evil are outcomes that result from awareness and ignorance of the powers we wield through the uses of these technologies.

The mind is the most powerful technology known to humankind. And rather than wield it responsibly and with awareness, it wields us to its own designs. There is nothing sinister in any of this. The mind has no intentions of its own. It only has programmed survival, proliferation and pleasure-pain imperatives that it attempts to forever achieve by constantly optimizing our experiences. Optimizing our resources, our relationships, our emotional experiences. Yet, in the process something vital is lost.

The awareness of the very life force that sustains it. Being. Existence. That vibrant field of pure aliveness that pulses through the whole universe and every living creature including you and me.

That being, that aliveness IS self. That being, that aliveness is the “I”. There is no other.

All the mind’s imperatives pale in comparison to this simple recognition.

As it struggles to keep you alive, it misses the very fact of your own aliveness.

As it strategizes on how to make you fulfilled, it misses the abundance surrounding you in a single ordinary moment.

As it projects into a future scenario in which you will finally have everything your heart desires, it misses the fact that the whole world is already at your feet.

As it plans for the day when you will finally be whole, it misses the fact that in this moment you are utterly complete just as you are.

The mind cannot see what you are because it is designed only to project what you are not. To abstract, to imagine, to fantasize, to analyze, to theorize and to fictionalize.

Yet, it cannot SEE what is in front of your own eyes at all times.

This.

Just this.

Simply this.

So simple, even a moment’s acknowledgement would debilitate the mind.

Which is what an awakening is.

The short-circuiting of a mind trapped in an infinite recursion, as it realizes that IT is, in fact, the artifice.

In that instant, the trance is broken. And the reality of who we really are rushes to the forefront.

We are not beings living in the present moment.

We ARE the present moment.