Personal growth: The counter-energy of carrying the past October 4, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, life, living in the past, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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One of the ways we can obscure our true selves and thereby block our advance to more complete self-actualization is through our tendency to burden our thought processes with the weight of the past.
If we are not careful, over time, we can add so many individual internalized concerns to “the voice in our heads” that it seems as if we are making our self-improvement journey while wearing 25-pound shoes on our feet.
This tendency of not living in the Now, in the present, can negate our efforts to reach our personal development potential.
In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle tells an illustrative story:
Two Zen monks were walking in the country and came across a young girl who could not cross a road covered in deep mud, for fear of ruining her silk kimono.
One monk picked the girl up and carried her to the other side, and the monks walked on in silence.
Finally, after five hours, the other monk could not restrain himself: “Why did you carry that girl across the road? We monks are not supposed to do things like that.” The other monk replied, “I put the girl down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”
Tolle suggests we should try to imagine what life would be like for someone like that irritated monk, who cannot seem to “let go internally of situations, accumulating more and more ‘stuff’ inside…”
“Stuff” such as grievances, regrets, hostility, and guilt.
The lingering “stuff” inside eventually becomes our dominant intellectual and emotional “story,” a story that can take over our perception of ourselves, and become a negatively limiting identity, Tolle believes.
In A New Earth Tolle seeks to advise us how to extricate ourselves from this trap.
— Dennis Mellersh
Self-actualization: The power of limiting our accessibility October 2, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.Tags: achieving goals, Carlos Castaneda, life, personal development, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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If we are to fully realize our potential in personal development, we need to reduce our accessibility to the outside world, and we must learn to be “deliberately available and unavailable,” according to Don Juan Matus. (1)
Don Juan stresses, for example, that “The art of the hunter is to become inaccessible… [which] means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don’t eat five quail; you eat one…you don’t damage the plants just to make a barbecue pit…you don’t use and squeeze people until they have shrivelled to nothing.”
Don Juan further explains that the hunter, confident in his ability, knows that he can obtain game repeatedly through his skills, and so he does not worry about that aspect of his existence, and in that respect is inaccessible.
He is not desperate, like the person who worries they will never eat again, and so eats five quail at once.
According to Don Juan, when we worry we cling to things out of desperation and by repeatedly doing this we become exhausted, and we also exhaust whomever or whatever we are clinging to.
(1) As detailed in Carlos Castaneda’s book, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. The book, part of a series, features “conversations” between a Mexican shaman, Don Juan Matus, and Carlos Castaneda, when the latter was doing anthropological research in Mexico.
In these “conversations” Don Juan speaks using images of the world he is familiar with in the Mexican desert, to make his philosophical points. There is discussion/debate concerning whether Castaneda’s writings should be viewed as anthropology or as dramatized literature, or as a combination of both.
—Dennis Mellersh
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