Stilte spreekt van EckhartTolle

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Is er verschil tussen Christendom en Boeddhisme in ontwaken? Mark Valliere

“If you want to save your life, you must lose it.” - St. John of the Cross

After experiencing a non-dual shift, or a spiritual awakening back in 2012, my mother asked me to go sit and chat with her cousin, who is a Catholic Monk at the Franciscan Monastery. After hearing my story and being convinced my experience was authentic, he said that although he wasn’t knowledgeable enough to speak to me about the methods that initiated my experience (Eastern spiritual practices), the church did recognize my experience but that instead of spiritual awakening, they call it being touched by the Holy Ghost. 

When I sat and tried to describe the experience in such a way that would make my findings relatable to the average person, I wrote the following. Just curious what you guys think, not for validation or approval, but because I feel it may make for good conversation with regards to what I feel Christ tried to convey. 

No Memory? No Problem!

 

Imagine waking up in a hospital bed, all alone, having no recollection of who you are, how you got there, or your life leading up to this point. Your entire frame of reference for how you see yourself in relation to the world around you suddenly vanished, leaving you with no personal identity (mother, father, sister, brother, friend, lover, etc.), no belief system to govern your life, nor an affiliation to a specific country, religion, political party, or ethnicity. You wake to find yourself void of a personal story of any kind that would create the concept of “Me” and “My place in the Universe”. 

  

If you woke to find yourself in this state of total amnesia, would your body suddenly cease to exist, along with your long list of accumulated mental concepts? Obviously, the answer would be no. But why not? Why is it that everything you’ve ever known about “you”, and how you view yourself in relation to the world around you, can suddenly cease to exist, and yet, you can still live on? 

While the answer to this question may seem obvious, to accept its implications would require the unraveling of the very fabric of your existence. In other words, while the answer might seem complex, and even difficult to accept from the viewpoint of your personal story, it is really very simple. You are not who or what you have come to believe you are. You could recreate your life, complete with an entirely new identity and a new collection of mental concepts to govern your newly created existence and live on.

 

Behind the façade that is the “me”, lies an intelligent, animating force that governs our existence, and it is free of the need for a personal identity and its entourage. This force is often referred to in many spiritual circles as the soul, spirit, or higher self. Buddhists call it the buddha nature, to Christian mystics it’s referred to as christ consciousness, and to Hindus, it’s called atman. Regardless of what we call it, all these names refer to the same thing, and it is said that this force not only governs our existence, but that it is interwoven within the very fabric of life itself.

 

While this force is inherent within each and every one of us, most of us are oblivious to its presence because it becomes buried beneath many layers of mental concepts as we undergo a process called conditioning. In an effort to help prepare us to function within society and the world at large, we are taught at an early age that the world around us and everyone in it is where we will find the resources to have our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual needs met. With each layer added to our growing sense of self, we move further and further away from our true nature and into a mind dominated reality, where this false sense of self overshadows our awareness of our true nature. 

Developing an awareness of, and moving into alignment with this aspect of ourselves does not require us to fall deeply into a state of amnesia. It is not about completely dismissing our personal identity and everything that comes with it, nor is it about trading in one identity for another. It is about making a shift from our mind dominated reality to one that is in alignment with our true nature, free from any attachment to our personal story. When our personal story no longer holds its relevance, it no longer binds us to a way of living that keeps us caught up in an endless cycle of searching for love, acceptance, approval, and validation. Through this process of self realization, we discover that all we’ve ever needed mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, have been an inherent part of our being all along. This is liberation, and the beginning of true and lasting inner peace.