"Why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow." Pavel Somov

Like a rat in a maze I spent years scampering up and down the hallways of the mind until I read Eckhart Tolle and began to glimmer that there is more to reality than the maze, there is more to reality than the mind. Mind is one of those tricky words that means different things to different people. To me mind is thought, perception, images, the stories we tell ourselves, and it is a wondrous instrument; but identity is not equivalent with mind anymore than identity is equivalent with the liver or pinky, eyebrow or spleen. Awareness or being includes the mind, and the liver and pinky and eyebrow and spleen; but they do not include awareness. Awareness is more than mind-stuff, and the mind cannot encapsulate or fully comprehend what awareness is. We are so addicted to and drunk with the mind that we are often completely oblivious to our mind-possessed state.

I was happily surprised yesterday to see that this month Eckhart gives a 90 minute webcast on Emerson! This is hog-heaven for a girl who named her blog Emerson and Tolle. Eckhart reads this sentence from Emerson: "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity...When we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow passage to its beams." (Self-Reliance) The intelligence, for example, of the human body never ceases to stagger me- and I am very much in the lap of this intelligence! Sometimes I turn away from the chatter in the mind and sink deeply into the intelligence that sweeps ceaselessly through the body. Eckhart calls it inner body awareness- being nonverbally alert and present to the intelligent energy animating every cell of the body. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Eckhart reads this sentence from Emerson's The Oversoul.)
We are a stream whose source is hidden. But we live in the lap of that stream. Feel that! Slip out of the mind-maze into the effortless river of real life. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon) It's not so hard to shift from the busy plan-making mind to the silent shock of the life that is happening right now. "Lose your mind to find your consciousness." (Pavel Somov) Today I'm feeling the current of the river, sometimes easy, sometimes swift and turbulent, flowing from me to you and from you to me, carrying along the crazy maze of mind, which is part of it all...