Tao Of Now

To Our Readers And Commentators

Because of the serious and valuable nature of some recent comments on our blog about the nature and value of Thought, as occasioned in our time by the writings of Eckhart Tolle, we are reposting on our main pages certain comments and Strephon’s responses.

We find the nature of this dialogue respectful and serious, so we want to present it in the best light.

We thank our commentators again, those here and those not featured here.

From Len Kharlen - September 30, 2006

It is nearly certain that what you say generates different thoughts in my mind than were in your mind when you thought them up. That however does not mean that you are wasting your time speaking, nor does it mean that I am waisting my time listening. It is likely that we can both babble enough thought approximations to reach a practical understanding of where to find sustinance to further out existence and improve the likilihood of our offspring surviving.

As for your spiritual being . . . your words make no sense to me. At least there is agreement that the ego exists.

Response: Strephon Kaplan-Williams - October 3, 2006

Len Kharlen, I don’t understand everything you say here, but I do appreciate the contact, and here’s why.

-We are not discussing Eckhart Tolle directly, but being direct with each other, discussing our own thoughts and approximate understandings.

-I do appreciate thought to thought at an abstract level. I feel connected to my thoughts and thus somewhat to yours.

-It would be imaginary to expect us to reach perfect understanding together in anything. But words do communicate. I do feel influenced in some emotional way with what I read seriously and thus respond to. Thus, as you point out, even if I am responding to a misunderstanding of something you or Tolle, or my wife, says, I am still trying to sort out something for myself.

-Great issue! What do we do when we are communicating together and we don’t understand each other, misread each other, and so on? I say a little understanding of each other is worth the encounter, usually. It is a good starting place to take a theme further.

For instance, here I am picking from your presented issues and developing a theme. This may not be what you mean or say, but it is still a real response. So we stimulate others with our communications, even though we cannot understand each other completely.

-Some critics of my criticising Tolle’s thought have responded to me as if I did not understand Tolle’s thought and person, even getting emotional about it. The response is then to explain and defend Tolle, or their personal experience of Tolle.

Well, are we talking about Tolle? Most of us only know the public image Tolle. So we are not talking about a person Tolle but about our own responses to the themes and issues evoked in us by a Tolle paragraph or video talk he gives.

Tolle does not exist! What exists is our experience of a symbolic Tolle. This is how I see it and process what is evoked.

If critics are attacking the person they are in effect attacking themselves. For all they really have is their image of Tolle, me, you, or anyone else.

So, it’s not easy to find the true person or the true thought, or to get out of our own stuff and thought patterns enough to see objectively outside of ourselves.

Should I add, don’t you think?

Thanks, Strephon

***

From Anonymous - October 13, 2006

People talk of enlightenment without understanding the fundamental nature of thought and its limitations. Thought is necessary of course, but it is also limited. Thought is conditioned, and where conditioning is operative, the logic and the reasoning will be biased, flawed, distorted in one direction or another. Therefore, and this is logical, one must understand first the distorting mechanism that is thought and how thought is never “pure”. It is rooted in time and experience. Truth, what is, is always changing, moving. Thought, mired inevitably in the past, cannot keep up with the flow of actuality. Thought is a tool of communication and we need to communicate obviously, however, there is a point at which thought becomes a hindrance because it is always old always translating the new in terms of the old. Cf. Robert Pirsig, static and dynamic Quality or J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known.

Response: Strephon Kaplan-Williams - October 14, 2006

Thank you for your comments on the value of thought as well as its limitations.

What I like here is that we are in dialogue. I like also that for some of us who use our minds at the abstract level, like here, we are dealing with a general issue, maybe central to humanity itself.

Let me ask then, if thought has its limitations, such as in ascertaining truth, what then, if there is a way, is the way to the truth?

Let me ask also, in our time, when you and I exist, what is the way to truth?

Great minds like Tolle, Pirsig and Krishnamurti, and those of us who understand things like they do, can wander in abstract thought, and even say that abstract thought fails as an adequate way to ascertain true knowledge about ourselves and life.

My task here in tackling Tolle as representative of the thought-using, anti-thought people is to again raise the question: if you use thought to condemn thought, how can you do so without dealing with this logical inconsistancy?

This is the first paradox-challenge to all who would think along these lines.

The second paradoxical challenge to the same people is: if indeed thought is inadequate to come to the core truths of our existance, what do you propose as an alternative, and how can you prove this alternative method of yours works better than thought, and without thought?

Third issue-question: is truth or knowledge obtained by negaitve proving something false? If you say, thought is not the way, this is “statement by exclusion,” or saying what is not. It creates the logical fallacy of Proving the Existence of Sometime by Proving the Non-existence of Something Else.

You try to prove thought does not work, but you use thought to prove this? Or do you say that you have experience of something else that proves that thought does not work to get to the truth?

So Tolle may be right! He states that there is another way that leads to the values he says are the values to have in life. Does he describe this other way using thought processes?

Yet he has condemned thought processes as the way. Thus, for logical consistency he is not logically allowed to use thought to describe or state the truth of “his other way” whatever that is. If you don’t want to adhere to logic as an inherent truth-tool in itself necessary to organize perception and experience, then of course you can say anything and try and have it believed by others as some sort of validating process.

Thus, Tolle cannot describe “his other way to the truth” without thought processes. Yet, he has already condemned thought processes as true, as effective in guiding the way to truth. Thus, Tolle, or this kind of thinking, is contamintated with inconsistency.

Therefore I take another position: since I am using as clear a thinking process as I possibly can to get to what is real and true in life, I do my best to enhance that thinking, not condemn it. However, what I get to as the chief value is more than clear thinking itself, and also gotten to with more than clear thinking itself.

I don’t end with negatives because I have thought as well as I can. I enjoy clear thinking and find it useful for understanding my experience and yours.

CLIMBING THE GREAT MOUNTAIN - A PARABLE

There once was a journeyer who had to climb a high mountain in his weakened state to cross over to the other side where things were beautiful and secure, as this journeyer had heard. However, being too weak, the journeyer despaired of ever making it to the other side. The farmer the journeyer was staying with on the side of the great mountain offered him an old horse saying, “I hear your complaint and know you cannot on your own make this final journey. Let me offer you my old horse. Maybe on his own he cannot make it over the great mountain, just as you can’t. But together, who knows what you both can do?”

Gratefully the stranger took the gift of the farmer’s old horse and horse and journeyer set out together. Many and terrible were the words sometimes that the journeyer used, along with kicks, to get this old, biting horse with his limp and sagging muscles up the side of the great mountain and over the top. It was not an easy way to go for either of them, cursing each other all the way, if even the horse knew how to curse, and he certainly knew how to bite!

However, they made it to the top of the great mountain and over to the other side, where the way was easier and the view of the valley below splendid.

Instead of curses, kicks and bites, both horse and rider enjoyed each other’s company on the downward sloap. Together they had reached something that neither of them could have reached alone. They had become friends for the better times to come.

The old farmer on the other side of the Great Mountain must have wondered what had happened to his two frail complainers. He must have smiled at the thought of them together. Yet, I think also, his optimism about life must have revived.

He knew the principle well: two can make it where one alone will never be able to go because each is inadequate alone.

While he realized he would never go there himself, he did allow himself to glory in their probable success. He had done his supportive function well. The thought of the two complainers having to work well together gave him food for a smile and a laugh that day and the next and the next and onward.

The horse and its rider must also have thought back on things and been grateful for the farmer’s support.

When help is needed help is there, yet it has to be recognized to be made useful for the greater journey ahead.

***

From Anonymous - October 17, 2006

Inumerable sages, teachers, mystics, philosophers, even scientists, have pointed out that thought alone is inadeqaute to convey the whole of human experiences. It is not an “all or nothing” issue. Logic itself is an attempt to deal with the inadequacies, inconsistencies and contradictions even a casual observation of thought reveals. What is the nature of thought fundamentally? That is a key question and one that is not ordinarily asked. Is it not wise to ask the nature of the tool one is using to discover truth and to find meaning and psychological security?

Also, thought condemns thought every day: Propaganda, t.v. ads, billboards, lies. Thought is also used to justify these same things and worse: The use of torture, war, the death penalty, pro-life or pro-choice issues etc. The point is not that thought is to be condemned or justified but rather questioned. Thought has created the so-called answers in the form of religions, ideologies, utopian philosophies, all of which perpetuate confilict, violence, and war. Even people who on the surface believe in the same God or religious founder fragment into conflicting sects and political struggles. Thought as a truly unifying force is hardly evident. Where is evidence for thought as a tool for producing a truly orderly, harmonious, highly civilized and cultured community? As J. Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm once asked, “has thought taken
a wrong turn” somewhere in the course of human history and evolution? Thought is responsible for beautiful symphonies and paintings, as
well as genocide and the expoitation of the weak and less educated by the clever and the powerful. We live in a society rooted in greed, corruption, and the use of force.

And to discover whether it is possible to live in the Sacred, not in some thought-bound system of beliefs but in the actual, living, vibrant flow of life itself means asking if there is an end of thought with all of is inevitable confilct.

Also, thought is capable of penetrating into the nature of its own activities, of investigating the thinker and the thought. Even if thought were the only means we have of discovering what is true, then it would still be necessary to question whether it is capable of actually doing so. To ponder such a question it is necessary to be quiet and observe what is happening in the silence and the space, not of knowing, but of a mind that is truly learning without the influence of one’s preconceptions.

Thanks for the opportunity for dialogue.

Response: Strephon Kaplan-Williams - October 17, 2006

Yes, this is a dialogue, and for what purpose?

I see the use of our perceptive minds here for clarifying life perspective as we live our lives. In fact we are dying organisms alive now as moving and interactive points of awareness.

Thus, the meta level is that for each of us to live our lives more or less successfully we need to have a more or less conscious perspective on life, so as to evaluate how we are indeed living our lives, and for what values and purposes.

To use our current public figure and thinker, Eckhart Tolle maintains that since his enlightenment in realizing that reliance on his thought processes has been disrupting him, as it does, according to him, all people, he has achieved peace and harmony.

Along comes this experienced psychologist and philosopher-scientist and says, “prove it!” For the same logic you use to make your statements in public and in books is the same thought process that you also condemn as the way to truth.

So I want other evidence. Yet I am pushed into a corner because I can be seen as one who holds onto thought, when it is this holding onto thought that is the cause of my need to have proof of what Tolle says.

Yet I question back again. I use you, Tolle, as our best current example because you are out to influence people through your writings and public lectures.

Thus, I can see also, as my public duty, as a communicator and a teacher, to point out where I see contradictions and non-truth statements that you yourself make. It’s as if, Tolle, you are not quite capable of stating your anti-thought processes without using thought that seems also to have logical fallacies.

I try to say this all respectfully without personal attack because I recognize that we are all in this together, that we are all Universal Mind, and that no one of us can arrive at collective truth and perspective alone, nor should they try to do so.

Our current commentator, Anonymous, has stated his or her perspective just now that reliance on thought as a dominant mode or perspective for action is actually producing the ills of humanity such as wars, violence and exploitation.

Okay, what if this is actually true?

Or, do we have to take the contrary position that any statement produced by Thought cannot be true of our direct experience because Thought itself is contradictory and fallacious?

Ah, so we cannot use even out best thought processes effectively to create life perspective as a basis for right action in the modern world?

Are we then all doomed in our existence and eventually we will all be self-exterminated because of our inability to problem-solve our existence and its problems?

That young woman of twenty-three that I read about who said to a Polish worker walking past her stripped naked by Germans in uniform
before they shot her. She said to him with the right consciousness for her age: I am only twenty-three! Meaning of course that she had not lived life and now had to die through no fault of her own.

What if the message of the holocaust and wars is to all of us that we as humanity are already dooming ourselves?

There are some of us vitally concerned about this, as is our recent commentator.

What then is the cause of all this mess in the world, and the lack of our ability to problem-solve our existence and its very real problems?

Some here are taking the position that reliance on thought itself, which produces dogmas and fractionalism is a great and major cause of irresolvable conflict, so cannot be relied upon to save us from our problems, both individually and collectively. Correct me if I am wrong.

I seem to be taking the position here and in my life and work with people a contrary perspective.

I seem to be saying, No! No! It is not reliance on Thought that is the problem. It is the opposite. In truth, people don’t think that well. Their thought processes are terribly contaminated by poor thinking in itself and by emotional contamination, often due to childhood and adult trauma. They have never been taught in school to think well and use that thinking for direct problem-solving in their lives.

What if it is true that beating and otherwise hitting most all children in school systems and in families produced terrible fear and revenge feelings in the helpless and defenseless children of that period, which then got acted out in that Great Excuse, two World Wars.

What if I said violence against children was and is the probable cause of war and excessive violence in the world?

What if I said the single most, best action the world can take is a universal rejection of war as a political problem-solving technique is to ban universally corporal punishment on children in school and at home?

What if I said what is needed is A Universal Declaration Of Children’s Rights which all nations and peoples subscribed to?

Is all of the above true? Is some of this perspective working successfully in the world even now?

Is there sure evidence that children who are not terrorized as children with physical and psychological threats and attacks are as adults not violence or over-aggressive in trying to get their needs met, but more cooperative in problem-solving in the adult world?

What if I said these statements, logically arrived at, were in fact true? Then we would ask our scientists to test this theory with real world surveys that were logically consistent in their design, and therefore able to report direct experience accurately.

What if I said that children who are not terrorized physically or psychologically as children do not attack themselves or others violently in their adult lives?

Would this not be a logical statement to follow through on with direct observations in reality?

This is problem-solving of the kind that we need the best and most intelligent thought processes for to help us, the world, save ourselves from destruction.

This is why I hold with Thought as a major tool for perceiving reality accurately and doing something effective about the problems we find there.

Are we still in dialogue on this?

Strephon Kaplan-Williams