Learned Craziness or Original Sanity?—Pointers to "Home"

© 2009 Will Joel Friedman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

An excerpt from his forthcoming book
Awakening to Sanity: Being Sane in an Insane World
—A Traveler's Guide
 

"God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk."
—Meister Johannes Eckhart 

Given the troubled, violent history on this planet, the toxic and rapacious assault on the environment, and the peril of global warming, the key question facing humans individually and collectively is "Perish or grow?" Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle asks "Peace or Drama?" Thus one can ask, "Stay asleep or consciously awaken?"

"It's always the same question," French spiritual teacher Arnaud Desjardins poignantly asks, "Ego or surrender?" In harder-hitting terms: "Suffer or Surrender?" Ego and suffering demand a tremendous exertion of energy, while letting go in surrender takes essentially no energy or willfulness. "Energy" in its earliest French or late Latin root literally means "as work" or "at work." Given trauma can be understood as anything one cannot face and accept, compassionate acceptance ushers in the opportunity for healing. Thus, "Stubbornly insist one knows or humbly accept one doesn't know?"

One can equally ask, "Trauma or yield?" with yield pointing to a deep acceptance of "what is." Or similarly, "Be someone else or be oneself, Original Nature?" Each question begs the response: "Be a character in a story of who one is or simply be who one truly is? It is purely one's life, human evolution, consciousness itself and the Love and Divinity one is that are the fulcrum of this seesaw. The Course in Miracles asks, "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?"

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is To be enlightened by all things. —Dogën

For the 4500 years of recorded human history with references to eons before, most people would rather suffer and die than honestly grow and evolve. The question can be phrased as "Learned craziness or original sanity?" and "Remember and cling to the constructed imaginary self or forget and let go of what never existed?" Ultimately the question is: "Human's way or Divinity's Way?" It is witnessing consciousness that amusingly sees through the personal self attempting to hijack life. It is being able to see this "ego maneuver" for just what it is and naturally surrender this fictive self that is the prelude to the authentic liberated self. True character is built upon one's personality once the ego is out of the way. The authentic liberated self unfolds Being, inhabits the Pure Awareness of that which is prior to birth, outlasts death, and is beyond the conceptual.

George Demont Otis     California