It’s been far too long since I have entered a post.  This is in part because I am going through a time of transition personally and professionally (aren’t we all — always?).  So as I continue to define myself and my (so-called) message, I will just enter what comes to mind or in this case, provide passages that I read that I find relevant to my life situation of the day.

 Here’s one from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth:

 Giving Up Role Playing

When you don’t play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do.  There is no secondary agenda:  protection or strengthening of yourself.  As a result, your actions have far greater power.  You are totally focused on the situation.  You become one with it.  You don’t try to be anybody in particular.  You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself.  But don’t try to be yourself.  That’s another role.  It’s called, “natural, spontaneous me.”  As soon as you are trying to be this or that, you are playing a role.  “Just be yourself” is good advice, but it can also be misleading.  The mind will come in and say, “Let’s see.  How can I be myself?”  Then, the mind will develop some kind of strategy:  “How to be myself.”  Another role.  “How can I be myself?” is, in fact, the wrong question.  It implies you have to do something to be yourself.  But how doesn’t apply here because you are yourself already.  Just stop adding unnecessary baggage to who you already are.  “But I don’t know who I am.  I don’t know what it means to be myself.”  If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are — the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.

Give up defining yourself — to yourself or to others.  You won’t die.  You will come to life.  And don’t be concerned with how others define you.  When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem.  Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.

Why does the ego play roles?  Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought.  That thought is:  I am not enough.  Other unconscious thoughts follow:  I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more.  But you cannot be more than you are because underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being.  In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others.  In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone.  True self esteem and true humility are contradictory.  In truth, they are one and the same.

So…  thank you Mr. Tolle, I will stop, right now, the project of defining myself and get down to the business of Being.