A Day in the Life of...

Tolle in his books makes the following point over and over again. Yet, it is not new. People confuse Form and Being, the man and the message. People like Buddha, Jesus, Lao-tze, Mohamed the Prophet, Plato, and countless others are venerated and in some cases deified. They were all mortal men. The Being or Consciousness within them was the same entity - one entity taking several forms down through linear time to speak to us and impart wisdom. I am that Consciousness and so is every other human on this planet. When Jesus says, "I am the bread of Life.", that is his God Essence or Being speaking through the man, the form. The man died, the Being lives on. He never claimed to be a god. People worshipped him and made him one.

"If your master is the incarnation of God, then who are you?", Tolle asks and then comments in The Power of Now, that " ... any exclusivity is Ego no matter how well disguised".

Even Buddhism is a religion rather than just a philosophy. This is why Zen Buddhists say that you "must kill the Buddha to be the Buddha". The purest form of Buddhism is likely Zen Buddhism. Perhaps Tibetan Buddhism is just as pure. Yet, Tibetan Buddhism is being killed by China and Zen Buddhism in Japan has its critics as well who claim that some Zen Buddhist schools are corrupt and self serving.

Christianity was multifaceted and colored by the different regions of the Roman Empire as it spread only to be stifled and controlled by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches as belief was organized and deadened, as priests became the minds and voices of God. The Protestant Reformation and the printing press caused Christianity to flower again as people learned to read the Bible and reflect on the "diamonds of wisdom in the dung heap" as Jefferson calls it. Thomas Jefferson used textual analysis of the Synoptic Gospels and the Greek, Latin and King James versions of those gospels to write his Bible. He came to the conclusion that there were two different men called Jesus in The New Testament. There was the kind, wise, compassionate Jesus and there is an angry Jesus. He believed the latter was added by scribes with their own agendas because his Bible has the former Jesus.

The Bible is a book written by committees down through the ages. Oral traditions and stories written down as the people who made them died and their followers lost the real message being conveyed. Spoken wisdom being edited and misinterpreted as it was written down. There are two Gods in The Bible. There is the angry God who is a God to be feared and respected, a Patriarchal God, a god of the Egoic Mind. Then there is Jesus' Father, a kind, loving God who does good works, who is Nature and whose Kingdom is all around us. The Father who is the Core Being of us all. Likely, in the Quran, there are two Gods, the angry Old Testament God, and the Sacred, Beautiful, Loving God found in some parts of The Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible.

This angry God is why people don't like the term "God". God is a closed concept. The word still points to a Sacredness and Beauty that is only experienced when a mind is still, when words no longer do justice to the Reality that is experienced. Intellectual belief in God is as empty as intellectual disbelief in God. What matters is to experience that Sacredness, see that Sacredness, be that Sacredness and live that Sacredness. That is what it means to be Awakened. Wakefulness is Humanity's birthright and that is what everyone is trying to accomplish whether they know it or not. So, if God, Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed, Tolle, or any other person, thought form or belief prevents you from waking up, question it, and if possible, drop it or kill it metaphorically. Do not confuse the messenger with the message - form with being.