As Tolle teaches, aligning ourselves with the Now, Presence, or Consciousness is necessary to awakened living. We mustn't wrestle with or try to undo through wishing, wanting, and waiting that which is now. While we are humans and have human emotions such as empathy, sadness, anger, and disappointment, being aligned with the present moment involves putting space between you and the isness of Now. This bifurcation between the internal Essence and the external human you is, on the one hand, a separation or alienation of one entity of the self from another entity of the self. As Tolle would say, "You are not the voice in your head." Or you are not your bodies. Or your human experiences. These seem to mean that as humans we should see ourselves simultaneously as "me and myself," a self-obsessed, self-seeking entity that constantly thinks in terms of my life, my wants, my needs and, on the other end, an altruistic, unassuming wallpaper that seeks only to be one with all things. Of course, Tolle does not mean to imply this at all. But in connecting with our Consciousness, it does require some acknowledgment of another present self of which we want to transcend. He says that the constant stream of thoughts in our heads is nothing more than white noise in the background. "I think" is no more a true statement than "I circulate my blood." As with blood circulation, thinking doesn't require doing or volition on our part, it just happens. So wouldn't the idea of oneness with the present moment conflict with alienation from the present moment. It would seem that we must accept or embrace the isness of the present moment while at the same time separating ourselves from the action and reactions (esp. emotions) of it. My house is on fire. I remain calm. Call the police. Save what I can. Then wait. I must ignore the urge to think about and dwell on all the memories that were lost. To fight the temptation to think about what the insurance will or will not cover. Since I am a dramatic and emotional person, I must fight the urge to break down and cry in regret and worry about all of the what ifs. It is what it is. My house is on fire.
Is this the state that Tolle teaches? A state where oneness means calmness and alienation or separation from our human lives, mind, emotions. I arrived at the answer in a most indirect manner. I met my landlord one night in the clubhouse for what should have been a quick exchange of paperwork for my new lease. This was the third year that I lived in this apartment, but strangely the landlord and I didn't know each other that well. The conversation really began when he asked me if I was a doctor since I worked at the hospital. I was a bit shocked by the question because I figured that he at least knew that I wasn't a doctor. So we started talking about our lives. Where we were raised. How we came to be where we were. Actually, it was mostly him talking. I enjoy listening to people's stories. It's amazing what you'll find out about a person if you just lend an ear. I am also a naturally inquisitive person, so I prodded a bit and the information flowed like lava; slowly, intensely, and captivatingly. As it turns out, he was not close at all to the person I had imagined he was (well, had I thought about it). He was shaped like a football player, yet was a swimmer. We shared the same alma mater. He is of a particular religion from one Midwestern part of the country. While I was of (arguably not) a different religion from one Southern part of the country. I was the sinner. He was the saint. He was probably as red as I was blue. And I am very blue. We were very different.
Our conversation lasted for about an hour and a half. In fact, had it not been for him (needing to go home to his wife and kids), we probably would have talked for much longer. At the end, something dawned on me that never would have before reading Tolle. Instead of concentrating on his "otherness" or our dissimilarity, why not take away a lesson about commonalities. But of course, what commonalities? We didn't share much in common. Maybe except for our alma mater, relatively unpleasant childhood, and relentless search for an identity. More importantly, what is it within me that longs to alienate others and highlight their "otherness"? What is it within humans that seek to alienate, to separate ourselves from other humans? Admittedly, it doesn't always involve wanting to make yourself feel more superior than the other person, but sometimes we want to alienate others just because we can. Everything from religion to nationality to gender to weight to race to state to neighborhood to our very names all derive from the notion of alienation. Alienation is a way that groups tell themselves how different they are from the world around them. Imagine an earlier form of human intelligence where "humans" did not have the capacity or desire to put labels on things. Where it was fine that a mountain had no name. That groups of people weren't "those" over there, thereby alienated from we over "here". That skin color had no name. Where nothing was separated from another. Man was not of nature. Man was Nature and Nature was man. Essentially, the history of mankind has been the increasingly alienation of Man from Man and Man from himself. We are now at the point where we tell ourselves how much we hate our bodies. How we are not our bodies. So alienated in fact from ourselves that we let our bodies get so large that we begin to hate it. We cut it up for removal of fat. We damage it with illegal and prescription drugs. Of course it's not just food, though food exemplifies the extent to which we have alienated ourselves. One of the original sins of alienation for the modern world was race and slavery. Much like most of these alienating categories based on fairly innocuous fiction, race has been one of the most violent and divisive alienating forces over the last four to five-hundred years.
All of this is to say that Tolle's perceived conflict of alienation (of the self from the self and of the self from the world) and oneness (with Consciousness) is not that at all. The struggle is to convince the mind that it is already alienateded and therefore needs to be reconnected to the source of Consciousness. So in order to undo the millenia of alienat(ing), we must start with the supposition that human reality including human emotions and the mind are alienated. And if you think about it, we are. Everything we think, do, become, and respond to involve a) our personal desire to fulfill some self-centric want or need b) our personal desire to feel separate from someone or someones c) our need to divide things, subjects, people, places with labels. When we distance the Consciousness from the alienating, we become more conscious and less alienated.
