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Originally Posted by cylon  Well at first they do seem incompatible. But at least as far as the Abraham stuff, what does it say? Feel good, now (be present).
I think the war on ego may be misperceived. People associate ego with identity. So to say you're destroying the ego to some (and I thought this as well) means to destroy your identity. But you can't destroy the real self that is behind the thinking. You're not destroying your real self... you're destroying the pattern of habitual thinking and worrying, and the constant focus on tomorrow or yesterday.
Creation is in the present moment. Even if your intention will most likely manifest tomorrow, next week, next year, whatever... it has to be real to you RIGHT NOW, and you have to believe it's real, right now. And you can't feel it's real, now, if your thoughts are on tomorrow. |
This is one of the concepts where I think they overlap. Yes, feel it in the present, be present, let go of attachment to your intention. In other words, the art of allowing. However, our intentions are part of the ego. One could argue that they come from our Higher Self and that can be true, but once we're aware of them and want them to manifest, they become part of the ego. This train of thought led me to the argument that, ok, as long as you don't identify with it, that's the whole point. Which to me sounds a little bit like detachment. And this is all good, except for the fact that we can be detached from the outcome, but that doesn't change the fact that we want it (and it doesn't mean that we're going to think about it in the future necessarily either, we can think about in the present and feel as if we already have it in the present, but this is still all based on "wanting" nonetheless). At this point, it goes completely against the Abraham-Hicks who say that we can never get it done and finding and giving focus to those things we want and will always want is the whole point. I was going through some of the A-H material to find something to quote here about this, but I found so many that, well, that in itself shows the contradiction here - and anyone familiar with the Hicks know what I'm talking about.
All of this got me thinking about a line from "Before Sunset" in which Celine says: "Not wanting anything, isn't that a symptom of depression?"
So, being present is fine and wonderful. When working with the LoA it's essential, both in terms of visualizing and feeling it in the present and being completely focused on whatever manifestation method we're using (and that's where I found part of the value in Tolle's book). However, "killing" the ego as Tolle suggests (and even says that himself in the webcasts, that he killed his ego) means that you're killing the "wanting" behind your intentions. What's the purpose of the physical existence and experience if you kill that? To me this gets way too close to apathy and misses the point of a physical experience.
So, there IS some overlapping, like I said, but the contradictions are still there for me.
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Originally Posted by cylon So you may enjoy watching those webcasts on oprah, the interesting thing is that they have callers who ask these same questions so it's much more of a "real world" type discussion. |
I did watch half of them and his answer to one of the callers who asked something among these lines didn't convince me, unfortunately.