Eckhart Tolle, Sam Harris and Looking for my Head

Seeking the seeker

Last Christmas was our first in Louisiana, and it was strange. We were alone in our new home without kids, without a Christmas tree and without snow, all things we’d had the previous year. January came with a post-holiday gloom that I could not shake. I knew it would be temporary, but it was difficult.

I started listening to the Sam Harris podcast, Waking Up, to see if my meditation practice could help with the blues. Instead, it made me feel like I was losing my mind completely. I found one particular exercise that he repeats often to be very disturbing.

Not to blame Sam, as he warns that this exercise can be unsettling. It is something like this: he suggests that you imagine you are speaking to someone and you switch viewpoints so that you are looking through their eyes at what they are seeing, namely ‘You.’ When you do this, you see that you can’t be looking, and look at yourself looking, at the same time. In other words, if you imagine being in the place of someone who is seeing you, there would be no one for you to see, because you would be doing the looking. He likens it to having no head. You are looking at a being in a chair who is not really there, almost like the you in the chair has no head. Eckhart Tolle calls the exercise seeking the seeker.

I know, it’s weird and not easy to grasp. In January when I tried it a few times, my depression worsened to an almost panicked state. It was like the ground shifted and I was wobbling; like everything that was solid could no longer hold me; kind of like when my daddy died. I stopped doing the exercise. I stopped listening to Sam Harris.

The past few weeks, months later and now summertime, I started listening to the Waking Up app again when I could not settle my mind in meditation. I did the exercise quite a few times. It didn’t frighten me as it had before–I just relaxed and went with it–but I did not sense any new insights or sensations from it.

Until today. I sat outside at dawn just as the sun peeked through the live oaks of my neighbor’s yard. Crows, blue jays, finches, woodpeckers, cardinals, mockingbirds–they were in their full glory– that few minutes when all of them are singing in chorus loud enough to wake everyone up. Maybe that’s the idea or else they are simply thrilled to greet a new day.

I closed my eyes and took in all the sensations outside and inside of my body. At one point I opened my eyes and for a few moments it seemed as though instead of me observing or experiencing all the sounds and sights in the garden, I was part of all the sounds and sights of the garden and was looking back at an empty body in the chair. My body, but without me in it. I was part of the swirl of everything, inside it, not separate from it observing it. The body in the chair was Selfless. And so was I.

The beauty of this state of being is that it allows me to experience the world as part of something bigger than my Self, to feel a sense of belonging, and to feel liberated from all the daily shoulds and expectations and fears that run around in my mind all day long keeping me from being helpful or open or sensitive to other people and even to myself. I think it is what’s meant by the Christian ‘Christ consciousness’ in which you surrender your small Self for your true self apart from money and jobs and goals and roles: ‘yet not I but Christ lives within me.’ It is like being in that river I talked about in my other post.

It was a blissful feeling that has stayed with me somewhat all day today. Tomorrow the sensation will likely be gone, and may take another few months to return. I don’t know. I will keep trying. I believe it is worth the effort.