This has been a Barack Obama and basketball Sunday as the rain gives my newly fertilized lawn a surge. Not yet finished with Audacity of Hope, I couldn’t wait to jump into Dreams From My Father, and I just have about a quarter of an inch left to go.
So far the book has been like a Picasso painting as Obama tries to put the pieces of his broken story together and make sense of his identity. Written in 1995 at Harvard Law School, the book is given depth by knowing what has become of the young author as he now builds his campaign for president on this story he struggled to paint.
What comes through the book for me is the clear voice and intelligence of the painter as he remembers and gives shape to his memories and the many colored oils that have made up his palate. We are all painters, artists with a given set of oils from which to create our canvas, and our whole life’s purpose is to make our life in that painting conscious. That’s what comes through to me in Obama’s struggle with his odd mix of oils, which has given him a unique opportunity to see his story from both sides at once, like one of those paintings that when you squint your eyes you see a new picture rising from what you thought was the background.
First Obama saw no color as a child in Indonesia, then back in an American public school, he saw black, but he also saw white, and so the painting goes as he discovers that each time he thinks he knows who he is, the background shifts again and a new picture comes forth.
The question Obama asks, and we find ourselves asking as readers, is whether we are our story, or are we the author of our story and the only ones who can auathentically give our story meaning. Do we let others give us meaning or do we choose ourselves? That is the canvas we are given to paint. We have the freedom to choose what our picture means and how to live in it. We can choose to create our story or be created by it. Obviously, Obama chooses to create his own story once he went through the oils to discovers what his given colors are.
What we forget is that life is just paint; its meaning comes from our choices. There are no good or bad colors; there are just colors and a canvas. The truth Obama seeks in this book is that we, as life, are the canvas as well as the colors, and that when we identify with the canvas, we are free from color.
Posted under reviews
This post was written by ed on March 31, 2008
Eckhart Tolle’s fourth book review lesson (a free download on 
A great essay by 
For the past two mornings there have been no words, no insights to post. Have I finally run out of something to say? Every morning since July, 2005, I’ve written one to three pieces, and I must confess, I made some credentials for being able to do this. Tapping into a well of endless creativity had become a source for pride as well. In this way, I was filling up my well with silt as I drew water from it.Sunday, Easter Sunday, I was suffering from a pollen attack and my sinus was never-ending sources of you know what, and during the day somehow I got an insight that I was using my writing for a sense of specialness. And then, wouldn’t you know, right behind this discovery came a cold front of background discontent and self doubt that created a contraction of self and a dry well. Now I didn’t believe I was creative or had anything to say at all.In both cases, the ego had something to chew on, some nourishment for it’s belief that it is separate from life and this present moment. The ego loves nothing more than to believe that it is free from such changes in the internal weather, and if the bad weather comes back, it will love that too. It doesn’t care what the weather is as long as it can identify with it and use it for its survival.If you are interested in becoming an observer of the weather in your mind, that is, the changing thoughts, feelings and emotions and sometimes the background of unhappiness that fields these storms, I recommend Eckhart Tolle and the book The New Earth. You can download the free conversations Oprah is having with Tolle on the Oprah website. There are four posted there now, and having watched most of Tolle’s retreats on DVD, these conversations are very helpful and provide a guide for the observation of our own weather.
Happy Easter
In one of several letters critical of me to the editor in our local paper, a woman and Bible expert asked me directly what Jesus meant to me. When in an argument with a Biblical person, it always comes down to Jesus, it seems. Here is the ultimate Gotcha. Is he just a wise man or is he God? Is he your personal savior?I say why can’t he be all three? Jesus certainly was a master, a realized being who taught the truth of human existence to the people of his time, and our time, for that matter. And Jesus certainly is God, if God is what exists. For God to be God, God must be both form and formlessness. God cannot be separate from creation or creation would be not-God.Now here is the tricky part. Is Jesus my personal savior? And by personal, I mean a personal relationship like that of me and my father, or mother, or friend, and even my enemy. Here’s what I experience, not what I read or studies or have been told by some religion.I remember back in the late 60s when I awoke to my true self (see this post) and suddenly found myself in direct relationship with reality—everything was bright and new, and there was absolutely no filter or mind between me and existence—and I fundamentally knew, like I know that I am alive, that I was God’s son. This was no idea but a relationship that was prior to my sense of self or I.During the night before, I went to sleep an ego that was separate from the world, I went to bed in a self-image that was conditioned by the past and afraid of the future, and I woke up in a state of perfect fearlessness. I was I, and that was it. I knew who I was, like one knows who your mother is and you had been searching for her all your life, and when you saw her you knew that you knew her all along. I knew who I was as if I had known myself as a baby, as a child, as a teenager, and had forgotten, and now I remembered. I knew who I was as something eternal that can never die, change, or cease to exist, or had ever ceased to exist. I knew who I was, and I was joy. I knew Christ and we were the same as awareness is the same no matter what the experience is.Since then that world transforming experience has guided me like a star over the manger until now on this day after Good Friday it is both a memory and a reality, a personal play between the real and the unreal, a hide and seek game between a little self and the Christ within.There is Jesus and there is Christ. One is now, one is then. And yet, both were then and both are now. There is only one Christ, one Son of God, and only one relationship with the Father, and we are all that. Seeing myself as separate from that, experiencing myself as other than that is the crucifixion. The suffering, the crown of thorns is my separate self that doesn’t know my true self. Jesus showed us, taught us with his life how to let go of that suffering ego.And when you let go, you wake up and it is Easter.
With tulips blooming in the front yard and birds flocking around my feeders (I must be on the bird migration map as a popular restaurant), I welcome Thursday. (Oh, it’s also the first day of spring!) But I don’t welcome it with reference to the calendar or what’s going to or not going to happen today; I welcome Thursday from this always already now. Today is what is and without preconditions and I welcome it.We watched the second lesson for the Oprah/Eckart Tolle class, downloaded from last Monday. (I’m always asleep by 9 so I can get up early) What a blessing this ten lesson series on Tolle’s The New Earth. She said over a million people have now watched either live or by download. Imagine, a million people listening to and tuning into their own presence through the teaching of Tolle. One has to be in the process of awakening to even want to listen or read Tolle. We don’t hear or see what we are not ready to see or hear.Awakening is no big deal, really. It’s just practicing loving or accepting this present moment without conditions. Preachers call it unconditional love and they say it’s God’s love, but that makes it out there as a goal. What’s out there in time is always safe, because that means you don’t have to do it now, just when you are ready or “saved.” But we are always living now; even when thinking about doing it later, we are still now. There is only now, always.It’s like smoking. You never quit tomorrow. You only quit now, and when you get to tomorrow it is always now. We are always at this present moment, but the ego only looks to the next moment. The ego can’t look at this moment and accept it, because to accept it is to BE it. The ego can’t BE this moment because then it wouldn’t exist, and the ego won’t have that.Ego is that sense of self that rides time as if it were a dragon trying to turn and devour its rider. Our perch on time’s back is always precarious, and we hold onto anything we can to keep from being tossed off into the abyss of Now.But, believe me, if we would just allow ourselves to be tossed off, we’d discover that the ground is not hard at all. In fact, the ground of being is like the embrace of a great Mother. She holds us close and makes the world stop bucking us, and the dragon’s fiery tongue becomes a gentle kiss, and its fire burns away all our worries instead of burning our hair.The reason why the world seems to be a fierce dragon is that our purpose is to fall off and discover the “peace that passes understanding.” Time and the world make us suffer just so we can finally let go of it. When we just let go for no reason, then all things become messengers that take us to the ground of our being.But the great puzzle is that we can’t let go for a reason or to gain something, because that very desire or gaining idea is also in time and the trap of being lost in it. This is the Gordian Knot, the great double bind that is both the lock and the key to the liberated mind.
The positive responses from bloggers and pundits as they try to find a single meaning to Obama’s speech yesterday seem to swing from vision to political tactic. Was he honestly trying to heal this nation and transcend race, or was he just “trying to get the media off his back?” as a few pundits thought. Personally, I thought it was the “vision thing.” He will never get the media off his back, but he can make them change their focus.The media reminds me of a hungry school of fish that will go after any bait in an instant, always focused on the feeding and never on the pond in which the food rises. After Obama’s address, it will be difficult for the media not to be aware of the pond, now that it has been pointed out to them. When the viewers are aware of the pond, they no longer think the bait is all that important. They want to talk about the pond.
Yesterday was an emotional day, full of undecided and uncertain weather, and it all seemed to make some sense when the weatherman came on TV to show us what the weather systems are that we are now experiencing. With dispassion he calmly and exactly laid our racial map, showing where we have been, where we are, and our choices on where we want to be. The reactions that roll across our land today, all positive and uplifting, reveal our hunger for such clarity and insight, and—because here we saw it— how deprived we have been of a true weatherman in our national life.