It’s interesting to see what the experiences of others is. And perhaps you can see what is common to all of them. Please understand that you will have your own experience. Everyone’s conditioning has this same commonality and is also completely unique. So your experience of awakening will also be unique. What is common to all these experiences as well as what you will experience is the end of ego, self-identification. But it will happen to you in your own completely unique and beautiful way, like the blooming of a flower in Springtime.
“Of course ,it is always good to give money to a spiritual cause . One creates good karma by doing so. It is also better to believe in God than to deny Him,for without belief you won’t make the effort to find Him. But don’t imagine that God can be bribed or flattered into giving you His grace. The only thing that can win Him is your love.” Paramhansa Yogananda
Nice, Rob. Thank you. Surrender to something greater. And that is love.
Thank you, Crispin, and I didn’t think you did. As more people are reached by these teachings and more people benefit from them I will have to find more ways to accommodate them and I may have to charge more. Someone asked if they could donate and if I had a donate button on the website the way BATGAP has. I hadn’t thought about that. But that might work as well. If enough people donated I might not have to charge anything. That would be pretty nice. 🙂
Power and money have corrupted many people, including some spiritual teachers. If and when that happens, I think the resonance of the teaching suffers. It is no longer reaching the spiritual heart or coming from the spiritual heart. There is a different resonance. I still don’t feel that with Eckhart Tolle, although I haven’t listened to him in probably a year, and perhaps that was an old video. I have listened to Adyashanti in the past year and Mooji and Rupert Spira. And I have not felt that loss of resonance in any of them. I have noticed that Adyashanti’s resonance has actually grown over the past year. He’s coming from an even clearer space than before and that was already pretty clear. Of all these people I only know from seeing them on video. But the resonance and transmission of that resonance is still clear. Physical distance makes no difference to awakened consciousness nor does time, interestingly enough.
There is no end to this awakening. It just continually deepens. And perhaps that’s another sign where money or power have entered the picture. Or even worse, attachment to our own ideas and teaching. 🙂 There is a stagnation. The continued deepening is no longer deepening. It’s as if a teacher has reached a plateau of sorts. That’s something else to watch out for. If we remain open, awakening continually deepens. It is limitless after all.
Thank you, Crispin and blessings and love to you as the awakening process continues to unfold.
Peter
Peter, thank you for replying. I can only say that I disagree with you on almost every point! But I don’t feel comfortable with hijacking your blog further by thrashing one of my own hobby horses, and time is in any case short, so I’ll resist attempting a refutation. Wilkinson & Pickett’s The Spirit Level is a good read on the dangers that the super-rich (like Tolle!) pose to our democracies.
It never occurred to me to number your offerings amongst those motivated primarily by money, by the way. They seem very clearly motivated with a warm and genuine spirit, and I have no in-principle objection to some payment for anything of value.
Thanks again for engaging.
This presentation loses credibility in the first minute by starting off with notoriously greedy $piritpreneur Tolle, who charges vast scads of cash for everything he does. The details are easy to find, but for a good summary see https://www.christophertitmussblog.org/eckhart-tolle-is-on-the-rich-mans-list-is-this-the-price-of-enlightenment.
By presenting such crass dullards as ‘enlightened’ you’re on the horns of a dilemma. If the fellow’s not enlightened, then why include him? If, on the other hand, this is what ‘enlightenment’ looks like, then it’s just not worth having. We don’t need more Tolle’s in the world: a man whose greater wisdom leads him to do nothing more imaginative, thoughtful, or useful than move to California and take huge wads of money from the gullible cashed-up exploiter class. I know dozens of much superior humans who do far less harm, and make no pretence of enlightenment.
If enlightenment results in more $piritpreneurs, working tirelessly to continue the world-destroying corporate agenda of increasing the unfair distribution of our tiny planet’s diminishing stock of resources: why bother?
It’s interesting you should say this, Crispin. There is no one living in awakened consciousness that does not consider Eckhart Tolle to be living in awake consciousness. Nor for that matter any of the others shown in this video. I did not create this video, but I do consider all of these folks to be awake and that’s why I included it. Awakening is not an intellectual matter. In fact it has absolutely nothing to do with the mind, with concepts or with mental knowledge. Nor does it have to do with whether money is charged or not nor how much. To recognize an awakened being, you probably have to be awake or at least open to the resonance that comes from such beings. Otherwise you are only relying on your opinions, concepts, and sometimes even prejudices and anger.
Awakened people do not rely on their opinions, concepts, prejudices or anger. This is the format of the ego. The phrase my opinion plus 25 cents will buy a cup of coffee is a wise one. Although now it might be 5 dollars at Starbucks. (I don’t know the price as I don’t drink coffee.) The point is that our opinions are worth nothing, absolute zero. Your opinion plus my opinion about whatever I have just written combined is still worth nothing. Throw Albert Einstein’s and Stephen Hawkin’s opinion into the opinion pile, still zero. Take the opinions of all 7 billion humans and it still comes to zero. So our opinions are in very good company, but they are still worthless. The more we trust our opinions, our thoughts and beliefs the further we are from a truth that is beyond all opinions, thoughts and beliefs and is mostly encountered in a deep silence. Each of the people presented in this video experiences this truth. How do I know? It just resonates. This truth resonates. It is a deep peace, absolute contentment and unconditional love that pervades everything. It is the essence of all humans, of life itself. Yet the majority of humans experience it only rarely if ever. But some do. These folks do.
While we cling to our thoughts and opinions, we cannot feel this deep peace that lies at the core of what we are.
My personal preference would be that Eckhart Tolle, or whoever manages his company, would not charge so much for his retreats. I can’t afford it. But I don’t pay any more attention to my preferences than I do to my opinions. That and $5 might buy a cup of coffee at Starbuck, if I drank coffee or went to Starbucks.
For the first ten years I charged nothing at all for my teaching and healing. And people were cured of chronic illnesses they had spent thousands of dollars trying to cure. But then I had no expenses. It was all done in person at my home or their home. Now I have internet costs and all the different costs that go along with that. So I charge enough to pay for that. At some point I will need to hire some people to help out as it is getting too much for me to handle by myself. When that becomes inevitable I will probably have to charge more. Otherwise I can’t keep doing it. Eckhart Tolle has many thousands of people who want to come to his events. He, or his company, need to rent large halls and venues to accommodate this. He has employees to create and manage his websites. I doubt he could do it himself. All this costs a surprising amount of money. My Zendo is small. It can accommodate about 25 people at one time. If the demand grows larger, I will also have to rent a larger space to accommodate more people. To pay for that I will have to charge more.
Many people feel that all spiritual teaching should be free. And at one time, many years ago, this was probably very true. But that was before the internet and all the other wonderful forms of media that allow many more people to access these teachings. And those forms of media are not free. You can read more about this if you search for the word Dana on the website. Or just click this link. https://n-lightenment.com/dana/
In those days when all spiritual teaching was free, very few people had access to them. There was no mass media. If someone wanted to learn from a spiritual teacher, they had to walk for many days to reach one. And generally sleep outside because there were no accommodations. It was a great sacrifice to learn from a spiritual teacher if one could even be found. So very few ever encountered a teacher or teachings. Today it is very different. Thanks to mass communications, especially the internet, almost everyone has access to the most profound spiritual teachings available. But mass communications are not free. So now people charge for these teachings. You can see if you look at my website that I charge very little compare to Eckhart Tolle and some other teachers. That doesn’t make me more holy or enlightened than they are or less so. I am retired so I only have to avoid losing too much money to deliver these teachings. As more people want access to the teachings, the expenses will increase and so will the cost to pay them.
Often when people begin teaching, they don’t charge anything. They have very few students. And their expenses to give the teachings are negligible or zero. Often people just come to their home or invite them to teach in their home. As the number of students grow, accommodating them becomes more complicated and costly. It’s just the way it seems to be.
So how much someone charges for an event or teaching has very little and probably no relevance at all to whether they are awake or not or how awake they are. I hope you can see this. It is far too simplistic to say because someone charges money they are not awake or are a fraud or a con man. On the other hand if a teacher’s motivation becomes mostly about the money, then there is a big problem. but I don’t see that in any of the people presented in this video. They all feel entirely authentic to me.