Best Of

There will always be an element if I. We are, after all, Independent beings.
That said, We can move from "I" - "You" or "I - "They" to "We and "Us" united to blend our differences, cognizant of our own separate uniqueness but creating a greater oneness. In another way, we learn and grow to love ourselves with the kind of live that embraces others with the same love. We expand this love to love of all life. Oh, we still carry all the other emotions, states of life, but our core is the Selfless Self Love.
Thus does the "I" become the "WE", the selfish becomes the selfless.

Peace to all

I was reading Only Fear Dies by Barry Long. It was an interesting book, the early chapters were about how personality is formed by mimicking the responses of parents in childhood and how emotional pain forms almost a separate kind of body inside one’s energy.

It reminded me a lot of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which contains a lot of similar ideas, which is not surprising because Eckhart Tolle learnt from Barry Long at one point in his career as a spiritual teacher.

Later chapters in the book contain a history of the world in terms of the mind of unhappiness. Barry holds that primitive man was a lot happier and largely free from likes and dislikes, and that the rational mind evolved almost like a parasite and contains a powerful mechanism taking it towards unhappiness.

@Jeroen said:
I had a dream… I was sitting in a train which was going fast, and the desire arose in me to see the train from the outside… so suddenly there was a view from the side of the train, several hundred yards away, watching the train rushing past… and suddenly I realised my body was still on the train! I became aware that the watcher was not the body.

This reminds me of our ever-present friend Awareness

Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object. It is empty and so can contain everything, including thought. It is boundless. And amazingly it is intrinsically knowing.

@RobinH said:
Interesting. Since I started readig about Buddhism again I'm having a series of dreams in which I go on trips or interact with people from my past in casual manners. I wonder how Buddhists interpret dreams. Are they useful in diagnosing what weighs on one's mind more or should one just let them go on the spot?

I think dreams are significant, that they have something to tell us. It is said in Buddhism that dreams can give one insight into ones karma, among other things.

True. We spend so much energy trying to fix the world back into that old 'comfort-zone' version, but that ship has sailed. Realizing the practice is actually built for the chaos, not just for the quiet moments, makes it feel a lot more like a survival skill than just a philosophy