The Self Challenge

There is a challenge we seem unprepared to face. We human beings have solved many problems, yet we still do not live in peace and harmony. There is something that we are missing.

In my four English books, I present a radical view that was inspired by two great thinkers. In their own work and many dialogues, Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm showed that there is a serious mistake in our ego-system. The way we think about ourselves is causing us many problems.

My books, Insights into Immensity, Whole and One, and Life Without Self highlight their key message: the human challenge is to free the mind from the tyranny of thinking. Right Now crystallises my take on life in ten theses and in over a thousand one-liners: seeing the world right leads to doing right.

The books are available here for free reading. If you prefer a printed version or audiobook, you can buy them on Amazon. 

I was fortunate to meet both Krishnamurti and David Bohm in the Seventies and Eighties. After their 12 dialogues in 1975 were published in 2014, I felt the urge to write about their inspiring views. A few years later, I was asked to write about Bohm's legacy. And last year, I decided to distil the essence of Krishnamurti's work into one book.

Why do I do all this?

I feel the urgent need of fundamental change in the human mind. We seem to miss something vitally important. K and Bohm talked about a mystery. That is what life actually is. Our view of the world is very superficial and limited. It does not cover the whole of life.

There is an obvious reason why we don't feel the mystery. Our ego prevents us from sensing it, because it lives in concepts of our own making.  

There is a world we just cannot see with our eyes and sense with our senses. The ego cannot reach that; it is beyond words. Bohm calls it the implicate order; to K, it is simply what is.

We can all tune in to the mystery. We can sense it, though there are no words or ways to express it. It manifests itself. That is enough, but not for the ego. It wants more than it can get. It either invents something more or gets frustrated.

Our worldview is based on two false assumptions: separateness and time. Yet we are inseparably intertwined with one another, and time is a creation of the mind; the sense of the passage of time arises from thinking.

Seeing the world correctly leads to the mind being freed from the tyranny of thought. In the face of facts, the myth of the self is revealed. This happens either right now, in real time, or never.

This view challenges the prevailing view. In my books, I present various ways for bringing about this transformation of consciousness, but true change occurs in the deep structures of the mind when we see something as it is. Then the boundaries and limitations of the world disappear, for they are merely creations of the mind.

The self has its place in our lives, but it does not help us see or do miracles. Living a miracle is, in my vocabulary, "living in what is", in facts. It is the most wonderful way to live.

If the connection to the miracle of life is cut off, life loses its meaning. If we do not see miracles – even though we live in the midst of them – we are not looking closely enough. Our life has become so trivial and hectic that it is rather challenging to realise that we are part of the fabric of life's miracle. 

It was a major revelation for me to realise that the myth of the self is linked to self-deprecation. Many people are victims of belittling themselves. They seem to underestimate their mental capacity. By connecting to the flow of life, we can be free from the limitations created by the self. That means living life in its purest form.

The challenge has been set: seeing clearly is seeing the miracle in the world, in others, and in oneself. It shifts our focus from the fiction our minds create to the actual facts of life. Then the myth of the self finds its natural resolution—and it is truly high time to resolve it.

After seeing that there is no separate self, the mind works in a different mode and state. It is not in the world; it is the world. As an idea, saying this has no meaning. Seen as a fact, it frees us from the myth and tyranny of self. Then we are the world.