Joanne Sales

Imagine that you sit down at your table at a dinner party. Immediately, the person next to you begins to tell you the details of living with his ex-wife. At first, you listen. Then you nod. Then, you glance around and look for an escape. You’re stuck. Your other table neighbour is complaining about taxes and traffic. The couple across the table is planning a trip to Barbados. At one end of the table, you’re witnessing a temper tantrum; at the other end, a nervous breakdown. “Excuse me, I need to use the…”
Merciless rants at a party are painful to witness, but easy to escape. But what if the relentless ranting is going on inside your own head? A young woman’s brother spends a lot of time in mental institutions. “He hears voices,” she tells me. I ask her, “Don’t you hear voices?”
“Of course,” she answers.
“So do I,” I affirm.
Finally, we recognize the difference between her brother and the rest of us. Her brother believes the voices. “Oh.” We are both humbled for we have to acknowledge that we too have the nagging habit of believing the voices that speak inside our heads. Those voices are our opinions and cherished beliefs. Recognizing how close we are to “clinically insane” adds a personal touch to the bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
I guess we could take some comfort in knowing that we live in a society of people dominated by inner voices. But we have our escapes, don’t we? We can overwork, overeat, get drunk, watch TV, go shopping, read the news, complain, get a divorce, etc. But these things only cover up the rant. They don’t bring peace to the voices.
What are all these voices and why don’t they just shut up? How do we bring peace to the inner dinner party of the mind? This is the subject of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, author of the New York Times bestseller, the Power of Now. I went to see him on November 30, in Vancouver, along with 2,300 friends at Common Ground’s 25th anniversary celebration at Canada Place. There wasn’t much noise in the Vancouver Convention Centre room that evening. To some degree, his inner quiet quieted our own minds.
How can anyone condense the wisdom of being in the now into a few paragraphs? The wise ones of every tradition have been addressing our “out of control” minds since the beginning of time so I won’t even try.
The Coasters said it so well way back in the 50s: “Yakety yak yakety yak... Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spendin’ cash... Just tell your hoodlum friend outside. You ain’t got time to take a ride... Yakety yak – Don’t talk back...”
Enough said about the inner dialogues between the multitudes of me. We know the problem. Here’s the good news, as Tolle presents it: If, and when, we become conscious in the present moment, we find out that we don’t have to spend the rest of our lives as victims of our inner static. We aren’t the mental dinner party. Nor do we have to stay there. The power of “now” is that, if we actually take up a chair, and listen to the ranting dinner guests, consciously and peacefully, eventually, they go away. We find that, in the present, in the stillness, that our nature is actually quite benevolent, kind, loving and peaceful. The dinner party chaos is a mere smokescreen covering our own Higher Nature.
At this moment in history, becoming conscious may be the most effective survival strategy for the human race and Earth as we know it.

Joanne Sales is an organic blueberry farmer, writer and teacher in Qualicum Beach. joanne@glasswing.com, www.joannesales.com