Thich Nhất Hahn was born on the 11th of October, 1926 and died on January 22, 2022. Both his birth and death dates resolve to the number 11 in numerology.
The number 11 is considered a Karmic number associated with spiritual awakening. This mystical number refers to insight, higher energy, inspiration, and creativity to those who embrace the symbolism of numbers. Master Number 11 is concerned with spiritual illumination. Often a Number 11 will have an instinctive understanding of metaphysical matters.
Nhất Hahn was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was exiled in the 1960s for his stance against war. He embraces peace. As an influence in my own life, rather than embrace spirituality and religion, he spoke about universality, awareness, and being “awake.”
I understood when he spoke about living a conscious life, attuned to energy of human beings, and trees, and water, and sand. That everything has a vibration. Nhất Hạnh was active in the peace movement and embraced deep ecology, promoting nonviolent solutions to conflict and raising awareness of the interconnectedness of all elements in nature.
The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is.” That understanding, he wrote, can liberate people from fear and allow them to “enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”
I have followed Michael Singer, and Deepak Chopra, and Eckhart Tolle, Andy Puddicome, Don Miguel Ruiz, all members of the ideology of awareness, of soul work, of not living an ego-driven life.
Michael Singer wrote: “What you realize at some point is that you're not; that the moment in front of you that's unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren't in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. You start to practice saying, "I don't want to check inside of me first to see what I want and what I don't want. I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me just like it's creating everywhere where I'm not, and let me see how I can participate in that, be part of that instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears." That's living from a place of surrender.
Also from Singer: “Samskaras is a Sanskrit word. It's used in the yoga world, because that's what's been used for thousands of years. It just basically means when an event happens to you and you either really, really don't like it or you really, really do like it, you don't let it go. If you don't like it, you push it away because you don't want to experience it and that is typical psychology—suppression, repression, resistance. Call it what you want. You just push it because you don't want it coming so close to you and when you do that, it stays inside of you, because you didn't let it go.
Likewise, when things happen to you that you really, really like, you don't want to let them go, so you do what Buddhists call clinging. You cling to them. You hold onto them inside so you can feel them again, experience them again in your mind and so on.
Those are what samskaras are, these pieces that you've held inside of you from your past. And what happens is they keep coming back up and they keep interfering with your ability to see what's happening now because they get stimulated by—they react, if you will, to the moments that are unfolding in front of you. And the next thing you know, you're not experiencing what's happening in front of you, you're experiencing your reaction to what's happening in front of you. Eventually, you will find that this is quite disturbing, and it keeps you from living a full life and from fully experiencing life.
The question of how to let them go, it turns out is very simple. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it's simple. They will come up periodically on their own, and what you'll find is that you'll have an opportunity to either push them back down, cling to them, keep them, or to let them pass through.
From Tolle: One night in 1977, at the age of 29, after long periods of depression, Tolle says he experienced an "inner transformation".
“I couldn't live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I' that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn't know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or "beingness," just observing and watching