2023-06-20 03:17:35
Eckhart Tolle at a conference in Berlin. (Yashoda/Getty Images)
“Until I was 30 years old, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety, punctuated with periods of suicidal depression.” This is what the German Eckhart Tolle, renowned spiritual teacher, tells in the introduction of The Power of Now, his self-help, meditation and realization book, published in 1997 and become a best seller: it was translated into 50 languages and has sold more than 5 million. of specimens around the world.
[”El poder del ahora” se puede adquirir, en formato digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá.]
“Now,” Tolle continues in his book, “I feel as if I were talking about a past life or the life of someone else.” He speaks from his own experience: after a long period of depression, at the age of 29, he underwent an internal transformation that changed his life.
He returned from an intense inner journey, in which he asked himself what he wanted from life and approached the meaning of his existence from another perspective. He came out stronger: he managed to take the reins, overcome the difficult moment he was going through and write his teachings, which mainly focus on the fact that happiness is not in the future or in the past, but in conscious attention to the present. .
Tolle was born on February 16, 1948, in Lünen, Germany. He lived with his father in Alicante, Spain, from the age of 13, until he moved to England at the age of 20. He studied at the Universities of London and Cambridge. He had a difficult childhood and early adulthood, marked by anxiety and depression.
After the “enlightenment”, he abandoned his doctoral thesis and, without a job, slept many nights on the benches of Hampstead Heath, the enormous park in London. He spent several years as a “vagrant” “living on savings”, in a state of deep inner peace.
Then he moved to Canada. Since 1996 she has lived in Vancouver with her partner, Kim Eng, also a spiritual teacher and creator of a practice to awaken consciousness through the body and movement.
In the introduction to the book, Tolle continues in extreme depth: “I can’t go on living with myself.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of how peculiar this thought was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two: the ‘I’ and the ‘myself’ with which ‘I’ cannot live”. “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of the two is real.”
In what might have been his last hour, Tolle had a vision that started him on the path of becoming a spiritual teacher. He says that we are not our thoughts and explains that the constant and often negative dialogue in our heads is separate from who we really are. He also points out that if we can realize all of this, the process can bring us closer to the courage and peace he has experienced since his dark night.
[Los libros de Eckhart Tolle se pueden adquirir, en formato digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá.]
Tolle argues that most people are unaware that they have “a little man or woman in their head who just keeps talking and talking and they completely identify with them.” And he explains: “In my case, and in the case of many people, the voice of the mind is predominantly unhappy, so there is an enormous amount of negativity that is generated continuously by this unconscious internal dialogue.”
Tolle’s work has attracted high-profile figures such as the American journalist and television presenter, Oprah Winfrey, who has played an important role in promoting his teachings.
What happened for you to realize this? Winfrey asked him in an interview in 2008, for the Oprah & Friends program on XM Radio as part of his Soul Series. Tolle responded like this:
-That night a separation occurred between the voice that was the incessant stream of thought and the sense of myself that identified with that voice, and a deeper sense of myself that I later recognized as consciousness itself, rather than something else. what consciousness had become through thought.
-When you realized that the voice in your head was separated from consciousness, did it impact you?
-Yes of course. I didn’t understand it, I only realized the next day that I was suddenly at peace. There was a deep sense of calm within, yet outwardly nothing had changed, so she knew something drastic had happened. Some time after this transformation, I was talking to a Buddhist monk who said that Zen is very simple: “You are no longer dependent on thought, you go beyond thought.” Then I realized that this was what had happened to me. All those repetitive and unhappy thoughts were no longer there.
Eckhart Tolle and Ophrah Winfrey. Talk about everything.
-Where does our identification with these thoughts and the voice in our head come from?
-The sense of myself that derives from our thoughts, memories, conditioning and sense of self, is a concept that derives from the past. It is essential that people recognize that this voice is going on inside them without ceasing, and it is always a breakthrough when people realize the following; “Here are all my habitual, repetitive, negative thoughts, and here I am, knowing that these thoughts are going through my head,” then the identification is suddenly broken. That, for many people, is the first real spiritual breakthrough.
The power of now explains techniques and ways to realize that many times our heads have us anchored in the past or worried about what is to come and we are not in the present. Then he delves into the causes that lead humans to that and with questions and reflections he helps to develop an awareness of plenitude in the present.
The book is divided into three parts: The first: Why do people feel pain? The second: How can moving deeply into the now alleviate pain? And the third part: How can we get into the now?
With influences from the masters Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism and even phrases from Jesus collected in the Bible, the book emphasizes the importance of being aware of the present moment so as not to get lost in thought, because it ensures that the present It is the gateway to a heightened sense of peace.
According to Tolle’s account in the book, our internal voice, our ego, drives us to live a parallel life of tragedy, a catastrophe that disrupts our emotions and leads us to suffer from that reality. That is why he affirms that it is necessary to understand our role as creators of our own pain. He explains that the mind prompts us to constantly think about what we didn’t do in the past and worries about the future. And that those recurring thoughts about what we can’t control-what happened and what we imagine will happen-cause us anguish, depression and illness.
The exit? Focusing on the present -Tolle insists-, on the now, on what we can decide and do, becomes a healing process. As? First, he explains, you have to detect that permanent voice and then deactivate it with meditation and full awareness that the only real thing we have is the present. Reading The Power of Now provides more tools to start down that path.
[”El poder del ahora” puede comprarse, en su versión digital, en Bajalibros clickeando acá]
Consciousness: the escape from pain
Do not create more pain in the present
No life is completely free of pain and sadness. Isn’t it a matter of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?
Most of human suffering is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs our life.
The pain that you create now is always a form of non-acceptance, a form of unconscious resistance to what is. At the level of thought, resistance is a form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is a form of negativity. The intensity of suffering depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on the strength of your identification with the mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more identified you are with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you can put it this way: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more free you will be from pain, suffering, and the ego mind.
Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as a threat. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
Imagine the Earth without human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still talk about time in a meaningful way? The question “What time is it?” or “What day is it today?” – if there were someone to do it – it would not make any sense. The oak or the eagle would be perplexed by such a question. “What time?” they would respond. “Well, it is now, of course. What else?”
Yes, we need the mind, as well as time, to function in this world, but there comes a time when it takes over our life and that’s where dysfunction, pain and sadness set in.
The mind, to ensure control, continually seeks to cover the present moment with the past and the future, and thus the vitality and infinitely creative potential of the Self, which is inseparable from the Now, is covered by time, the true nature is obscured. by mind. An ever heavier load of time has accumulated on the human mind. All individuals suffer under this weight, but they also continue to increase it every moment, whenever they ignore or deny the precious moment or reduce it to a means to obtain a future moment, which exists only in the mind, not in reality. The accumulation of time in the individual and collective human mind also carries a great deal of residual pain from the past.
If you don’t want to create more pain for yourself and others, if you don’t want to add to the residue of past suffering that still lives in you, then don’t create more time, or at least not more than is necessary to manage the practical aspects of your life. How to stop the production of time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and made brief visits to the Now, take up residence in the Now and make brief visits to the past and future when required to handle the practical affairs of life. Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than creating internal resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than opposing life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life, and watch how it suddenly starts working for you instead of against you.
♦ Born on February 16, 1948, in Lünen, Germany.
♦ He is a “spiritual teacher” and writer.
♦ She lived with her father in Alicante, Spain, from the age of 13 until she moved to England at the age of 20.
♦ He studied at the Universities of London and Cambridge.
♦ Since 1996 he has lived in Vancouver, Canada, with his partner, Kim Eng, creator of a practice to awaken consciousness through the body and movement.
♦ He published four great hits: “The power of now” (1997); “Practicing the power of now” (1997); “Silence speaks” (2003); “A new world, now” (2008). Also “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” (2005); “All living beings are one” (2008); “The guardians of being” (2009).
♦ He currently gives lectures all over the world.
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