Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual leader who follows no particular tradition, is second in the 2014 Watkins’ list of Spiritually Influential Living People, after the Dalai Lama. I don’t know what that does to his ego, but his work has certainly awakened me to how identified I am with mine.
As a twenty-five year old student, Tolle says in the book under review, “I saw myself as an intellectual in the making, and I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn’t realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.” This is exactly how I was at twenty-five and I am not very different now at forty-one. But, as Tolle points out, such attitude has a basic flaw.
Descartes gave expression to this error in his famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” For three hundred years this was accepted as an elementary truth and all awareness was identified with the thinking mind. Then came Jean-Paul Sartre who observed: “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”Clearly awareness was different from mere thought. Reading this in Tolle’s book was a revelation to me.
As in his earlier books, The Power of Now (1999) and Stillness Speaks (2003), Tolle’s emphasis in the book under review A New Earth: Create a Better Life (2005) is to dis-identify with the mind and live in the present moment. When one forgets the past and stops worrying about the future and instead focuses on the present, according to Tolle, one tends to find Joy emanating from the recesses of one’s Being.
I have seen there are a lot of parallels between Eckhart Tolle and the Indian mystic Osho (formerly known as Bhagwan Rajneesh). Osho also states that the mind is a chatterbox and that one has to still the mind to attain enlightenment. Osho advocates meditation as a means to still the mind. He also talks of the “here-now” in which one should live, and that one should completely forget the past. Both Tolle and Osho draw inspiration from Eastern sources such as Upanishads, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen.
I have found Tolle and Osho (as well as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha) to be good antidotes to the sins of Ayn Rand over the years. But have I found lasting peace and contentment? The answer would be “No.”
As a twenty-five year old student, Tolle says in the book under review, “I saw myself as an intellectual in the making, and I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn’t realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.” This is exactly how I was at twenty-five and I am not very different now at forty-one. But, as Tolle points out, such attitude has a basic flaw.
Descartes gave expression to this error in his famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” For three hundred years this was accepted as an elementary truth and all awareness was identified with the thinking mind. Then came Jean-Paul Sartre who observed: “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”Clearly awareness was different from mere thought. Reading this in Tolle’s book was a revelation to me.
As in his earlier books, The Power of Now (1999) and Stillness Speaks (2003), Tolle’s emphasis in the book under review A New Earth: Create a Better Life (2005) is to dis-identify with the mind and live in the present moment. When one forgets the past and stops worrying about the future and instead focuses on the present, according to Tolle, one tends to find Joy emanating from the recesses of one’s Being.
I have seen there are a lot of parallels between Eckhart Tolle and the Indian mystic Osho (formerly known as Bhagwan Rajneesh). Osho also states that the mind is a chatterbox and that one has to still the mind to attain enlightenment. Osho advocates meditation as a means to still the mind. He also talks of the “here-now” in which one should live, and that one should completely forget the past. Both Tolle and Osho draw inspiration from Eastern sources such as Upanishads, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen.
I have found Tolle and Osho (as well as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha) to be good antidotes to the sins of Ayn Rand over the years. But have I found lasting peace and contentment? The answer would be “No.”
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