474 Eckhart Tolle III: I am grateful to him



Eckart Tolle III … the reckoning.


I've been delving some more into The Power of NOW. I now can break down how I arrived at the rejection I expressed before (blog 468) of E.T. and his writings. It has become clear to me: He obscures the simple truth of what occurred (and I do not doubt the veracity of his awakening experience) with unnecessary - indeed I believe (in my case at least) - alienating interpretations, commentary and repetitive waffling.


For instance, on the subject of emotions in the chapter You Are Not Your Mind:


· p. 25 … mind includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental emotional reactive patterns


· p. 26 … focus attention on the inner energy field of your body; feel the body from within


· p. 27 / 28 … if you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, the emotion temporarily becomes “you”


· p. 28 … the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern


· p. 28 … emotions are modifications of primordial undifferentiated emotion that originates in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name & form


This stuff may make sense to his 6m-odd readers (and Oprah Winfrey) … it doesn’t make sense to me, or at least it doesn’t seem pertinent to me. But I feel a shift within myself … I now feel a gratitude toward E.T.: He shows me how not to approach the concept of enlightenment: It is not an issue that requires incessant mumbo jumbo. 


Again, I stopped reading when I realized there is a lot less to enlightenment than Tolle wants to make us believe; certainly a lot less words. OK, I acknowledge he wants to expand on 'enlightenment' and he tries to give readers tools to overcome fear and anxiety.


Yet, stuff like "tomorrow's bills are not the problem" and can be a "core delusion" that changes a "mere situation, event or emotion" into a "reason for suffering", do not endear him to me ... superfluous, useless, annoying jargon! My bills due tomorrow are no delusion. If he said, "there always will be circumstances [bills that are due] ... what counts is how you deal with those circumstances; worrying about them is counterproductive" ... that would be useful.


Eckhart Tolle had an awakening. He describes what happened powerfully on p. 4 / 5:


“My mind stopped. I was fully conscious but there were no more thoughts.

I realized that what everybody was looking for had already happened to me.”


There you have it. Once you comprehend the content of the above two sentences and you apply the lesson they contain - still (empty) your mind (and the best way to achieve that is by meditating [though it can happen instantaneously]) - the bulk of the rest of his writings becomes superfluous ... to me, annoyingly so. 


In my book with no name but instead three definitions for the term  en.light.en.ment  I have an essay on just such incidents, which in Zen are referred to as  SATORI.  And while we are here at my essays, allow me to bring you another one:  RUSSELL




the Japanese symbol for Zen

(I just copied it from the Internet,

please correct me if I'm wrong)