Reading THE POWER OF NOW - By Eckhart Tolle

The book was recommended by a good friend and I’m listening to the audio version from my local library.

The POWER OF NOW is compelling and a powerful teaching. Eckhart starts the book by talking about how he took to spirituality. At the age of 29, he felt a deep longing for isolation and the feeling of not being able to live with himself any longer. He says that the most loathing thing was his very own existence. After years of learning from spiritual saints, he realized that something profoundly significant had happened to him but he didn’t understand it when he was 29. Then, a time came when he had no relationships, no dog and no home. He spent most of his time on park benches. People would come up to him and say they wanted what he had. That answer later grew into the book that we are talking about…THE POWER OF NOW.

The book originated by people’s questions often asked in classes, sessions and conferences. Sometimes in the process of writing, an entirely new thing came up that he had never thought of or uttered.

Eckhart uses terminology that is as neutral as possible to reach a wide range of people. The book draws insight into finding peace within our own deepest self and how we can feel it when our mind is still.

Eckhart elaborates the identification we have of ourselves with our mind. He talks about how we’re not being able to stop thinking and the way our mind-made self causes fear and suffering. He describes the mind as a superb instrument when used rightly. It is not so much that we use our mind wrongly, it is that we don’t use it at all. It uses us. Just because we solve a crossword puzzle or build atom bombs, we cannot be free of our mind when we want; then the mind is using us, we don’t even know that we are its slave.

Eckhart reflects on how people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, use the words “being” and “god” with great conviction as if they know what they are talking about; he further goes out to say that the word God has become a closed concept and it has become the mental representation of someone or something outside us. Neither God nor being can define god.

Eckhart’s answers are accompanied by visual images and mental movies. He reveals that we can free ourselves from our mind. We’ve got to start listening to the voice in our head and be there as the witnessing presence. The I AM realization, rather than I am THIS or I am THAT, arises from beyond the mind.

Here is the real deal. The book is about is about living in the NOW. I highly recommend it to those who are interested in the psychology of spirituality.

Write to me. I would love to hear. Are you spiritual? What moves you about spirituality?