THE POWER OF NOW – ECKHART TOLLE

It was a rainy day, me and my pal had a big fight in the morning and I was all brooding over it till the afternoon. As an attempt to take my mind off the mess, I went for a drive in my car which I shouldn’t have as it was so rainy that even the roads turned swimming pools. It was pouring cats and dogs so I had to roll up all my windows. I started thinking about the issue again ” He is right, I am obsessive about that stuff. no no am not, he is the idiot who brought up this whole stuff, we both are idiots, oh my god ” . My mind kept construing this dustup from different vantage points as I kept sequencing retrospects from our past fights and did some predictions of what might happen next time when we meet. I thought I should talk to other guys in my circuit and hang out more with them or may be I should rethink this whole stuff in a disinterested way or I should go apolog…….. baaaaaaaaam,,, the car automatically got turned off and wont start, I kept pushing it and no use, wont start. The taxi guy behind me started honking stridently and screaming at me asking me to get down and push it near to the side-walk. Thats when I realized that my car was half submerged in water and I was in the middle of a gridlock which I don’t know how I got myself into. I got out of the car and started pushing it towards the sidewalk. I stumbled and almost got ran over as i was pulling my car with its bumper and didn’t know what I was stepping on because of the water up till my knees.Then I parked it in a safe place out of the traffic and started walking home which was like 2 miles away, all the way getting drenched by the violent rainfall. Reached home. Sat on my couch after drying myself .There came the realization of certain stuffs.

I was surprised to notice that shift in my thinking pattern, the way my mind stopped thinking after my car wont start(after d baaaam) and everything good and bad, pure and evil, beautiful and ugly, high and low I considered or that I would normally perceive in stuffs just got obsolete and vanished for a temporary period of time. All I could think about was going home safe and not stepping on any electric wires lying on the road hidden under water. Its the exigency of the situation that made me quit my thinking automatically and turned my attention to reality and what was happening in the now(at that time). Such a wonderful experience. But then, I wanted to do this stuff all by myself and whenever I wanted, not just during the time of emergencies. So i googled the phenomenon and ended up at this wonderful book, “The Power Of Now”.

Before reading any book on philosophical concepts I generally do a research work on that book in the internet. I go to forums in which people post their opinions about books. I really got mixed reviews from people for this one. Some said this book is from the spiritual genre(am not Christian and I don’t believe in Christianity either). Some of them said this book is anti-Christ as it goes about the concept of not surrendering to god(new age haters). Some said this book gives an illusion of well being but actually not so. whichever may be the case, I inferred from them that this book is not just another self-help junk for the ADHDs or the depressed and was some genuine philosophical concept which has gained good popularity and hailed a classic. So, I picked it up from the local library.

THE POWER OF NOW: A GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT – ECKHART TOLLE.

A shot from the film Matrix – when that bald guy says “Welcome to the real world” and we all go like “oh my god, it all lines up and makes sense, cool. But still its just some crap from a movie”.

This is kind of similar to the feeling that I exactly got after reading first few pages of this book.

It is obvious from the title what this book is all about. The author terms the constant thinking process as “mental noise” as it gets intense and disturbing at times and says that this thinking process has been consistent in people from their childhood and it conditions them by creating definitions for the self like how to behave, what to hate, what to like and all and makes them act out those definitions at the same time not allowing them to go out of it. He teaches how one should detach himself from the chronological time and get down to the unlimited time(?) of the now. He also states how people are peripherally aware of the now and how much they are identifying themselves with the thinking process which according to him is just a tool of the mind and should be used only for practical purposes. He defines the painful past memories as pain bodies and gives ways to dissolve them in no time. Ever came across this situation in life where you stand in a bus stop thinking about when the bus is going to come and what works do I have today to finish off at my workplace, what is my boss going to say about me messing up the last one , once again baaaaaam, a hot girl passes by staring at you and you forget everything, and say to yourself “oh my, would you look at that”, things in reality sometimes excite you and drag you into the now temporarily just like my experience. But this taste of the now is short lived and so momentary and people usually climb back to their mind-identified state in no time. He also explains that, a person who lives completely in the now and here acts so alert and conscious than a person in a mind-identified state.

I am basically quite fast in the uptake, but the whole concept of Eckhart was so hard for me to comprehend in just one night read. The complex sentences explaining about the pain bodies and emotions just made me dull and some of those deep concepts were too difficult to comprehend even after a repeated read and I just got plain exasperated. I thought I would cotton on as I go down the way and I did too. I was able to understand what happened to me on that rainy day too, I got a taste of the “no-mind” “all in the now” state temporarily as a result of the emergency. Eckhart asks you to do this voluntarily by following two methods, to get into the visuals that the Now gives you and submerge yourself into its details, and second, let any disturbing compulsive thoughts flow freely with you observing them without any restrictions.

The overall meaning of this work of Eckhart Tolle is that “you are not your thoughts” which to some extent contradicts other concepts which i once used to appreciate, like the famous Cognitive-Therapy(for therapeutic purposes), positive thinking, optimal thinking(in line with Eckhart’s concept but slightly contradicting).

Eckhart Tolle says at the start of this book that he got his spiritual experience during his late twenties on one bad day he drove himself to the very pinnacle of pandemonium inside his mind and thats when he came to understand the true-self and the false-self. He once explains in this book that one who experiences a near death experience in an intense manner knows the value of life. Dying before the actual death is the enlightenment in his terms, which metaphorically said , dying here means killing the ego and detaching oneself from the mind and thoughts which is exactly the concept of Buddha, Christ and kind of a specific part of the Advaita vedanta from the upanishads. But from my standpoint, I would say this book is not that much spiritual and the abstract explanations are all solely referring to the practical working of the mind and its interpretations of the reality.

This book came out in 1999, millions of copies sold, a New York best seller(now his new book A NEW EARTH is doing the rounds) translated to 33 languages or so and oprah’s favourite. A good read, I would recommend it to those people who are so caught up with the chronological time of the past and the future. Am through with his STILLNESS SPEAKS. Yet to read A NEW EARTH.