THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
For this book, ‘thought-provoking’ is a huge understatement.
The book makes you question so much in your thoughts, feelings and even
consciousness that it is a slow, slow read, you stop every few pages and wish
you had someone to talk to, to share your latest discovery. The only parallel
in anything I had read before is Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of
Contemplation – where getting away from
thinking is part of the struggle to move closer to God.
But here it’s much stronger – the mind, the ego, is an
absolute tyranny with its self-dramatization, its mental movies about a better
tomorrow, and so many more little tricks that distract you from consciousness
of yourself, your deep body, your current existence, your immediate problems
now.
Achieving all this is a big ask, of course. One of the many
annotations I have written, early on in the book, says, ‘If you are saint!’,
next to one of Tolle’s calm injunctions to ‘watch the mechanics of your mind.’
For a person with health problems and pain it might be too late to try and adopt
the principles of this book, much as Tolle tries to get us to understand pain
and tolerate it.
Following this book is scary but liberating at the same
time. It chimes very closely with some of my own thoughts as I’ve faced up,
this autumn, to a world without my father in it. This grief needed a strategy
to make it tolerable. Also he presented a sad example of over-reliance on the
mind, even to burning it out while the body limped on.
Since reading this book I have found myself less bored, less
frustrated, less impatient. As Tolle says, ‘Waiting is a state of mind. It
means you want the future; you don’t want the present.’ (That sounds rather
like a late Leonard Cohen lyric – one of those phrases that, like the best
coaching questions, are simple but very perceptive.) I have noticed the beauty
of my surroundings; even sitting in a traffic jam this morning the sunlight on
the frosty field was glorious. I have concentrated more on what I am actually
doing now.
The mind is so powerful, it can churn away day and night with
thousands of images and sounds and feelings. But it can hold you back from
action, too. I remember going to ‘Go Ape’, a tree climbing experience where you
make your way through high treetops across wobbly rope bridges and zip wires.
Every movement was preceded by a fiddly process of fastening and refastening
the three rope slings that were connected to my safety harness. Of course I was
glad of the harness, but still all those loops, carabiners and buckles slowed
down my progress. In the same way, the mind can surround you with a fog of
thoughts, rationalisations and interesting patterns that have to be spotted
before the next step can happen.
Also it sets you up with too much self-image, a compilation
of image and sound that you have to see coming true. That builds up the
pressure to succeed to an almost unbearable tension.
The other problem with these mental movies is that when they
are optimistic they are often less vivid than the pessimistic ones. The
prospect of change is less easy to imagine than the prospect of staying the
same; rejections are intensely familiar because they come so often. If they are
allowed to become mental movies then we can gravitate towards them. That’s the
trouble.
This book helps you find the off switch. The
mind has its essential uses, but like every television, it needs to be turned
off at the end of the programme you wanted to watch.
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