PBS Disappoints with Their Choice of Eckhart Tolle Experts
Last night, by accident, I caught PBS’s segment with Eckhart Tolle. It was delightful, as always, to watch Tolle and listen to his simple and profound wisdom. Tolle is such a wonderful example of a real human being.
In my opinion, PBS really dropped the ball with their choice of experts to comment on Tolle’s work. Dr. Betty Sue Flowers demonstrated quite clearly that she has little more than a conceptual understanding of Tolle’s work. This is the continuation of an age-old delimma – intellectuals interpreting and commenting on the mystical.
Though Dr. Flowers is obviously sincere in her appreciation of Tolle and his work, her explanation of Tolle’s work and his experience reveals her understanding to not be based on experiential knowledge – and that is the rub with intellectuals. Her explanation of Tolle’s transformative experience totally missed the heart of his experience – that his understanding was not the result of conceptual conclusion, but a revelation from being in the NOW.
Though, I found their commentary lacking, PBS did a fine job on selcting content. The segments of Tolle were excellent. It’s wonderful to see PBS broadcasting material like this. All-in-All I’d give the show 4 out of 5 stars if I was a rating kind of guy.
This is a video that is worth every minute of your time and more. It is a must see for those who have an interest in the Eckhart Tolle – Oprah online presentations and all others interested in spiritual development. What is not addressed in this video is how one’s being can synthesize these two selfs into a real integrated, functioning person.
Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened.
A new book by A.H. Almaas – The Unfolding Now– will be released 6/10/08. With all the interest generated in the NOW by Eckhart Tolleand Oprah, it will interesting to see if Almaas’ works become more widespread.
I have a manuscript copy of The Unfolding Now and I think it is one of Almaas’ most useful books for people interested in presence, the now, and spiritual development.
The Unfolding Now goes into great detail about the barriers and issues that keep us out of the now.
I love The Unfolding Now! Almaas’ clarity never diminishes, yet each book brings an increasing simplicity and gentleness. As I worked with this latest material, I felt like I was receiving a transmission of pure compassion. His strong, true voice reminds us that beyond the endless self-improvement projects and idealized mystical states with which the spiritual path is strewn lies the simple but exquisite taste of our own being.
Almaas is a genius at revealing both the core qualities of Essence and the veils that obscure it, always in language that helps peel away those veils, always holding open the door to the unfolding presence and awareness that remains when the veils have dissolved. The Unfolding Now leads the reader through a masterful series of inquiry processes, invitations to sense and know ourselves at increasing levels of subtlety, gently walking us deeper and deeper into Truth.
“Without heart, we are not really human. And the possibility of having an authentic and deeply satisfying human life is only a pipe dream when our love is not directed to what truly fulfills the heart. To find true fulfillment, many of us at some point in life turn to the spiritual search. But what is it in spirituality that gives this fulfillment? Where does this deep satisfaction come from?
First we need to find out why we become involved in the spiritual search in the first place. What are we looking for when we begin the journey? To experience new and remarkable states of consciousness? To travel to extraordinary realms beyond our everyday world? To be liberated from the difficulties and constraints of the world? Or are we looking to enrich and deepen the meaning of the lives we are living here on Earth? If our aim is to engage in our spiritual work so that it can impact and transform the way we live, we have to begin by seeing what we are actually doing in our lives. What are we up to? What do we really want?”
The continuing popularity of these books reflect the continued interest in the spiritual journey. Oprah and Eckhart Tolle have one of the most dynamic presentations to ever hit the web. according to reports, over 500,000 people are trying to tune in to the ten-week series.
In June of 2008, Shambhala willl publish A.H. Almaas’ 14th book – The Unfolding Now.
The keys to self-knowledge and deep contentment are right here before us in this very moment—if we can simply learn to live with open awareness. In The Unfolding Now, A. H. Almaas presents a marvelously effective practice for developing the transformative quality of presence. Through a particular method of self-observation and contemplative exploration that he calls inquiry, we learn to live in the relaxed condition of simply “being ourselves,” without interference from feelings of inadequacy, drivenness toward goals, struggling to figure things out, and rejecting experiences we don’t want. Almaas explores the many obstacles that keep us from being present—including defensiveness, ignorance, desire, aggression, and self-hatred—and shows us how to welcome with curiosity and compassion whatever we are experiencing. – from the bookcover.
What keeps us from living in the Now?
This book is an exploration of the barriers and obstacles to Being Here Now that prevent us from experiencing the reality of the Power of Now. In short, it looks at the mind, the ego, and how the past keep us from being able to be in the now.
How is our experience within time a hindrance to our experience of our essential nature?
…our time orientation will disconnect us from our True Nature because it contradicts the now-ness, the timelessness, of our True Nature. It is paradoxical, of course, to think about things that way because we are always thinking in terms of time. The time axis is very important for the mind. The mind is always thinking of things in the past and of what it is going to do in the future. It rarely settles in the moment. If it did, it would become quiet.
When you settle into the moment, you realize that there is not much happening—a few things here and there. The primary awareness is of the immediacy of the moment. This is because presence—being in the now—is characterized by beingness, simply being here now. In contrast, our familiar self is based on doing, going, making things happen. We do not trust that action can arise and proceed from inner stillness; we do not recognize that Being is the ground of everything. To be in the now connects you with that quiet beingness that underlies all changes, all activity—the simple hereness where what is most basic is not activity but presence.
So when we are not settled, all the images, all the reifications, all the projections from the past arise and influence the present. We don’t see the present as the present; and we don’t experience the presence of the present.
That same influence of the past also keeps orienting us toward the future. Something will come up from the past that we are not happy about, and in our desire for things to be better in the future, we disconnect ourselves from the moment. We miss the now. And when we miss the now, we don’t just waste time, we miss the now-ness of what we are, the realness, the here-ness—the very fact that we are.
When people talk about being in the here and now, it is a more profound experience than simply being aware of the content of the experience of the moment. It begins with that awareness because the content of the moment is what is arising now. So, we are aware of the content of the moment—the physical attributes, the feelings, and the thoughts that are arising in the moment. But the more we are attuned to what is arising in the moment, the more time slows down as we become more present to the moment. And when we become more present to the moment, we begin to recognize the now-ness itself, which turns out to be the presence that is present to the moment.
So, my presence is the now-ness of the moment; they are not separate. It is not that my presence is present in the now of the moment; the presence is the now of the moment. That is how we actually know what presence is. In the practice of being where we are, it becomes clear that to be ourselves, to be real, we need to be in the present moment. We need to attend to the moment, we need to embrace and be completely aware, immediately in touch, with the moment. This immediate in-touchness with the moment is the in-touchness with the now-ness of the moment, which is the same thing as the Being of our presence.
In some sense, all the obstacles to being ourselves that we have observed and explored so far are basically in time; they are a function of the passage of time perceived in the linear sense. They come from the past and move into the future. If our center of consciousness is operating within a linear time framework—in the passage from the past to the future—it will be engaged in these obstacles. Our judgments and rejections and hopes and desires and expectations all happen in time. Even our inner practice becomes a practice in time. We are going from one point of time to another for a process that has a beginning and an end. There is a cause and a result: something we do now will result in a change in the future. That kind of time orientation will dislocate us, will take us outside the presence of what we are and into the ephemeral mental world of time, which is where most people live. – The Unfolding Now
What does the term *EgoDeath* exactly mean, in brief?
Ego death, as I think it should be defined, is a set of insights about, and a powerful experience of, the impotence and logical invalidity of the accustomed apparent control-agent who seems to reside in the mind.Ego death is associated closely with the loss of control, or the loss of the sense of being a legitimate controller.
Ego is not entirely false. To say that “ego dies” really means, more precisely, that the cognitive structure labelled ‘ego’, and the egoic mental model of the world, are systematically re-conceived, just like the components of Newtonian physics were systematically re-conceived to form the new system of Einsteinian physics. Ego death means that the mind no longer centrally identifies with the ego. The locus of control or origin of control is no longer seriously taken to be the ego. The transcendent mind knows that there is a source of control underlying the ego, and that ego’s power of control is an epiphenomenon. – Michael Hoffman
Looking closely into one’s attitude and orientation around ego death reveals that it is usually the ego itself, that has reified this notion and is – seeking it’s own demise? This seeking is just another means the ego has of maintaining it’s structure.
“You cannot make the egoless state into a future goal and then work toward it. All you get is more dissatisfaction, more inner conflict, because it will always seem that you have not arrived yet, have not “attained” that state yet. When freedom from ego is your goal for the future, you give yourself more time, and more time means more ego.
“Look carefully to find out if your spiritual search is a disguised form of ego. – Eckhart Tolle
Instead of seeking ego death or enlightenemnt, which is mostly goal oriented in time and space – and thus a creation of the ego (and therefore antithetical to ego death), endeavor to understand yourself more deeply. Accept the ego and inquire deeply into it. True understanding will reveal the truth and dissolve the false naturally without the need for us to reject anything.
Enlightenment equals ego death. For millennia this equation has held true. While the term “ego,” meaning “I” in Latin, is obviously a relatively recent addition to the English lexicon, just about every major enlightenment teaching in the world has long held that the highest goal of spiritual and indeed human life lies in the renunciation, rejection and, ultimately, the death of the need to hold on to a separate, self-centered existence. From Shankara’s rantings against the ego as a “strong and deadly serpent” to Muhammad’s declaration of a “holy war against the nafs [ego]” to the Zen masters’ fierce determination to use any means necessary to break the ego’s grip on their students, this “ego-negative” interpretation of the spiritual path has remained enshrined in enlightenment teachings for ages, for the most part unquestioned and unchallenged. What is Enlightenment
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
Asking this a million times in a sincere, hearful way will reveal what ego death really is.
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What keeps us from living in the Now?