|  Eckhart Tolle's new book is setting the tone for a better world, as Margaret Evans discovers.
I
have just read a book by a man who sees straight into
my soul. Yet, rather than being the slightest bit offended
by this naked transparency, I find myself in awe of
his understanding of me - and of you. In fact, of what
Andre Malraux famously termed 'the human condition'.
The man is the German writer Eckhart Tolle and the book,
his first full length work in eight years, is A New
Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.
Since the extraordinary success of
his first major work The Power of Now which catapulted
him to the bestseller lists earning iconic status for
a book on spirituality among the more usual fare of
murder and mystery, we've ticked over into a new millennium,
a new age pregnant with possibility. And despite its
complexity, this new book released in Australia in November,
will be devoured just as eagerly because it provides
compassionate and, dare I say it, enlightened guidance
for seizing that possibility.
Eckhart Tolle, for one, believes
we are already well advanced in our evolution towards
a world of heightened consciousness, what he calls the
"new Earth" where we renounce the ego and
all its flawed trappings and sense our oneness with
the universe. It's only the ego, he tells us, our need
to set ourselves apart from and preferably atop our
fellows - just think sport, politics, TV soapies, Cronulla-style
racial relations - that prevents us reclaiming, in the
words of both the Old and New Testaments, " a new
heaven and a new earth". Heaven, says Tolle, clearly
a deeply religious as well as spiritual man (quotations
from the Bible pepper this book) is not a location but
rather an inner realm of consciousness. The earth is
its outer manifestation. Complex? Certainly. It's easier
to grasp the link when Tolle suggests that as human
life and consciousness are intimately bound up with
the life of the planet, the dissolution of old ways
of thinking is wreaking synchronistic climatic and geographic
upheaval. Just how many monster hurricanes have hit
Florida in the last year or two? How many tens of thousands
of people died in the "once in a lifetime"
tsunami of last December? Not to mention the earthquake
in Pakistan of unheard-of destructive power.
It's indisputable that our world
is changing - and Eckhart Tolle is just the man to make
us want to embrace that change.
Now working as a counsellor and spiritual teacher in Vancouver,
Canada, Tolle, for me, is at his best in those sections
of the book where his comments about humanity in general
have a rapier-like perception on the personal level, too.
I often felt his insights were like a wise presence looking
over my shoulder as I went about my daily business. Never
threatening or censorious, always understanding if inclined
to prod a bit uncomfortably at times!
In fact, the idea of transporting our self from within
the prison of our ego, an entanglement of our thoughts
and emotions, so that we can look upon our self with detachment
is one of his key messages. Tolle talks about "standing
back from the mind and seeing it from a deeper perspective"
and in that moment there occurs " a brief shift from
thinking to awareness". It's the same idea that certain
meditation techniques teach - name a problem or an emotion
that's troubling you and view it, as it were, from the
outside so that it becomes limited and contained and "out
in the open".
Eckhart Tolle shares with us his first glimpse of this
awareness as a 25 year old student at the University of
London. Fascinated by a woman he often saw on the train
who was always engaged in her own angry and very loud
dialogue " in the voice of someone who has been wronged,
who needs to defend her position lest she become annihilated",
one day he decided to follow her to her destination. To
his horror, it turned out to be the university's central
administration building and library! The realisation that
his unswerving faith in the power of the intellect had
just been seriously shaken - "How could an insane
person like her be part of this?" - brought a moment
of intense clarity after he found himself muttering aloud
in the men's room: "Wasn't my mind as incessantly
active as hers? There were only minor differences between
us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking
seemed to be anger. In my case, it was mostly anxiety.
She thought out loud. I thought -mostly - in my head.
If she was mad, then everyone was mad, including myself.
There were differences in degree only." (P33). Unfortunately,
this moment of clarity and detachment was a glimpse only
and for the next three years Eckhart Tolle battled depression
to the brink of suicide before awareness returned and,
with it, the cleansing fire of liberation from the mind.
Reining in "the voice in the head", made even
more insistent and debilitating when it carries the emotional
baggage of the past, is a central theme of Tolle's writing.
In A New Earth he introduces us to something he calls
"the pain-body", his vivid term for "an
accumulation of old emotional pain". And, instead
of finding this section unsettling or depressing in any
sense, in Tolle's hands, guided as they are by a profound
and compassionate wisdom, I found it liberating. He knows
my suffering, your suffering because it has been his suffering
too - and he gives us understanding and tools to do something
about it!
It's reassuring to accept Tolle's view that we aren't
really responsible for our own "dark side",
that cacophony of critical, negative, querulous or plain
angry thoughts that from time to time assail all but the
most saintly of we humans! Absolution is a wonderful thing
in any context! Tolle describes the pain-body as a "semi
autonomous energy-form that lives within most human beings,
an entity made up of emotion". Like all living things,
he says, "it periodically needs to feed- to take
in new energy - and the food it requires to replenish
itself consists of energy that is compatible with its
own.... energy that vibrates at a similar frequency."
Elsewhere he describes it as a "psychic parasite"!
If your own tendency to dwell on perceived slights or
injustices or to rehash in excruciating detail every word
of some deeply inconsequential argument with your partner
or your mother or your best friend sounds uncomfortably
familiar, join the rest of the human race, Tolle is telling
us. At that time, you're simply in the grip of an energy
body that demands attention that actively seeks unhappiness.
He concedes we may find it "shocking" to realise
that "once the unhappiness has taken you over, not
only do you not want an end to it, but you want to make
others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on
their negative emotional reactions." (P145)
He uses this engrossing idea to explain the roller coaster
ride of many intimate relationships, the tendency of many
people to seek out the same sort of partner who brought
them nothing but grief in the past, the collective pain
bodies of certain races namely Jewish, Native American
and Black American groups (it goes without saying that
Tolle's compassion would also extend to the collective
suffering of our own Aboriginal people), and the media's
obsession with violence and misery. His view of the "collective
female pain-body" that has drawn its intense energy
from the suppression of the Sacred Feminine in the ego-driven
world of the past 2000 years is fascinating. The suppression
of feminine wisdom and the torture and killing of between
three and five million women by the Holy Inquisition ranks,
says Tolle, "together with the Holocaust as one of
the darkest chapters in human history". The pain-body
that has absorbed over centuries the agony of wise women
who dared to share their knowledge of nature's healing
powers now finds expression, says Tolle, in PMT! And that's
by no means a trivialisation. Even the more sanguine of
us women would agree (remember?), I think, that it is
a time of "intense negative emotion".
Together with the profundity of his insights, Eckhart
Tolle has the gift of offering us practical ways to bring
them into our daily lives. In most instances, it comes
down to his unshakeable belief in "the power of Now'.
He often speaks, too, of living in Presence, of Being
rather than the ego-driven preoccupation of Doing.
As well, I loved his frequent excursions into Zen philosophy
to illustrate with stark simplicity an idea that might
otherwise seem too complex to grasp. One of my favourites
illustrates the pain-body concept:two Zen monks were walking
along a country road muddy after heavy rain. They came
across a young woman trying to cross the road where the
thick mud would have destroyed her silk kimono. Without
hesitation, one monk picked her up and carried her to
the other side. The two monks then walked on in silence
until, after five hours, the second monk asked the question
that had been weighing on his mind: 'Why did you carry
that girl across the road? We monks are not supposed to
do things like that.' The other replied: 'I put the girl
down hours ago. Are you still carrying her?'
The final chapter of this book is a call to action, what
Tolle calls "awakened doing" so that we can,
collectively, bring about the next evolutionary stage
of consciousness on our planet. Simply through '"acceptance",
"enjoyment" and "enthusiasm", we can
achieve that "new heaven" of a more caring,
thoughtful, gentle and compassionate world, one that has
its foundation within each of us. When it's put that way,
it doesn't seem so unattainable!
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart
Tolle is published by the Penguin Group |
