Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now years ago. Mine has a copyright date of 1999 and I have bought and given away many copies since then. I have read thousands of books on matters spiritual, philosphical and magickal over the years but when someone gave me the Desert Island book question I said that the only two books I would need would be The Power of Now and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The querent was horrified that I didn’t pick The Holy Bible.
So now you know how much I value Tolle’s original book. Incomparable, and able to be read dozens of times with more and more insights each time. That is the test of a true spiritual classic coming from the Presence. It’s different each time you read it because you have grown spiritually because of the previous reading. You are no longer the person who began reading it last time. Even if you know such a book by heart you can get more and more from it by contemplation, until your consciousness connects directly with the consciousness that produced the book. THEN you’ve got it. And there is now no difference between author and reader. They are at identical levels.
Consider that for a moment. Every book comes from inspiration at some point. So the Rosicrucians say that if you know how to read you can read every book by just reading one in a certain way. If you can dig between the lines to the creative consciousness that created the book you can get in touch with the consciousness that creates everything, including every book.
My experience in reading alchemy books hundreds of times tends to make me give you this personal discovery as a rule. The moment that such a book becomes hard to read, or even boring, is the moment for you to apply will, your highest state, and read it again. The feelings are a strong indication that the ego is getting worried about your spiritual progress and wants to stop it. At that point keep going and you will be pleasantly surprised at what happens.
I was both pleased and horrified that it took an appearance on Oprah before the great know nothing American TV watchers knew about Tolle and his latest book. But then I still haven’t realized how great the divides among those who read because they want to, those who read because they must, and those who don’t read unless Oprah tells them to. I picked up this news about Tolle from hearing people talking about it. It’s been fifty years since I watched TV.
At age five I could read the newspaper with ease so I really don’t have a grasp of the inner lives of those who don’t or can’t read. But the NOW thing doesn’t need an ability to read to know that it is important. It’s a simple matter of turning off distracting noise and pictures and looking at the life you currently seem to be living. Sitting under the cherry tree is what some call it.
So we can begin with the basics. Anything that is born will die. The body was born. It will die. You were not born and you will not die. You are not your body. We tend, as humans, to think that what is going on between birth and death is our life.
Go back in your memory to the first memory you can recall of this life. My own is around the age of three, rather late compared with many people. Now go forward in your imagination to the graveyard or cemetery plot where your whole event filled life is symbolized as a dash between two dates. Imagine the memorial stone with the dates on it. Does the idea of even doing that rouse up a suspicion that you have become a prophet? Don’t worry. You can always change the second date if you want to. Nothing you do will alter the actual date of your leaving the body. It was fixed when you came into it.
Now just contemplate what we have achieved so far. It looks as if most people regard their lives as past and future. They really think that life is what has already happened added to what is going to happen. 'This is your life stuff' is always a collection of incidents from the past. Somehow the present moment doesn’t seem to be in the picture.
And the past changes, depending on how old you are. It’s a fact of human nature. I warn my students who ask about my experiences that the older I get the better I was. It’s a common phenomena among the elderly, even those with fine memories. Memory is selective. Lots of people can remember quite clearly things that never happened. Ask any psychiatrist determined to discover sexual abuse in the life of their clients. Just a couple of suggestions and a story unfolds with ease and becomes established beyond doubt. The mind is an inexhaustible source of mental videos.
Talk to anyone about their life and they will always dig up the sequences of happenings of the past or talk about their hopes or plans for the future. I have often said that we sit in the theatre and watch the movie on the screen. Everyone in the audience is convinced that they are watching the movie of their own life unfolding before them. Everyone in the audience sees a different movie. The enlightened person in the audience can do that too, but is also able to see the blank screen on which all the moving shadows are projected.
Most people think that the past drama of their movie is their life. You can’t really compress all that stuff into one moment. One still from the movie won’t hack it as a good story. To get a good movie we have to join hundreds of events together and get a continuous stream. The present moment is only the point from which we remember the past stream of moments. But actually the present moment is the only one there is.
In the movie The Peaceful Warrior the hero, Dan Millman, now the author of many excellent spiritual treatises, gives the gymnastic performance of his student life when all that was happening was in the present moment. He had no thought of what ‘might’ happen, or thoughts about what had happened. He existed totally in the now, like a Zen Master. He actually was the present moment. So all his actions were perfect, unaffected by past or future.
Some few Olympic gold medalists are doing that right now as I write this. But they don’t apply the same focus on the NOW in their everyday lives as they do sometimes in the actual event. The ancient yogis who first discovered the power of living established in the NOW consciousness were the athletes of the spiritual world.
Those people who live in the past or future have already lost their life haven’t they? It is only in the present moment that we live. The past and future are obviously creations of memory and imagination. It’s only because we can string memories together that we think we are a person. It’s the ego that has put these memories together and taken on the persona of someone who did this or that and is likely to do this or that in the future. That person does not actually exist. It is a mental construct. But that is who most people believe themselves to be. In the NOW that person does not exist. Only the consciousness of Being exists. And that is the same in everyone.
Consciously try to avoid the present moment. You can’t. It just follows you around wherever and whenever you go. The past is not accessible to you. It’s over. The future isn’t accessible to you. Only when the future becomes NOW can you experience it. To live in past and future is to be locked into the illusion of time. Remember the belt round the waist of the Fool in an orthodox Tarot. It has symbols of the Zodiac on it. It is a symbol of time and indicates that until the Fool can remove the illusion of time, taking off the belt, he cannot remove the garment of ignorance. We cannot see things as they are when we live in the illusion of time.
As the Indian scriptures say, “The Universe is a mental construct. Only the Real is Eternal. Only the Self is Real.” And the Self is the Awareness of Being that everyone has, that does not change over the years. We always exist in the present moment. Time is in the head. NOW is in the heart. You cannot ever say with truth “I am not in the present moment. I’m in the past or future.”
Every possible state exists only now. People add the extreme past to the extreme future, total them, and name the sum of the two as Eternity. But all eternity exists only now. As the Pattern on the Trestleboard says, “All the power that ever was or will be is here now.”
So many people experience the past as a ball and chain, or a sharp stone in the shoe. Family feuds are always about the past events that no longer exist, and may never have existed. Some cultures like the Sicilians are proud of their ability to cling to past wrongs and think that doing something about them in the present has actually cleared up the past. Many people own such programs and think it’s how they actually are. A very wise person once said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” It applies perfectly to the ‘living in the past’ situation.
And then there are people who live in the future. But the future can only be experienced when it is in the NOW. So why not live in the NOW always. That way life can be experienced fully and directly. I used to give some students buttons that said, ‘Since I gave up hope I feel much better.’ Some people were as horrified at that as the querent who was amazed that I hadn’t chosen the Bible as my Desert Island reading material. But look at it without being amazed. People who live in hope are already living in the future. They are missing out on the now, where everything is going on. The only place where anything is happening.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t make plans. Of course you move forward in imagination and make plans. But you make them NOW with what is here NOW and then you don’t live in your future plans.
So, let’s experience the NOW. Close your eyes and shut out all the stuff that locks you into your present movie. Focus only on your breath, which is definitely happening in the NOW. As your thoughts slow down you will find yourself in between thoughts in a condition in which the only thing you know is that you are Being, you are conscious of just being.
Now that is the same consciousness of Being that you have always had. It hasn’t changed an iota over the years. Whether your body is currently ten years old or a hundred years old the consciousness of Being is the same. It is the only thing that doesn’t change. And whether your body is currently alive or not makes no difference. That awareness is what you actually are, no matter what part you are currently playing in the cosmic theatre called life here, or are in some other world apparently beyond or before this one.
When you recalled some easily remembered incident of your childhood you saw that the actual sense you had of Being was exactly the same as you have now. Your body was smaller, or younger. Makes no difference. Your sense of Being did not change as you grew older or larger, or older and smaller. You may know more than you did as a ten year old but the actual sense of Being hasn’t altered. And it won’t.
Everybody has the same sense of Being available to them. Some are more aware of it than others. Those like Tolle, who are firmly established in that consciousness of Being can see life as it is. They feel different from other dispersed people when you are around them. They have dropped all their programs and act only in the moment. The sense of Being, that most can only touch briefly during meditation is their continuous state. It is the centre of their lives.
For most people the centre of their lives is their body. Most people associate strongly with their body and the name it answers to. Because of this we tend not to give as much importance to what happens to other bodies as what happens to ours. Yes, your neighbor’s tree may have fallen on her car, and you may actually empathize with your neighbor. But your toothache or in-growing toenail takes priority, because it’s happening to you, if you think that you are your body.
The Buddhists have a story of a woman who had suffered every possible disaster that could happen to anyone. Her husband died from a snake bite leaving her as a zero status Indian widow with two small children and no income, living in a land distant from her family. In her attempt to get back home she came to a raging river and left one child on the bank while she held the hand of the other in an attempt to wade the river. As she looked back she saw a vulture pick up her child. In her panic she let go of the other who was carried away by the fierce current.
Totally distraught and starving she reached her home town just in time to see the cremation of her father and mother who had been killed when the family home caught fire, leaving nothing at all of their belongings. That was the last straw. She went mad with grief and ran through the jungle tearing off her clothes. She ran right into a meeting that the Buddha was having with his monks.
They of course were afraid and disgusted to see a naked woman, the bane of celibate life. The Buddha had none of their programming left. He was the embodiment of compassion not prejudice. He ordered her to approach and tell her story. She did. The Buddha leaned forward and looked deep into her eyes and said, straight from the Presence, “But daughter, none of this is happening to you.” Her identification with her body and past life just dropped away in that great NOW presence. She got it. The Buddha gave her a blanket and she became his first nun.
It often, but not always, takes some great disaster to bring about the dropping of the ego. Tolle describes very plainly that it didn’t happen to him until his suicidal depression made life as he was living it impossible to bear. The ego doesn’t often surrender easily.
The Self in the Buddha was recognized by the Self in the crazy woman. The awareness of Being in him was the same as in her. Just think of that and realize that all these people on the TV or in the street that you have thought different from you are just the same you, in different bodies. When somebody appears totally different from you it’s your projections of things you haven’t accepted in yourself being shown on the screen. When you see that person as the same as you but in a different body and with a different mind and therefore living in an apparently different universe you will get the meaning of “I and the Father are One.” Father was the name that very wise person gave to his inner Self, the Self of all beings.
When you hear the chant Om Namah Sivaya, homage to Shiva, you are experiencing to some degree the insight of the ancient sages who said, “Relishing the wonder of inner devotion, may I worship even the blades of grass thus: Homage to Shiva, my own consciousness.” As Muktananda told his devotees…God dwells in you as you. The Indian greeting, ‘Namaste,’ with palms together in front of the heart chakra, means “The Divinity in me greets the Divinity in you.” You are not your body, nor is that body yours. You are the Self of all beings.
Everything you see is a mental construct except that Self that you have never seen. All you see in the mirror is a reflection of the body you are using. Nobody has seen the real you. It is invisible, invulnerable and cannot be harmed.The body belongs to the planet you are currently experiencing and will return to it when you leave the body and mind behind, as you have done many, many times already.
All the sages and saints who have attained the NOW consciousness are saying the same thing. The divinity, however you name it, lives in all things simultaneously. There are millions of minds but only one Consciousness. Thousands of rôles, but only one actor. And when you contact that NOW you are for a period aware of that universal Consciousness that eternally creates and sustains the universe. And as the Indian scriptures say, “Thou art That!” Happy Trails.
