Eckhart Tolle's core teaching, which he realized on the night of his spiritual awakening, is this: one is not one's mind. Through observing and detaching oneself from the compulsive and often anxious stream of thoughts, one's nature of spiritual enlightenment — contentment with circumstances as they are — is no longer obscured. While observation of this process is the essential practice, there are other approaches to natural well-being; one major path is to “end the delusion of time.”
The Obscuration of Spiritual Enlightenment by Psychological Time
Tolle asserts that in reality, time does not exist at all. He writes, “Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way?” The answer, of course, is no, and while Tolle acknowledges “clock time” as a reality even for a fully enlightened person, he distinguishes this objective process from what he calls “psychological time.”
Psychological time is a fiction of the compulsively functioning mind; it is a continuous projection into the future and replay of the past with accompanying feelings of dread, regret, pleasure and hope, and revolves entirely around one's conceived identity and ultimately illusory ideas about “making it” (i.e., some kind of salvation). While learning from past circumstances is important, losing oneself in fantasy or guilt is a form of chronic avoidance of spiritual awakening.
Spiritual Awakening through Letting Go of Time
Living by clock time, however, is not simply refraining from excessive mental wandering, according to Tolle's school of thought. The fruition of the practice Eckhart Tolle teaches is, in fact, a total surrender to the circumstances of the moment. It's said that surrender is a state in which needed change takes place; however, the mind's obsessive need to label, fixate, and resist the present moment is entirely absent.
Eckhart Tolle cites the example of ducks, who will periodically fight for usually no more than a few seconds, then flap their wings; this gesture, he realized, was to avoid the buildup of emotional tension in the body, known in Tolle's lexicon as the “pain-body” (see How to Relieve Stress With The Power of Now). The simplicity of mind of animals does not even allow for accruing resentment and resistance.
Enlightenment in Being Present
On the other extreme of time-fixation are such ideologies as communism and nationalism, which, as Tolle writes, “operate under the implicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a point in the mind-projected future, when salvation in whatever form...will be attained.” For Tolle, the tens of millions of people who have died in the “pursuit” of happiness serve as a testament to the insanity of projecting fulfillment into the future.
This teaching is an iteration of Tolle's central teaching - that enlightenment is ever-present in the mind, so long as one is able to recognize that the ever-deluded stream of thoughts is not one's identity. To learn more about the freedom possible in this realization, please see The Essential Message of The Power of Now.
Living the Power of Now
The unreality of time may be intellectually solid, but still somehow distant. For Tolle, the mind grasps at straws in its habitual avoidance of the present. Consider the approach of Rinzai, who “would often raise his finger and slowly ask: 'What, at this moment, is lacking?'” For many other tools recommended by Tolle for spiritual awakening, consider How to Meditate with The Power of Now.
Source:
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Canada: Namaste Publishing, 2004. Print.
Josefine Cole - Josefine is a BA graduate of Naropa University's Religious Studies program, which emphasizes self-transformation through practice of ...
