Stillness Speaks
by Eckhart Tolle
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eckhart TolleEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08
ISBN: 157731400X
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: New World Library
Book Reviews of Stillness Speaks
Book Review: These ideas will get Sarah Palin elected president. No really!
Summary: 4 Stars
Jim Carrey's on You Tube exulting the virtues of reading Tolle and discovering the Now. What a selfish millionaire! To paraphrase Joseph Conrad, Jim Carry doesn't realise that his life, his very essence of his character, his capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of his belief in the safety of his surroundings." So let's parachute Jim Carry onto a desert island, without his philanthropic support, his starry eyed hangers-on, and his electric barbed wire fence; and let's see how mindful and how Now Jim Carry can get.
Tolle reckons that these are wrong thoughts created by my overly switched on ego. Ego is bad in the New Age and Eckhart Tolle is big in the New Age. However, I don't detect malice or charlatan trappings in his wrap, and he's probably on-to something with his zen tool bag. Firstly, what do all these Eastern people mean by ego? Ego, you know, is not who you really are. You see, ego is like a cancerous tumor, churning out thoughts and thoughts are toxic. It doesn't matter whether they be negative thoughts or possitive thoughts, because the thinking is what we need to stop. But why is thinking bad? Well when we introspect, that is, when we think to ourselves, we are living in past and future time zones, when our true standing ground should be right here right now, in the now. The now is the only thing that you will ever experience. So this is why introspection is the wrong way of doing stuff; thinking to oneself is a noisy veil, clouding the real you. Mindfulness helps to switch those thoughts off, to still your mind, to gently float down stream (sorry I couldn't help myself) and enter eternity. It will be like removing cataracts from a blind man. We are all blind.. If we you can conquer your thoughts, then you will awaken.
This sounds silly, but having said that, I have read Tolle's books and listened to his audiobooks and I can't help but be impressed. I don't know if its his wacky German accent or the fact that he can talk this stuff for over an hour from the top of his head but he got through to be in a little way.. I hate gurus but this stuff is useful is what I am saying. There is obvious marketing trickery going on but that's the industry we live in. So if you can ignore the hype of blissful peace, then this book is worth a go.
A big downside though, and its a biggy; is Tolle's idea that a majority of people are waking up and ergo the more people wake up the more flowers will spread. This is all logically sound and numerically comfortable; but if you walk down the book isle to the politics section, then the minority still run the world, they have always ran the world and they are a small minded, mean spirited, spiritualy broken minority who worship the profits rather than the prophets. But that's another syllabus.
God, these pampered, Hollywood machine parts need to find better drugs. (Please feel free if you need to skip this startling but somewhat mumbo-heavy paragraph). Anyway, if you're a rich Westerner, then this Tolle character is on to something good. Originality is isn't; just keep this in mind, what Eckhart Tolle is expounding is a re-packaging of Eastern wisdom for our tiny attention span selves. Eckhart Tolle's wrap has an Eastern flavor that promises an easily digestible morsel of liberation if you put the hard work in. In the Eastern version of our wretched state, we are not wasteful crap excreting anuses because of The Fall, but our wretched state comes from our ignorance to the truth that we are all God almighty! We are all aspects of divinity, but we are asleep to this truth. You just need to awaken your mind to this realization. It's the idea that mind created the world by stepping out of eternity. By stepping out of eternity, mind brought along the illusion of time, with its poles of past and future. Tolle calls the illusion of time, our unconscious state and the Now our awaked state. The Now is out-of-time, and because temporal change belongs to time, the Now is a time-less One reality. We can better visualize this One reality by thinking of eternity or The One or The Now (all the same thing) as a revolving ball or globe. The part of the globe going downwards is the past and the part arising towards us is the future; the North pole is stationary isn't it, so the North of the globe is the Now (because it is outside of the revolving part we call time; get it?). The Now is the stationary part of the globe and time is the mere moving image of the globe (eternity) or as Plato said of it, time is the moving image of eternity. It is eternity that projects time onto the walls of the cave', like on a cinema screen. You can also think of the eternal One as a dangling disco ball in a night club and the lights cast by the ball are time and space and plurality. All these are cast onto existence by the disco ball (eternity). This is why the flow of time is an illusion and the eternal 'Now' is our only ground of existence. So Tolle is saying that past and future are not real, but we spend most of our waking moments living in the past and future. We stress about an incident that happened years ago or we worry about an uncertain future; like voices, our memories and worries drowning out the moment blabber on and on in a relentless drone, like a record repeating for years. Tolle calls this past-future time-binding state our unconsciousness. Our obsession with past and future is our hypnotic state. Let us awaken! Awakened consciousness is when we get into The Now. So in order to escape the world of illusion and stepping back into eternity, we must switch off the mind, its thoughts and dreams and all other illusionary smoke screens. If you manage to still your mind, it will be like removing catarax from a blind man. Eckhart Tolle awakened long ago, this is why he wrote The Power of Now; because he can see more than we blind sleepers.
Right then, that's the philosophical flailing out of the way, now onto the fun bit, is all this `we are all connected' and time being an illusion idea true? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant reached this Hindu conclusion in the icy little Prussian town of Konigsberg some 250 years ago, independent of any Eastern influence. Kant's philosophy is the culmination of the western journey and it came full circle and agreed with sages of India. Is this a coincidence?
The Eastern idea of we being little bundles of space-time, manifesting out of the navel of Brahman, is more sophisticated and a truer explanation of our sorry state than the western idea of a man in the sky, who, to use Milton's phrase, hung the stars like lamps in heaven, God our Father, who guides the flight of every atom and the fall of every leaf. This is why intellectuals run off to India! Erwin Schrodinger believed this and there were many early 20th century scientists that believed in something similar to the above. Those eastern gurus and sages knew a thing or two about existence and this is why Eckhart Tolle sounds so wise and calm, because he speaks a truth that the Bible and Koran bashers out there would have you not hear. Tolle is a soothing lubricant, to sooth the aches of trendy nihilism, the consumer, the rat race and the humiliation of the work cycle; a cycle that disembowels us through advertising and envy and shopping and sexual frustrations. These are the reasons why Eckhart Tolle's popularization of the East is catching Oprah and Jim Carrey in a fit of excitement; they may not realize it, but what Tolle is offering is an escape hatch to a calmer place.
But you need to live in a mansion to practice living in the moment! Or you need to be a hermit, which, funnily enough, is what Eckhart Tolle is (as too is The Miracle of Mindfulness Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh). Most of us live in the real world. If you're looking after a three year old and you are working your own little rat race and if you're trying to study and write, all of the time; then living in the moment is not easy. Our society is run on the lowest common denominator mode of capitalist existence, so only the rich can pursue this bourgeois game.
Now about Jim Carrey and Oprah and Tolle, they are later-day escape artists, trying to leave us plebs behind! Now you yourself may choose to leave this word of skyskrapers, Starbucks, finace and monkey politics. However, if you want Sarah Palin to become the next emperor of the world, then your moral duty is to throw you own dirt back at the powerful!
Summary of Stillness Speaks
In Stillness Speaks, best-selling author Eckhart Tolle illuminates the fundamental elements of his teaching, addressing the needs of the modern seeker by drawing from all spiritual traditions. At the core of the book is what the author calls ?the state of presence,? a living in the ?now? that is both intensely inspirational and practical. When the pressures of future and past thinking disappear, fear and frustration also vanish, conquered by the moment. Stillness Speaks takes the form of 200 individual entries, organized into 10 topic clusters that range from "Beyond the Thinking Mind" to "Suffering and the End of Suffering." The entries are concise and complete in themselves, but, read together, take on a transformative power.
Expanding on his mantra?Get out of your head and into the moment?Eckhart Tolle offers this new book on living in the now. Here Tolle emphasizes the art of "inner stillness"--the place where thoughts, ego and attachments fall always and we are left only with what the moment has to offer: "When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world." Don't expect this to be a quick skim or even a straight-through read. Like his previous bestselling book The Power of Now, Tolle uses brief entries and numerous white spaces to give readers easy in-and-out access into enticing spiritual insights that expound on inner stillness, such as learning the difference between surrender and resignation, overcoming the fear death, and how to end suffering. In fact, this is designed to be an ongoing conversation. Pick it up any time or any place, but be sure to allow for plenty of breaks for serious contemplation. Even as you occasionally abandon the book, don't abandon the teachings, pleads Tolle. Embracing and practicing inner stillness is no longer a luxury, he writes, "but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself. At the present time the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically things are getting worse and bett! er at the same time, although 'the worse' is more apparent because it makes so much noise." Devotees who have read all of Tolle's books and audio tapes probably won't find new ideas or information here. But they may appreciate the refresher course --revisiting familiar concepts in a slightly different package. --Gail Hudson
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