Now Thoughts On Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power Of Now’ Part 1

I've noticed how many are reading Eckhart Tolle's 'The Power Of Now' and are curious as to HOW to apply what he is saying.

Let's see if we can make sense of it and help you find a way to more easily embody what Tolle is talking about. Understanding all of this on an intellectual level is helpful to some degree, but what we're really looking for is being it, not understanding it.

In fact, I want you to realise that the transcendent, what Tolle calls 'presence', really can't be understood intellectually.

Anything you can say about it isn't it, and any idea you have about it also isn't it.

Knowing about it, in fact, is of little value. It's 'being it' that we're after.

One of the main ways to get stuck is to keep trying to "get it" intellectually. I see people do this all the time. They keep trying to understand it, without realising that what is trying to understand it is the ego, and the ego can never understand it. The ego would love to make "being  awakened" another of its accomplishments, but this will never happen.

Awakening is a dis-identification with the ego.

The ego becomes something you have, but is not who you are.

Awakening isn't something that happens as a result of intellectual understanding. Instead, it's a shift in perspective like those pictures where you can either see the goblet or the two ladies' faces, but not both.

So stop trying to "get it" intellectually. You can BE it, but you can't "get it" at least not mentally.

Let me give you an example that might make this clearer.

If you had never tasted a strawberry, and I told you all about strawberries - l described how they taste, what the texture is like, and told you everything else I could think of about the experience of strawberry - eating, you still wouldn't know what strawberries taste like.

You can taste a strawberry, but you can't understand what they taste like, and you can taste the transcendent, but you can't understand what it tastes like.

Once you've experienced it you can tell someone what it was like but, unless they've also experienced it, what you say won't tell them any more than telling someone who hasn't eaten a strawberry what that's like. And even if another person has experienced the transcendent, what you say about it will never actually capture it.

Whatever you say about it - isn't it.

The only value of anyone telling you about it, whether it's me or Adyashanti, Genpo Roshi or Eckhart Tolle, is to help you have the experience.

So I would encourage trying to "get it" with your mind.

It cannot be done.

Having said that, let's look at how you can more easily have the experience Tolle talks about, and even more, live from that transcendent place.

Tolle's book is about the Now moment, and he does a terrific job of describing what happens when you allow yourself to get into that Now moment and also how the ego pulls you OUT of the Now moment.

The whole idea of getting into the Now moment is one of those things that is so simple that most people figure out a way to make it complicated.

The truth is, and Tolle says this, the only thing that exists is the Now.

The past and the future are ideas, not realities. They exist mentally, but you can't hand me the past or the future, or point to it, or put it in a wheelbarrow. Both past and future are conceptualisations.

Looking for the past or the future is like going to the border between New South Wales and Victoria and trying to find the dotted line you saw on the map. There's nothing there because "border" is just an idea.

So Tolle points out that most of the time we're either in the past, regretting something that's already over, or in the future, hoping for something better or fearing something worse, and in doing so we miss the only thing that's real - Now. 

A lot of people would say, well, so what, what's the big deal about the present moment?

Well, the only way to find out is to experience the Now moment for yourself, and Tolle describes a number of ways to do that - watching your breath, looking at a flower or the ocean or some other exquisite natural phenomenon, watching your thoughts, paying attention to the sensations in your body, and so forth.

All of these will take you into the present moment.

The problem is that our habit of being in the past or the future, rather than the present, our habit of living in our mental world instead of in the real world, is SO extraordinarily strong that most of us can only stay in the present moment for a few seconds.

We do something to bring us into the present moment and within a few seconds our internal commentary about it, our ideas about it, pull us back into the past or the future, or into some other aspect of our mental representations of reality.

Those few seconds in the Now can be pleasant, even peaceful, but to fully experience the real power of Now, and to see how different it is to live from that place, you have to train yourself to be there for much longer periods of time.

This is why those who live in this awakened state almost always have spent years doing some sort of spiritual practice, usually meditation. Spiritual practice gradually quiets the mind, and as that happens, the mind is less likely to pull us out of the Now moment SO quickly.

Before we talk about the value of having a daily practice, let's look at why it's so difficult to stay in the present moment.

The great Alan Watts used to say that society initiates each new member into a game that all of society plays, and it does this as soon as each member is old enough to understand the game. The game is called The Game of Black and White, and the main rule of the game is that "White Must Win".

To play the Game of Black and White, a person first must learn to divide everything in the world into separate things and separate events. And, in fact, people learn to do this so well that once they've learned how to do it they don't even question whether or not it's really true that the world is composed of separate things and events.

This chopping of the world into separate things and events is one of the key ways the ego keeps you from staying in the Now and experiencing who you really are.

Seeing through this illusion makes living in the Now much easier.

Let's look at this idea that the world consists of separate things and events more closely, and then we'll get back to the game of Black and White.

A baby experiences what scientists call a feeling of "oceanic oneness". The baby can't tell where it ends and the rest of the world begins. The world is just one big continuous glob to a baby, completely undifferentiated.

But at some point the baby bites her thumb, and it hurts. She bites her blanket and it doesn't hurt, and the baby begins to make a distinction between "me" and "not me."

The differentiation process has begun.

When the child is old enough to learn to talk, the parents teach her the names of all kinds of things. This gives the child the idea that there's something called a "thing" and that a thing and its name are synonymous. 

Why isn't this accurate? 

As you look around you, you can probably see all kinds of "things," and I'm sure you can think of all kinds of "separate" events you've experienced.

Let's look at why this really isn't an accurate way to see the world - helpful, in many ways, but not at all accurate - and how seeing the world in this way keeps you from being in the Now moment and experiencing the deep peace of knowing who you really are.

In fact, the whole idea of separate things and events, as obvious and common-sensical as it seems to be, is a trick played on us by the ego.

Let’s think of a bee and a flower. The flower is rooted to the ground and the bee buzzes around it. Everyone knows that a bee and a flower are two, separate, individual "things".

But are they? You never see flowers unless there are bees, and you never see bees without flowers. They go together. They need each other.

They're one, interconnected, organic system, what a physicist might call a "unified field."

You can't have bees in isolation, nor can you have flowers in isolation. They exist in relation to each other. In that sense they're really one organism.

Then, of course, you have the dirt the flower is planted in, and the bacteria and worms that live in the dirt and contribute to the nutrients the flower pulls from the ground. That's part of the system, too. So is the air, containing the right mix of gases, that both the flower and the bee need. Of course we also need a planet that's a certain distance from a certain kind of star, with the right temperature, and the right amount of light, the right amount of air pressure, and the right kind of cosmic rays that allow the flower, the bee, the worms, the bacteria, and so on, to exist and thrive.

And, that star needs to be in a certain kind of galaxy, which is part of a system of galaxies, and pretty soon you begin to see that this bee and flower system actually includes everything, that everything is part of the same organic, interconnected system. Dividing the world into separate things and events has its uses, but those divisions are ideas about reality, not the reality itself. In truth, everything is connected to, and dependent upon, everything else.

In fact, just as an aside, I'll also add that in this same sense, the entire universe depends upon you and your existence. Even before you were born the universe depended upon the fact that someday you would be born.

The entire system depends on everything that has gone before and also everything that will happen later.

But that's another discussion for another time.

Thus, that is the first thing you need to understand - it's all one big interconnected system, and every part of it depends upon every other part. Thinking of the world as consisting of separate things is just a way of THINKING about it.

In fact, as Alan Watts used to say, a "thing" is a "think" - a 'unit of thought', as much of reality as you decide to get your mind around in a particular moment.

Again, I'm not against dividing things up. In fact, it can be extremely useful. It's when we forget that all the divisions are actually made-up, though, that we get ourselves into trouble and create suffering for ourselves.

I'll explain how we do that in a moment.

Ultimately, any difficulty you might be having in staying in the present moment can be traced back to the illusion that the world consists of separate things and separate events.

The next thing I want you to understand is that where we make these divisions that we take for granted as being real, rather than being merely mental ideas about the world is entirely arbitrary.

Where a division is made, how things are sliced, is just a matter of social convention. The divisions we think of as being so real are not intrinsic to reality. They are added by the mind, by the ego.

What do I mean by that?

Let's look at an example.

How big is the sun? If you look up in the sky and look at the sun - not for too long, because you don't want to hurt your eyes - if you look up at the sun you'd probably say that the sun consists of the extent of the visible fire, which is so many millions of miles across, or whatever it is. Once you get past the visible fire, you'd get into something that is 'not the sun'. The edge of the visible fire is the boundary between the sun and something else, outer space. But you could also say that the size of the sun consists of the extent of its heat. Doesn't that make sense, too?

If we use that definition, the Earth is actually inside the sun, and the boundary is somewhere else, way out into space, at the point where there's no more heat.

There's still another way to describe how big the sun is.

We could say that the sun consists of the extent of its visible light. Under that definition, the sun extends for as many light years as the number of years it's been shining, and it's becoming larger at a rate of 320 000 km every second.

The point is that all of these definitions of how big the sun is are completely arbitrary, and the one we use is just a matter of social convention. There's no such thing, in isolation, as "the sun" and putting a boundary on it, just as with the bee and the flower, is a way of thinking about it, not an intrinsic characteristic of it. And, in fact, all supposed "things" could be seen in the same way.

Your skin could just as well be seen as what connects you to the rest of the world as what divides you from it.

I hope you can see now that in reality there are no separate things.

So what about separate events?

Let's examine the question of when you began as a way of seeing that the idea of separate events is also just a social convention.

So when did you begin?

Was it when your mother gave birth, at what is called parturition?

Maybe.

Or, you could say that you began at the moment of conception. But perhaps you actually began when you were just a gleam in your father's eye. Or when your parents were born. Or when their parents were born.

In fact, we could keep going back in this way until we get back to 'the idea' of Adam and Eve.

So you can see that when an event begins - or ends - is also arbitrary, because in reality everything is one huge, interconnected, multi - dimensional ongoing event, and all the so-called separate events are actually connected to each other and they all go together, just like the bee and the flower. It might be convenient to chop things up into separate things and events, but nothing is really separate from anything else.

So, that's the first thing you have to really understand.

Everything goes together. Everything is one thing, but our mind, our ego, chops things up into pieces, making it seem as if we live in a world of separate things and events.

And we now know how the ego, the mind, does this is arbitrary.

The supposed reality of separate things and events is hugely reinforced by our use of language.

From a very young age we begin to create a "map of reality", a systematic and abstract way of representing reality inside our mind, and much of that map consists of ideas and concepts as described through language. When you stop to think about it, the whole premise of language is that certain separate things called nouns do something to other nouns.

Each of these "doings" arbitrarily begins and ends at a certain point and is thought of as a separate event -  the key phrase here being "thought of."

The fact that we rely so much on language to make sense of the world, and that our language is all about separate things and events helps us to forget that separate things and events are just a way of thinking about reality, and are really made up.

Again, I'm not against dividing the world into separate things and events. 

However, I’d warn you that when you forget that such divisions are all in your head, you pay a huge price. 

For one thing, the key example of a separate "thing" is the idea that there is a separate you.

Once you buy into that idea and begin to feel separate and isolated, once you begin to see and experience yourself as a separate ego in a bag of skin, a 'meat-suit' we wear, you feel separate from life.

On one hand there's your life, which is always happening Now, and on the other hand there's your idea of your life, your map of who you are.

In confusing the idea for the real thing, you miss the Now, and you miss your life. I think Tolle describes this beautifully.

When you do this, you create suffering for "me."

I hope you can see how this whole idea of separation is a complete and utter fraud.

Sir Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher and scientist, and the creator of the field of study known as General Semantics, once said, "The map is not the territory."

This is another way of saying that our ideas about things, our internal representations about things, our mental conceptualisations about things, are not the same as what they represent. Dividing the world into separate things and events is a way of "mapping reality", but that map is NOT reality.

Thinking that ‘things and events’ are separate is like thinking that those separate ‘things and events’ are the same as dividing those separate ‘things and events’ into two basic piles - this is where the Game of Black and White really gets started in earnest.

Once we've chopped the world into separate things and events, we put some of them into the "appropriate" or "good" pile - which, in terms of the Game of Black and White is the White pile - and we put the others into the "inappropriate" or "bad" or "Black" pile. Then we can bring in the main rule of the game which, as I said, is that White Must Win.

When White - those things and events we think of as appropriate, desirable, or good - "wins," we're at least temporarily happy. But when Black - the things and events in the other pile - seems to win, we feel unhappy & frustrated. If you stop and think about it, most of your life - most of everyone's life - is about trying to get White to win and trying to avoid having Black win.

Now here's the problem with this game: White can never overcome Black, though we play the game as if it must.

Good must overcome evil.

Life must overcome death.

Having must overcome not having.

Happiness must overcome unhappiness.

Health must overcome illness.

What I want must overcome what I don't want.

Pleasure must overcome pain.

You may have already realised that just as the bee and the flower go together, Black and White go together. In other words, "good" is defined in terms of "evil." If there wasn't evil, how would you know what was good?

Good only makes sense in contrast to evil. In the same way, ‘having’ makes no sense except in terms of and in relation to ‘not having’. Life makes no sense except in terms of death.

The same is true of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, health and illness, clarity and confusion, here and not here, light and dark, empty and full and all the other Black and White pairs of opposites.

They are all defined in terms of each other. AND, they all go together.

You cannot have one without the other, any more than you can have a one sided coin. In each case, you wouldn't know that the White side even existed if it weren't for the Black side, in the same way you don't feel your stomach unless it feels bad, or you don't experience your eyes unless there are spots in front of them.

Until the opposite comes into play, everything is invisible, unimaginable. Now it's certainly possible in any given moment to have more of one side of the equation than the other, but you are NEVER going to get rid of the side you don't want.

It is impossible, in the same way you can't have buying without selling or up without down.

Just try and make everything in your house 'up'.

You cannot because up and down go together.

And, as I described earlier, where one side ends and the other begins is totally arbitrary. Where does up end and down begin?

In reality, they are one thing and any division is conceptual, just a thought in our head, NOT real.

In Buddhism, they describe this by saying 'all opposites arise together'.

As I said before, it might be useful in some cases to divide things, but you have to remember that you are making it up, that all divisions are ideas about reality, but NOT reality itself.

So why am I making such a big deal about dividing things up, and especially about this Game of Black and White?

What's wrong with wanting things to be a certain way? Well, nothing, if you do it gently, but most of us don't. The truth is that to be here, to be a human being, you're going to prefer certain things over other things. I prefer my children over yours. I prefer my car over yours, or at least I'm more concerned with it, more attached to it.

To be human is to want certain things. Without desire you wouldn't eat or come in out the cold, or procreate, and the whole human race would come to an end.

But when you play a really hard version of the Game of Black and White, where White MUST Win, you set yourself up for suffering.

Why? Because you've put yourself in a double-bind, an unwinnable situation, where you're trying to get rid of something that cannot be gotten rid of, where you're resisting something that, first of all, is just an idea and secondly, cannot be successfully resisted anyway, since it's part of a larger whole and can't be eliminated without eliminating the whole.

This is - in great part - where the 'pain body' Eckhart Tolle talks about comes from. Several other teachers talk about 'The Shadow'.

The Shadow is another name for the pain body. It really is just another aspect of The Game Of Black and White.

Here's how it works.

The pain body is really the result of playing the Game Of Black and White, accentuated and reinforced by trauma you may have suffered as a result of playing. In order for any past trauma you may have experienced to impact the Now moment, to pull you out of the Now, you have to take your concept of that trauma, your memory of it - including the kinesthetic, the body memory, the associated feelings - and attach it to something happening in the present, or something you will fear will happen in the future.

In fact, what you're usually doing is attaching this memory to something that is happening NOW and then anticipating the possibility of similar trauma and feelings happening in the future, usually the very near future.

If your father yelled at you and then spanked you when you were little, you might have been traumatised by this. If then, in the present, another authority figure, for example your boss, yells at you, you may mentally attach the traumatic memory - including the memory of the physical and emotional pain you felt - to your boss. You drag the past trauma - or rather your idea of it - into the NOW moment and associate it with your boss. When he yells, you feel the same fear you felt as a child.

The Shadow is another way of looking at the same phenomenon. A Shadow aspect of yourself is something you've made wrong - in other words, assigned to the Black Pile on the Game Of Black and White.

As a result, you've repressed or disowned it, in the hope that you can avoid experiencing it.

Any feeling or quality or human characteristic that you have repressed in this way becomes what is called a 'Shadow' part of you. In repressing it, however, in pushing it down into the basement of your consciousness, you don't really succeed in getting rid of it.

Something quite different happens. Rather than avoiding it, it will appear in your life in many covert ways.

Let's say you've made anger 'wrong', which means you resist it in others AND within yourself.

However, like a balloon which when squeezed in one place, pops out in another, the anger will find a way to express itself, in one way or another.

Let's say you made anger wrong because your father's anger created so much pain for you when you were little. Not only that, it wasn't safe for you to show your own anger toward your father.

So, you repress your own anger and you decide to avoid angry people at all costs. After all, they scare you.

Ironically, when you do this, anger becomes a central feature of your life.

You begin to see angry people everywhere.

And not only do you see them, you're strongly (and negatively) affected by them. They really bother you.

In addition to being afraid of them, you're very angry ABOUT them.

Another person, who hasn't experienced the trauma you've suffered, and hasn't disowned his anger, also sees the angry people - they aren't invisible - but he isn't affected by them, he isn't triggered by them, in the same way you are.

For you, though, life seems to be a constant stream of angry people!

How do all the angry people find you?

As Tolle puts it, your pain bodies attract each other.

By disowning your own anger, you attract it in others.

AND, you're powerfully affected by anger when you see it in others.

The second thing that happens when you disown your anger - or any other aspect of yourself - is that you'll express it anyway, in many dysfunctional, covert ways.

Everyone else can plainly see that you have a lot of anger - everyone but you.

You don't acknowledge - or really even realise - that YOU are angry.

For you, it's 'out there', in other people.

Any feeling or quality or other human characteristic that you've repressed in this way becomes what is called a Shadow part of you.

You're against anger, because it's such a ‘bad’ thing. But you do things to other people that are a covert expression of your disowned anger.

Perhaps you're late for things you don't want to do, you fail to do what you say you'll do because you really don't want to do it. Or you express your anger covertly by avoiding responsibility, making excuses, or blaming others. You might be conveniently forgetful. You might complain a lot, use sarcasm, make cutting jokes about others, or be sullen or stubborn. And so on. In one way or another, your disowned anger IS expressed.

This is usually referred to as being 'passive-aggressive'.

Your anger is expressed but not directly. You cannot express it directly because you've disowned it. It is still there though. AND, in addition to being unpleasant for others, you suffer too.

Your own disowned anger eats away at you. And, of course, anger isn't the only thing you could disown and repress.

You could disown fear, or selfishness. You could disown any part your parents or authority figures didn't want you to express including wanting, happiness, joy, sadness, sexuality, aggression, pride, intelligence, the urge to be noticed, neediness or thousands of other human feelings and urges.

Some Shadow aspects are what most people would think of as negative while others are what are considered to be positive.

When you see someone who exhibits something negative that you have disowned, it will trigger you in a negative way.

When you see someone who exhibits something positive that you have disowned, for example, kindness, intelligence, talent, charisma - you'll put them on a pedestal.

In either case, some part of you has been disowned, unacknowledged, and stuffed down into the basement, and it needs to be re-owned.

Until that happens, that Shadow part will continue to pull you out of the

Now and into the ego.

It will keep you playing the Game of Black and White.

Tolle would say that your pain body will pull you out of the Now.

It's the same thing.

Another thing that happens when you re-own a Shadow aspect of yourself is that it matures, it grows up.

Disowned anger could turn into a refusal to allow people to harm others, or the motivation to work for greater justice in the world.

Disowned selfishness could turn into the ability to love yourself unconditionally and in doing so to love others.

Disowned fear could turn into a finely tuned discrimination as to when something is wrong or unsafe and the motivation to take appropriate action.So how do you know when you have a Shadow part that contributes to your pain body and keeps you out of the Now moment?

And how do you re-own it?

More in Part 2.