Secular Prophet - Eckhart Tolle

I am not certain what to make of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

I question anything especially if it is endorsed by a successful business person and marketing expert like Oprah.

I found the writing in the first part of the book brilliant if not pure genius. Is this “new age” philosophy a clever distillation of ancient eastern philosophies and religions?

For one who has tried to understand Buddhism, I have to agree with the critique below that this is a “re-working and synthesis of traditions” that makes for me, a greater understanding of the subject. I do not know if you have ever tried to understand Buddhism.  Understood it or walked away. I do not know if anything else he is talking about will touch you.

Tolle’s words and writings and ideas are from a “feel” part of ourselves that is beyond words, writing and ideas. He has definitely tapped into that part of me. It is hard to describe why I am reacting this way to his writings in the first chapters of “The Power of Now”.

There is an energy in this work, a hidden energy of the mind – and perhaps too of the soul.

In all fairness to what I have read so far, I have slowed down half way through the book when Tolle puts Jesus under a prism of understanding or perception using his unique way of seeing things. A different perspective of Jesus and the concept of “Now” compared to certain lines of the gospels is interesting. I will comment further in the future if his Jesus measures up to my Cultural Christian view of the Man Jesus.

I do recommend the first part of the book. Too much to explain here in one simple blog. Perhaps ET is just another clever new age hack. Perhaps he is opening a door to understanding that the human race have been trying to fully open for thousands of years.

In the You Tube piece below, the first time around may sound like a lot of mumble jumbo even after having read what he is talking about. I better channeled into Tolle's reading and his ideas on the second view.

Perhaps you can do some Doctor Andrew Weil breathing exercises in between listens as I have done to get into the proper and new sense of the Now.

It makes me think that Jesus may not have communicated well to the average person in the street on the first round of parables to a crowd. Those in the first crowd that came back a second or a third time were perhaps the people he chose as apostles especially when he saw the light of understanding in their eyes.





Eckhart Tolle

Some critics characterize Tolle's books as unoriginal, or even derivative. A 2009 New York Times article said he is "hardly the first writer to tap into the American longing for meaning and success". Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly said Tolle's writings have been successful due to surging public interest in books that tell you "how to be happier, how to live the life you want, how to be at peace, how to be a more successful human". In an article in The Observer, James Robinson called Tolle's writings "a mix of pseudo-science, New Age philosophy, and teaching borrowed from established religions".


Others praise his re-working and synthesis of traditions: Professor and author William Bloom wrote that "Tolle is offering a very contemporary synthesis of Eastern spiritual teaching, which is normally so clothed in arcane language that it is incomprehensible" thereby providing "a valuable perspective on Western culture". Publisher Judith Kendra says, "The ideas [that Tolle is] talking about have been in existence for thousands of years in both Eastern texts and with the great Western mystics, but he's able to make them understandable".

Ayn Rand's Pagan Religion

Most people in a secular society give lip service to altruism. It, as phrased by Any Rand, is the basis of the current moral standards in the west that fall short of her Objectivism which states that individual selfishness is the right approach to reality.

As in some cases, a visual is more informative.   A picture is worth a thousand words.

Viewing some ancient Ayn Rand interviews on YouTube, I felt that this pagan high priestess of the New American Fascism Free Market Capitalist philosophy does not see the forest for the need to piss on the tree right in front of you.

I can see that the so-called altruism of Christianity has not been fulfilled fully over the centuries. Some progress on a regular basis on the evolutionary scale and toward a better humanity is the implied overall message, reality, of Christianity.

Ayn Rand’s anti-human atheism is being touted more than ever before as America is trying to get its fix on its place in the brave new global reality.

If Fascism is the best way to go mixed with Fox New Fear and Lies agitprop rumors, then chaos is not only here temporarily but the eye of the storm moves back to the permanent violence and chaos of nature - a dark age.

That building a better world and being able to share it is the make or break moment of any civilization and more so now in the evolution of our species at this point in time in global history.

Look at the ash tray above.

Individual pleasure and selfishness says to smoke. Burdening your lung cancer treatment bills on insurance companies or the Government is the real end result of this false fucked up Tea Party philosophy. Total individual independence in the middle of your own forest is a myth long gone from the reality of the American landscape. I doubt that any of these arm chair fascist philosphers espousing Ayn Rand and her wanna be new American State Religion are really going to do the lung cancer treatment thing out of their own pocket.

That is the basic flaw of Ayn Rand – time marches on and a static philosophy must change or adapt to present situations. If you are locked into a never changing religion/philosophy/dogma of selfishness, you are already the ash (the dead past) at the bottom of the ashtray in terms of not trying to any make meaningful contributions to the present and continued future interdependence of humanity.

The filled ashtray of history to date is Objectivism, sad to say. No brave new light to the future there.

I – My – U, Looking for a new definition of God in a Modern Age

Had a minor epiphany of sorts yesterday whereby a lot of things fell into a new place.

Above, I have written a descriptive using three words including a texting word “U”. I will explain shortly.

I am going back to my quest for a new definition of God in this modern age. I am dusting off something from Junior year in high school and the Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. Indeed the picture of him in my religion textbook reminded me of Walt Whitman with the long beard and hat. Buber's I and Thou (Ich und Du) was publish in 1923. A similar idea, Freud’s The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es lit. "The I and the It”) was published the same year.

I for many years had merged a lot of the idea of I-it with the word Id and would often describe my job as a back office computer paper pusher as basically having an Id relationship with my PC. I also mixed in the concept of Zen in terms of getting a feel or a pleasure from the flow of the daily grind of that work. I am on a tangent here. Back to Buber.

Refreshing the high points of I-it and I-thou separates the reality of “I” from its surroundings or empirical from the analysis of the surroundings or abstract. You therefore have life broken down philosophically into the everyday real and everyday potential for the abstract.

I and Thou

What does it mean when a person experiences the world? Man goes around the world hauling out knowledge from the world. These experiences present man with only words of It, He, She and It with contrast to I-Thou. What this means is that the experiences are all physical and do involve a great deal of spirituality. Previously I mentioned that the world is twofold. What this means is that our experience of the world has two aspects: the aspect of experience, which is perceived by I-It, and the aspect of relation, which is perceived by I-Thou.

There is the I-thou into which the perception or concept or analysis and category regarding the concept of God falls.

Freud’s secular analysis of the world is one thing. Buber’s aspiration toward the divine is less known to the general world.

Thinking about this I-it and I-thou thing, I am adding a bridge word “my”. I say bridge word because the I-it and I-thou was a great concept in 1923 but it is almost a century later and I do not see much I-it or I-thou thinking in religious writing and theology or everyday religion practice. All I hear is the I-it when people pound their fist on the good book (It) in the pulpit. I do not feel much I-thou coming through there to comfort me.

Getting back to my bridge word “My”, I use it to describe intentional focus or attention to the empirical or the abstract. In other words, it the “my” focusing or touching the everyday world or by focusing on the meaning of it all – abstract – that places me in the universe in connection by a bridge from “I” to “It” or from “I” to “Thou”.

I – My – Thou. “Thou” is such an archaic word. I translate it modern into “U”.

Taking the idea one level above the empirical and into the spiritual, thou not necessarily divine, I am adding something of a holistic approach by combining all as I-My-U.

If I go a little further with the Quaker Idea of the spark of the divine in all living creatures, man in particular, then something merges here, has an energy of its own, that I recognized as such when I saw it happening. I thought of the four Hebrew letters or symbols that make up the sacred name of God. I have “Imyu” as a potential new name for God and everything (the universe).

Going back to the individual spark within every human being concept, perhaps if God in a Deist concept is a distant Creator, perhaps we each have the potential of being a surrogate of that distant Deist God in everyday life.

Adding more concept and or poetic license with Saint Paul's “looking into a mirror darkly”, perhaps, just perhaps, on occasion, you and I can look into the mirror of our souls and on a subconscious, if not conscious level, look into the mirror and see, quite briefly, God, in some abstract and or miraculous manner. In which case, the possible name of God “Imyu” becomes “Im- yu”.

I’m You.

Think about it.