The Power of Now
I read the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This is the first meditation, spirituality book I’ve read in this phase of my life journey; exploration and going deeper into myself, on this journey of self improvement and growth. It was recommended several times and came up a handful of times in my research on where to start. I decided to start with this book and then move on to The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, book report coming soon. I’d like to write these synopses (book reports) for each one, in an effort to further encapsulate the learnings into my mind as I often tend to forget and have a faulty memory where I read the same things over and over 🙃.
TL;DR
This book has many nuggets of wisdom and passages that soothed my soul. Yet, even still, it was very difficult to read and took me quite a while to get through. For me, it was not an easy read. The concepts escalated quickly into philosophical territory that drove my mind into the clouds and I found myself re-reading parts of the book over and over again. I remember this happening decades ago, when I was a teenager, and trying to get into similar concepts in books like these. In a sense, it just went above my head. I was not able to connect to the concepts. I think at that point, I did not have enough life experience, enough perspective and distance to be able to grasp the concepts fully. This time, it did feel like I was there… even if at times it felt like I was slogging through dense fog of wordiness. I was also surprised at the not so infrequent mentions of Christianity and Biblical references, I believe it was Tolle’s way to relate Buddhist principles to his western audience. As I am not well versed in either, those attempts left me lost and confused at times. All in all, the effort and investment I made to work through this book and truly process the messages was worth it.
In a nutshell, the book centers around the concept of our ability to remain in the present moment. The power of the Now, is the power of our own conscious presence. The ability for us to become the observers of our mind, of our pain. This essentially requires us to free ourselves from our own minds, to stop living in the past or the future. Whenever we think about the past or anticipate the future, we are not living in the present. The mind is just a tool we have to use when needed, however it tries to do all it can to hold us captive. It feeds off of our pain, our time traveling thoughts. We cannot look to anyone else or seek escape in order to be free. As my favorite Bob Marley lyric says “free ourselves from mental slavery, no one but ourselves can free our mind”.
Notes
Sharing my notes below on what I found the most surprising, useful, and insightful as I was reading.
You have it already. You just can’t feel it because your mind is making too much noise.
We are peaceful beings deep down in our essence, if we allow ourselves to tap into and connect with it. Train your mind to default to peace, it’s already in you.
It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization “I am” that is prior to “I am this” or “I am that”. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
The ability to connect with our inner essence is closer than we think. We are, we just simply are, we exist… that comes first and foremost, before any associations or attachments to this world such as our identities, circumstances, etc.
You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
Our mind is not us, it does not make us who we are. Our mind is a tool, a resource at our possession that we should use when needed and put away when not.
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
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What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain… All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
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If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
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Make it a habit to ask yourself: What’s going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don’t analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
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There can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn’t an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there on the other side of the clouds.
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Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
This seems ideal in theory, but I’m still left at a loss as to how to actually go about achieving this.
What, at this moment, is lacking? A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind. It is designed to take your attention deeply into the Now… Your life situation may be full of problems — most life situations are — but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?
Do I have a problem NOW (at this moment)? Exclude past and future.
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
Forgiveness means letting go of your grief, it’s to not resist life — to allow life to live through you.
The only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now.
Change has to happen in the NOW, including letting go of the past.
Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.
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Identification with the mind gives it more energy; observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.
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There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.
This resonated with me for my life currently in the phase and stage I’m in. I do wonder how this works in other circumstances however, for example slaves aren’t free but they may be liberated in the future… is freedom from their problems not in the future? Or would it still just be a state of being in the present?
Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don’t seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don’t demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don’t live up to your expectations.
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Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their “here” is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
This is a key area for me to work on. I tend to fall into the trap of always thinking about where I’d rather be or where I’ll be going next, wherever I find myself… even if I just arrived there. I don’t accept or move on to being in the present totally, I struggle with committing and not revisiting or questioning constantly. I would like to work towards being able to choose an option, letting things rest, appreciating and living in the moment after I’ve made a choice.
Or is there something that you “should” be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: “You should be working. You are wasting time.” Observe the mind. Smile at it.
Good reminder for my lazy moments, of which there are many 😏. Over the years, I’ve found this to be true. The more I fight the laziness in those moments and give myself guilt trips, the more I suffer and the more daunting the situation becomes. It’s counter-productive.
You are no longer a disconnected fragment in an uncaring universe, or so it seems. Your world now has a center: the loved one. The fact that the center is outside you and that, therefore, you still have an externally derived sense of self does not seem to matter at first. What matters is that the underlying feelings of incompleteness, of fear, lack, and unfulfillment so characteristic of the egoic state are no longer there — or are they? Have they dissolved, or do they continue to exist underneath the happy surface reality? …You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego’s substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.
Love when we are identified with our mind isn’t pure. It isn’t free, it carries an agenda. We cannot escape from ourselves (our ego) and find respite in another person. That yearning is an indicator to look deeper into ourselves. When we are truly able to accept someone for who they are, that is true love. If we can never accept what is, by implication we will not be able to accept anybody the way they are.
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence.
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Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their — usually unsuccessful — search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
My eternal quest for something I will never find
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
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You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms and circumstances, but you won’t be identified with them. You do not need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life — only your life situation.
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Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.
