The Power Of Now - Eckhart Tolle | Summarised Books

The Power Of Now

Your mind is a powerful instrument when used correctly, if not it can destroy you

Most of us are like a beggar who sits on an old box for over thirty years without checking what’s inside. People who don’t open that box to get their true wealth — the glowing happiness of Being and the deep, stable peace that comes along with it — are beggars, even though they might be rich materially. They keep looking outwards for bits of fulfillment or pleasure, for love, for security, for validation, while they have a treasure inside them that contains all those things in abundance.

The word “enlightenment” might make you think about superhuman achievements but it is actually your natural state of being at one, hence at peace. It also means a state of connecting with something that is you, yet bigger than you. Without this connection, you will feel like a lone fragment. Fear starts and conflicts without and within turns to the norm.

Being is the omnipresent life that supersedes many life forms, which can be born and die. In other words, Being is your deepest, true nature that is available to you now. Don’t bother trying to grasp or understand it. You can only feel Being when you are still and present in the now. The word “Being” does not explain anything, neither does God. The only difference between them is that the word “God” has to turn into a closed concept, meanwhile, being is an open concept. You can create a mental image of it and no one can claim to own it.

The endless mental noise in our minds is the main obstacle preventing us from experiencing the realm of inner calmness that leads to Being. The philosopher Descartes thought he had figured out the vital truth when he said: “I think, therefore I am”. That popular phrase caused a major error that insinuates that identity is related to thinking and thinking is related to Being. Almost everyone is a compulsive thinker who lives in a super complex world of constant conflict and problems, which reflects ever-changing mind fragmentation.

Thinking has become a disease — you become deluded that you are your mind. Cooking a meal or solving Sudoku does not mean that you are using your mind. Rather your mind is using you and getting its fangs into problems.

And, your mind will keep using you as long as you haven’t found your “off” button. Once you start watching the thinker, you will awaken and be able to activate a higher level of consciousness. Start by listening to the voice inside your head more often. This will allow you to track monotonous thought patterns that have been in your head for years.

A new dimension of consciousness will set in. This is your sense of own presence, also known as “I am” realization. Then your thoughts will vanish and lose control over you — creating a gap of “no-mind”. Initially, these gaps will be some seconds long but with practice, the gap length will increase and you will become fully present as your sense of peace and stillness deepens.

“All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.”

Therefore, the most crucial step to becoming enlightened is to learn to disidentify from your mind. For your mind is just a tool that should be put away after you have used it to complete a particular task.

Most of human pains are unnecessary and self-created when the unobserved mind rules your life

On an emotional level, the pain that you create now is often a form of negative energy — an unconscious battle to what is. The higher your resistance to the current moment, the more pain you will suffer.

The mind puts up resistance to the Now because it can’t work and maintain control without time i.e. the past and the future. Mind and time are intertwined.

Eventually, time overtakes our lives, causing sorrow, pain, and dysfunction to set in. Almost all humans suffer from this burden — they add to the burden when they ignore precious moment or turn it into a means of reaching some future moment, that only exist in the mind.

If you want to stop causing pain to yourself and others, then quit making more time unless it is necessary to handle the practical areas of your life. Accept that the only time that you have is the present moment. The main focus of your life should be the Now.

Failure to unlock the power of the Now will mean that all the emotional pain that you pass through will leave a residue behind, which lives in you. This residual pain, otherwise called pain-body, is a negative energy field that takes over your mind and body. It might be dormant or active; some pain-bodies are harmless while others are destructive and vicious. Like every other entity, the pain-body is yearning to thrive. It feeds on you and your negative experiences because its survival is based on your unconscious identification with it and your unconscious fear to face the pain inside you.

When the pain-body takes control, you become addicted to pain and either turn into a perpetrator that causes pain or a victim that suffers pain. You will keep relieving pain if you don’t push it into the light of your consciousness and face it.

Once you become the watcher and begin disidentification, the pain-body will still function on its momentum for a while and try to fool you into identifying with it again. Then, it might create temporary physical pains and aches in your body. Stay present and feel its energy if you don’t want it to continue controlling you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking about it — just feel it.

Learning about the mind’s complexity might make you a good psychologist but it won’t take you further than the mind

For so many people, most of their sense of self is closely related to their problems — meaning a big unconscious ego investment in suffering and pain. The mind itself is an amazing tool, not dysfunctional in any way. Dysfunction start when you seek self in it and confuse it with your identity. It engulfs your entire life and become your egoic mind.

How can you disidentify from the mind?

You can achieve this by ending the delusion of time. Since time and mind can’t be separated, you can stop the mind by removing time from the mind. Identifying with your mind means being trapped in time. You feel compelled to live solely through anticipation and memory, which leads to an infinite obsession with past and future, instead of acknowledging and honoring the present moment. The obsession is due to the fact that the past defines your identity and the future entails the promise of fulfillment and salvation in any form.

The Now is what you consider precious, not time itself. And, it is precious because it is the only thing and it is also the only point that can take further than the mind. Therefore, it is your only point of access to the formless and timeless realm of being.

Everything happens in the Now, not in the past or the future because they don’t have their own reality. Just like the moon doesn’t have its own light, it reflects the sunlight. When a past event pops into your mind, you are actually activating a memory trace that is stored in the mind, former Now.

In certain emergency situations, a conscious shift from time to presence takes place naturally. Even though it isn’t obvious, some people enjoy extreme sports like bungee jumping, kayaking, car racing, etc. because it forces them into the Now — an intense presence that is free of thoughts, problems, time, and personality burden. Losing track of the present moment for 1 second might lead to death. Just before you book a bungee jumping session, note that you don’t need anything extreme in order to get to that state.

A 13th-century spiritual teacher, Meister Eckhart sums it up perfectly, “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time”.

Most humans don’t shift between unconsciousness and consciousness but just between various levels of unconsciousness

For some people, they either don’t experience presence at all or experience it briefly and accidentally on rare occasions without knowing what it is.

Just like in sleep, we move between phases of deep unconsciousness and ordinary unconsciousness. According to Eckhart Tolle, “ordinary unconsciousness is our normal state where we identify with our desires, aversions, emotions, and thought processes — kind of background static”. You won’t necessarily experience unhappiness or pain in this state, you will just feel bored or nervous. Most people attempt to fix this with shopping, food, TV, work. But, all they will get is symptom relief for a short time.

On the other hand, deep unconsciousness is a deepened form of ordinary unconsciousness. It is a state of more suffering, unhappiness and/or pain that you reach when things are hard or you encounter big challenges like a loss, conflict or threat to ego. This usually means that the pain-body is awakened and you have identified with it.

If you can’t be present in everyday situations like talking with someone or watching the birds, then you definitely won’t be able to stay present when challenges come calling.

To be free of ordinary unconsciousness, you need to shine the light of consciousness on it. After dissolving that, it will be easier to tackle deep unconsciousness. The key is to observe yourself and monitor your mental-emotional state.

Are you stuck at a job that you hate but you need it to pay the bills? It doesn’t matter if your emotions and thoughts toward the situation are justified. Once you hold anger, resentment or other negative emotions inside you, the present moment will become an enemy. Your unhappiness won’t be limited to only you, it will pollute the people around you too.

Your way out of this mess is to talk with the person concerned and express your feelings, or you can choose to drop useless negativity that keeps creating more unhappiness. How do you drop a lump of hot coal that is in your hand? You start by admitting that you do not want to carry the burden or endure the pain anymore and then let it go. You can drop many patterns in ordinary unconsciousness once you decide that you don’t want them anymore. This will enable you to access the power of Now — the power of your consciousness free from any form of thoughts.

Your mind cannot grasp or think about presence because is all about being present

Presence is not what you can imagine. Being present will allow you to understand presence.

For instance, to test the degree of presence, some Zen masters sneak up on their students and hit them with a stick. A student that is fully present and alert would see the master coming and avoiding the stick. But if the student got hit, it will mean the student was in deep thoughts i.e. unconscious and absent.

If you don’t want your mind to engulf you like smoke, you need to remain present in everyday life in order to stay deeply rooted within yourself i.e. fully inhabit your body. Your total presence is required if you want to fully appreciate and become aware of the sacredness, majesty, and beauty of nature.

Zen masters describe satori as a moment of total presence and no-mind. It often lasts for a short while and might even be gone before you realize its importance. You become more conscious when the time gap between thought and perception gets wider.

Most people just apply mechanical labeling to flowers, they don’t truly see the flowers and feel their holiness and essence, just like they don’t feel their own holiness and essence.

When you become conscious of being, in turn Being becomes conscious of itself and that is the presence of enlightened consciousness. God lives in the timeless realm which is also your home, the end and the beginning are one and the essence of everything in the past and the future is ever-present in an unmanifested state of perfection and oneness. No human mind can understand it.

The body can serve as an access point into the realm of Being that is beyond form and name

Quit trying to comprehend Being because the mind loves squeezing things into a box and slapping a label on it. Feeling and knowing that you are and abiding in the intensely rooted state is known as enlightenment — the truth that Jesus says will free you from the illusion that you are nothing more than your mind and physical body.

And also free from sin, a pain that you unconsciously impose on yourself and others when that illusion keeps governing what you do, say and think.

A word is an abstraction that points to a reality. You can’t study the word “honey” for years but you will only understand it when you taste it, after which the word has no more importance to you. Talking or thinking about God does not mean that you understand the reality of the word. It is no more than a fixated link to a mental idol. If you hate the word “sin”, drop it and use another word that works for you. To understand sin, observe the magnitude of violence, greed, despair, and fear that humans inflict on each other.

Your tangible and visible body is just an outer shell. To start your inward journey and feel the life within your body, you need to inhabit the body and acknowledge that you are more than the outer form. You are not inside your body if your mind is taking up all your attention. In fact, you are cut off from Being. So, awareness of the inner body is consciousness recalling its origin and going back to the source.

In the physical realm, the awareness of the inner body has benefits such as making the outer body age slowly, strengthening the immune system and so on.

Gaining access to the formless realm frees you from identification and bondage to form. Hence, the unmanifested is the unseen sources of things — the realm of intense peace and calmness as well as intense aliveness and joy. The unmanifested is the source of chi, which is the energy field inside our body.

You can access the unmanifested through some portals such as entering a phase of deep dreamless sleep, dissolving psychological time with an intense awareness of the present moment, creating a gap in endless thoughts, letting go of the emotional-mental resistance of what is, paying attention to silence, and not trying to grasp nothing.

True surrender does not mean passively giving up in any situation, nor does it mean failure to take positive actions

Surrender might have a negative meaning to a lot of people but it is actually the wisdom of yielding to, instead of opposing life flow in the Now. It also means accepting the present moment without reservations.

Inner resistance uses emotional negativity and mental judgment to say no to “what is”. It becomes prominent when things go badly i.e. a pain gap develops when there is a difference between what is and the rigid demands of the mind. Meanwhile, those are the moments when you actually have to surrender in order to remove suffering and pain from your mind life.

If your current condition is unpleasant or unsatisfactory, separate out this instant and surrender to what is. Thus, external conditions won’t be able to control your state of consciousness anymore. You are not resisting or reacting.

You can use unpleasant situations to go deeply into the Now and into Being. Note that this is different from giving you and not caring about the issue anymore. Ensure that your surrender is not tainted with hidden resentment and masked resistance.

If your situation doesn’t improve immediately, your acceptance of the Now allows you to overcome it. Intense suffering often forces people into surrendering and finding God. When you become fully present and surrender to what is, the past loses its power. The Now is the key.

Conclusion

In the current occupied world, everyone is in the rat race for fortune and success. The Power of Now has a decent message that all the pressure and rush might be moronic in the end. It is very important to live in the present moment. You don’t necessarily have to choose a particular religion before you become influenced by various spiritual works. Remember that you can remove suffering and pain from your life by observing your mind and not passing judgment on your thoughts.

Try this:
Ask yourself about what is happening inside you at a particular moment in order to find the doorway into Being. Be the watcher of your mind — your emotions, thoughts, and your reaction in certain situations. When you feel ill or tired, meditate to fill your body with consciousness.