If I were allotted only one book, I would choose Eckhart Tolle's THE POWER OF NOW: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Because this book emanates a spirit of love, not only through its words, but in the spaces between the words. No book has touched me, nor embraced me as this one has. Perhaps it was its rhythm - the moving back and forth from simple to complex, from question to answer, from form to spirit, from dysfunction to divinity - which I found so comforting. Perhaps it was the author's authenticity as he spoke the unspeakable - of homosexuality, menses, patriarchy, and rape - which opened my consciousness.
This book is for all of us sleepwalking travelers in time - philosophers or kings, young women or terminally ill, gays or feminists, religiously inclined or scientifically motivated - who are willing to take the pilgrimage to wakefulness, from worry to peace, from unhappiness to joy. Tolle provokes us through an uneasy questioning that rocks us back and forth, between discomfort and solace, as he pokes at our handed-down unexamined beliefs then soothes with an offering of truth.
Eckhart begins by introducing us to his story - a story of early despair. For a moment, we are touched by compassion as we release from our belief in separation and connect in our shared mortality. In chapter one we learn of enlightenment and its greatest obstacle - us. Next Tolle awakens us to our role as the creator of our pain, of our attachment to pain, and our identification with pain. In the third chapter we find we can create a pain-free identity by living in the present. Tolle flips us back and forth 'time and time again' between the past and the future, between pain and pleasure, between unhappiness and happiness. As we experience the futility of duality and the emptiness of living in the past or future we access the fullness of living in the Power of Now.
In chapter four we plummet from the fantasy of living consciously in the Now to the reality of being lost in unconscious living. Eckhart then raises us in the next chapter to the glory of "waiting," to the sacredness of stillness, to the purity of consciousness, and finally - to the reality of our divinity.
In chapter six we shift from the mind to the inner body only to discover that all feeling and emotion are produced from thought. When we understand we are greater than thought, we are free - we are free to access our self behind the thought. We are the unmanifest and when we tap into our source we may consciously create our own destiny.
Chapter seven provides portals to the unmanifest which lay in space and silence, both within and without, in chi, and even in conscious death.
A complex portal to consciousness is presented in chapter eight - relationships. We are guided and supported in our passage from unconscious romantic love to the wonder of a conscious love where opposites do not reside. In chapter nine we learn to 'give up' negativity, judgment, drama and our belief in impermanence. As we learn to forgive the past, the present, and ourselves, fear evaporates and a new reality crystallizes - a reality founded on love.
Our compassion transforms. Our belief of a shared mortality becomes a knowing of shared divinity. In the final chapter, chapter ten, we finally 'let go' of our attachment to pain and we surrender to what is - our pure radiance - as we 'take up' the Power of Now. -- Patricia Gordon, M.A. Calgary, Alberta
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If I were allotted only one book, I would choose Eckhart Tolle's THE POWER OF NOW: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Because this book emanates a spirit of love, not only through its words, but in the spaces between the words. No book has touched me, nor embraced me as this one has. Perhaps it was its rhythm - the moving back and forth from simple to complex, from question to answer, from form to spirit, from dysfunction to divinity - which I found so comforting. Perhaps it was the author's authenticity as he spoke the unspeakable - of homosexuality, menses, patriarchy, and rape - which opened my consciousness.
This book is for all of us sleepwalking travelers in time - philosophers or kings, young women or terminally ill, gays or feminists, religiously inclined or scientifically motivated - who are willing to take the pilgrimage to wakefulness, from worry to peace, from unhappiness to joy. Tolle provokes us through an uneasy questioning that rocks us back and forth, between discomfort and solace, as he pokes at our handed-down unexamined beliefs then soothes with an offering of truth.
Eckhart begins by introducing us to his story - a story of early despair. For a moment, we are touched by compassion as we release from our belief in separation and connect in our shared mortality. In chapter one we learn of enlightenment and its greatest obstacle - us. Next Tolle awakens us to our role as the creator of our pain, of our attachment to pain, and our identification with pain. In the third chapter we find we can create a pain-free identity by living in the present. Tolle flips us back and forth 'time and time again' between the past and the future, between pain and pleasure, between unhappiness and happiness. As we experience the futility of duality and the emptiness of living in the past or future we access the fullness of living in the Power of Now.
In chapter four we plummet from the fantasy of living consciously in the Now to the reality of being lost in unconscious living. Eckhart then raises us in the next chapter to the glory of "waiting," to the sacredness of stillness, to the purity of consciousness, and finally - to the reality of our divinity.
In chapter six we shift from the mind to the inner body only to discover that all feeling and emotion are produced from thought. When we understand we are greater than thought, we are free - we are free to access our self behind the thought. We are the unmanifest and when we tap into our source we may consciously create our own destiny.
Chapter seven provides portals to the unmanifest which lay in space and silence, both within and without, in chi, and even in conscious death.
A complex portal to consciousness is presented in chapter eight - relationships. We are guided and supported in our passage from unconscious romantic love to the wonder of a conscious love where opposites do not reside. In chapter nine we learn to 'give up' negativity, judgment, drama and our belief in impermanence. As we learn to forgive the past, the present, and ourselves, fear evaporates and a new reality crystallizes - a reality founded on love.
Our compassion transforms. Our belief of a shared mortality becomes a knowing of shared divinity. In the final chapter, chapter ten, we finally 'let go' of our attachment to pain and we surrender to what is - our pure radiance - as we 'take up' the Power of Now. -- Patricia Gordon, M.A. Calgary, Alberta
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