Sam, you express so clearly what Eckhart Tolle teaches!
Yes, I prefer Eckhart Tolle’s materials over the older, ‘traditional’ writings by yoga and meditation teachers from the past. He gets to the core of the timeless ‘now’.
From what I recall from his book, The Power of Now, he had his own breakthrough experience of a higher state of consciousness before he started any spiritual teaching and lectures to help the rest of us. His breakthrough happened quite spontaneously. He was quite unhappy and desperate before it happened, I seem to recall.
Tolle is, therefore, someone who has already ‘been there’ and is now teaching others to “get there” too – or at least teaching what it is like in that state, how to get a glimpse of the transcendent ‘now’. And that is always a tricky challenge because one can only truly know and live a higher state of consciousness if one is in fact already in that state. And that is the rub: we hear about what the state is like from someone who is in that state, or close to it, or who has had a brief experience of it, and we want it for ourselves too. But, as Tolle says, it isn’t somewhere in the future, it is in the ‘now; in the gap between thoughts.
I agree with you Sam, Tolle is not saying meditation is not necessary. I believe he is trying to give others a glimpse of what he is talking about, and his tools are intended to help us bring our awareness out of the past (mind memories, regrets, etc.) and out of the future (hopes, anxieties, etc.) to the eternal present, the only true reality that is not a fabrication of the mind.
As I see it, a technique like NSR takes one daily to, or at the least towards, the ‘now’, and through the dissolving of whatever it is that blocks our full experience of the timeless field, bit by bit we get closer to living that field as a permanent state of consciousness – what Maharishi calls Cosmic Consciousness, where the transcendent awareness is maintained along with the other three states: waking, dreaming and deep sleep.
But we will constantly be unhappy if the goal of our practice (Cosmic Consciousness, enlightenment, whatever) is the prominent focus of our attention. As Tolle says, we will miss the fullest possible experience of life in the present moment, where it is being lived.
If anyone is interested in hearing Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey has his latest book, A New Earth, as her featured book of the month and she is hosting an online teaching series with Eckhart Tolle from her website. They are working through the book, chapter by chapter, and each session is over an hour long. You can download the MP3 or video sessions from her website, and people can phone in with their questions. They’ve just finished Chapter 7, and you can download each week’s sessions (free) from this Web page:
http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/webcast/archive/archive_download.jsp The live sessions are held every Monday.
Gavin, long-term TM meditator
Cape Town