The Power of Presence
Steve Donoso | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #63 |(5 ratings)At the age of twenty-nine, Eckhart Tolle was a research scholar, supervisor, and doctoral candidate at Cambridge University in England. He was also, by his own admission, deeply miserable. As he lay in bed one night, gripped by an intense dread and loathing of his own existence, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. In his book The Power of Now, he describes waking the next morning:
I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.
Gone was the miserable self, as well as the research scholar and the doctoral candidate. Tolle now experienced a deep sense of peace. He didn't quite know what had happened to him, didn't have any concepts or words for it. It was only later, after he had read spiritual texts and visited with spiritual teachers, that he understood: He had realized his true nature as "pure consciousness" rather than as an ego-bound, separate self, "ultimately a fiction of the mind."
Later on, people began to approach him with questions about the power of his presence. For the next ten years he worked as a spiritual counselor and teacher with individuals and small groups in Europe and North America.
Tolle described the role of spiritual teacher as "an open window through which a breeze is blowing." It is easy to confuse "the breeze," he said, "with the window through which the breeze is blowing," that is, the physical form of a particular person.
When he greeted me in his room for this interview, I was struck by his quiet and unassuming nature as well as his impish and contagious sense of humor.
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DONOSO: We often try to escape from our daily lives: work that is unfulfilling, relationships that aren't going the way we would like, family situations that become difficult. What is the origin of this desire to escape?
TOLLE: Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever "I make it." Our striving toward the future, our inner compulsion to deny the present moment, manifests itself as a continuous sense of unease and latent dissatisfaction with what is. This seems to be the "normal" state of our civilization.
The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now.
DONOSO: But aren't our potential future experiences and past experiences central to our lives?
TOLLE: We never experience the future or the past. We experience only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can only unfold Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.
DONOSO: What keeps us living in either the past or the future?
TOLLE: We live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image-making--a world of thought. And that becomes our dwelling place. It is a world characterized by the inability ever to stop thinking. The mental noise is a continuous stream. Psychologists have found that ninety-five percent or more of it is totally repetitive. Perhaps ten percent of those thought processes, at most, are actually needed to deal with life. Thought can sometimes be very useful [laughter], but in our world it has become obsessive-compulsive, almost like an addiction. People's sense of identity, of self, gets bound up with their mental concepts and mental images of "I" and "me."
DONOSO: When does this begin?
TOLLE: It begins when your parents tell you what your name is. That's the first label you absorb: The mind says, "Oh, that's me," and you repeat your name. Subsequently, that name becomes like a basket in which further life experiences are collected: things that happen to you, things that people tell you about who you are. Some parents tell their children, "You're not good enough; you're stupid; you can't do anything right." Other parents say different things. But there is always conditioning that is absorbed. These things are then collected and become the contents of your mind. As you grow up, a story grows out of them, a story consisting of judgments and concepts and belief systems. In other words, the self is a story line that develops in the head, very much like a fictitious creation. Yet it forms the basis of most people's sense of who they are, and that sense, of course, is reinforced by the surrounding world.
This conceptual sense of self is also often threatened by other people, so it is always very uneasy and defensive and constantly needs to replenish and enhance itself. There is always the need for more of "me" to add to who I am. I need to add relationship; I need to add knowledge; I need to add material possessions; I need to add status. If people's opinions of me are good, if they think highly of me, then I will have status in society, and that can become the basis of my identity. If they think badly of me, if I have no status, that, too, can serve as the basis for my identity-- an identity that says, "I haven't made it. I'm not good enough," and is characterized by a continuous feeling of insufficiency, lack, fear. Either way, the story of "me" is not complete. Even those who in the eyes of the world have "made it" feel they haven't arrived, that their story is incomplete, that so far it hasn't gone the way it was supposed to go.
DONOSO: You speak of a new state of consciousness arising, a shift in global awareness. Why is it arising now?
TOLLE: I see a shift in consciousness happening for the first time in more than just a few individuals here and there. It is a shift that ancient teachers, such as the Buddha and Jesus, pointed to--a possibility of living in a different state of consciousness.
The mind is only a tiny aspect of this greater intelligence, which is the same intelligence that created the galaxies and the world of nature. And that is what is arising now.
It's happening in our time on a global scale because human madness is threatening to destroy the planet. If the shift in consciousness doesn't happen very soon, then there's not much chance that the planet will continue to survive. Or perhaps the planet might make it, but humans won't. The planet may regenerate itself after a few hundred years, but humans will have disappeared.
DONOSO: The stakes have been raised.
TOLLE: Yes, and something is arising because there is a great intelligence at work that goes far beyond the human mind. It is the vast intelligence found in every organ of the body, in the DNA of every cell. It is the intelligence that runs and coordinates all the functions of the human body. Obviously, the conscious mind hasn't the capability to do that. Put all the world's computers together, and they couldn't run the functions of the body for more than a second. So there is a greater intelligence in human beings than can be contained in the human mind. The mind is only a tiny aspect of this greater intelligence, which is the same intelligence that created the galaxies and the world of nature. And that is what is arising now.
DONOSO: How does it arise in us?
TOLLE: It arises at first as the ability to watch the workings of one's mind. Then comes the choice not to identify with those mental structures. More and more, you realize that you are not your thoughts, because they come and go. They're all conditioned; they're all just the contents of your mind. Instead of deriving a sense of self from those contents, you realize that you can simply observe the contents. A deeper sense of self arises then. That is the aware presence, and it feels very spacious and peaceful, no matter what happens in your mind. You no longer identify with your mind, which is just conditioned thoughts, and instead identify with the observing presence, which can see the conditioned thoughts and emotions in continuous flux. When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth.
DONOSO: It seems easier to be in the state that you describe when I am in nature.
TOLLE: Yes, because nature doesn't stimulate the mind in the same way. Although many people can be in nature and still be full of mental concepts and noise, occasionally even people who are immersed in mental noise have moments in nature when the noise subsides, and suddenly they are alert and present. Then they get to watch and see and sense the aliveness all around them: the sacredness, the beauty, the harmony that holds everything together. It is wonderful to walk in nature with a mind that has become quiet--or, rather, with no-mind, but simply in a state of alert presence. Nature can be a great help there.
DONOSO: What does one need to do to become free?
TOLLE: Attention is an essential word here. Keep in mind that the words I use are signposts pointing to a state of consciousness that is nonconceptual; in effect, I am using concepts to describe nonconceptual reality. Sometimes I use the words spaciousness or spacious presence. The word attention is very helpful. The state of not being identified with thought is one of heightened alertness. Attention is the essence of Zen, a state of alertness in which there is no tension. It is a relaxed alertness, as if you were listening, though there is nothing to listen to. In this state, thought actually subsides; it stops.
Some people have attained this state of heightened awareness in dangerous situations, where they can't afford the luxury of thinking, because thought would be too slow. So the mind stops, and something else takes over: a state of relaxed alertness; a very peaceful, present state. People who have survived emergency situations say the shift happened just before the accident; something within them changed, and there was suddenly incredible serenity and peace and rightness. There was no fear anymore, and they knew that all was well. Beyond thought, they knew it. There are many, many such accounts. In some cases, those people took the right action at that moment, unpremeditated, not arrived at through thought.
DONOSO: Isn't the mind involved in creation?
TOLLE: Creativity doesn't come from the human mind. The human mind may give it form, but the deep inspiration for it--the essence of it--always comes out of that state of alert presence: not the mind, not thought. Subsequently, perhaps, thought comes in, more so in certain activities: writing, for example. But even the writer listens and waits for it to come.
Humans now need to go beyond just having limited access to that state of consciousness. We need to undergo a "psychological transformation," as Krishnamurti calls it. The shift will occur when humans begin to habitually live in that state of consciousness. If this happens, mankind will survive. If it doesn't happen, it's unlikely that mankind will make it. So let's see what happens. But a very important factor in whether or not mankind will make it is you--the individual.
STEVE DONOSO is a freelance human being living, loving, working, writing, and occasionally painting in Mid-coast Maine. His work has appeared in The Sun and Parabola. He can be reached at stevedonoso@ yahoo.com
