I found Eckhart Tolle simplistic, ignoring scientific evidence, presenting a home-cooked version of human behaviour and his approach to life and what it means, couched in contradictory language. But this is what I expect from pseudo-evangelists who have developed a certain point of view and are now blind to any evidence that might contradict that view. I am amused by what he has to say, not that he is convincing me of the validity of his arguments, or that he is presenting a revelation.

The Power of Now appears to be popular, and it may be popular with people who have not read widely on human psychology, human physiology, makeup of our social fabric, formative religions, law, politics, ethics, and the sciences. To the ignorant, Eckhart’s ideas could have value – in a simplistic way, because in people’s busy lives, they can only afford the time to delve into the simplistic, something that will reinforce their own personal and ignorant beliefs. That is how all evangelists and faith healers operate.

I cannot help but shake my head that people will believe what Eckhart is saying. I find his philosophy – and I am being generous here – naïve and unrealistic. But like I said, it is a product of someone who is himself simple and naïve. Certainly, we spend a lot of our time with personal regrets and with ‘if only I did…’, and these things are negative and destructive. That is a far cry from saying we must forget our past and future and live only in the present.

Detailed observations:

You are not your mind

Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still.

The above is a contradiction. On one hand, Eckhart states that Being is some external consciousness, beyond understanding. Yet here he is, defining what it is.

The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God…It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence…

He is correct saying that Being explains nothing. But Eckhart goes on to define it again as ‘your very essence’.

Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.

Eckhart is suggesting man should not think, but simply drift with life, accepting events as they happen. This is not enlightenment, but denial! It is man’s ability to think, to reason, evaluate his condition, learn from past events, individual experiences, grasp an idea and develop it, imagine a future and plan for it; these define the thinking man, an ability that has brought him out of the cave to the Moon, daring to reach for the stars.

Buddha may have spent his life sitting in a lotus position, but he was a lonely individual who shunned human companionship and human interaction. If he achieved nirvana, he is alone in his heaven. It is our individuality, the ‘self’ that defines what we are. Giving in to some omnipresent consciousness is to deny your existence, your past, your future, your humanity, your obligations, the drive to create, to care for something or someone.

…it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease.

The above is so totally untrue! The mind is the mechanism that stores our memories: our past, present and possible future images. Eckhart ignores the very real subconscious self, proven by much research into psychology and psychiatry. The conscious ‘self’, the mind, is what you use to overcome and control base desires. This cannot be a disease. To me, Eckhart does not appear to have knowledge of these sciences, or ignores the evidence. It is disturbing that he suggests because there is no ‘off’ button for our mind, it is somehow in control of us. He is ignoring basic human physiology. Of course we all think all the time, hear ‘voices’. Our mind is working all the time, flashing before us images, scraps of conversation, regrets, hopes, and fears. That is the mechanisms the mind employs to order the information we have, to compartmentalize it. Suggesting that we shut this out is to ignore life.

Meditation is but a tool used to order the seemingly rambling images the mind presents, it is not denial of ‘self’. It is a discipline one can use to achieve stability, but to suggest it is a means to focus only and always on the ‘now’, and to maintain that focus, is false.

I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless…

What evidence – from scientific studies, verified/repeatable experiments does Eckhart arrive at the 80 or 90 percent? Evolution has invested a lot of time and capital creating our physical brains to the size it is today. Every part has a function, and it functions all the time. Example is the REM sleep. It is incorrect to compare it to a mere tool to be used for a task and then discarded. Man is not wholly a programmed machine.

The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.

The term ego means only one scientifically defined thing. For Eckhart to define it as ‘false self’ is inaccurate, and he ignores scientific learning. It is ridiculous to claim that the ego only thinks of the past and the future, not the now. The ego is part of man’s psychological makeup, and therefore is in constant participation with the conscious self in whatever timeframe one thinks.

Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.

It is the ongoing process of constantly gathering information from your senses that maintains consciousness, and the brain will always work to interpret the information from the senses, hence thought is there always. Eckhart’s statement is without meaning.

It wasn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each?

Eckhart’s statement confirms to me that he has not studied biology, cell reproduction, or how the DNA is sequenced, the structure of chromosomes and what genes do. Like many home-made thinkers, he dismisses this as caused by a higher guiding consciousness, a God, because doing the necessary research to find how things work for is too much hard work!

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind.

The above statement is blatantly false. All emotion and feelings are reactions by the mind to external stimuli. The body merely reflect that reaction through a physiological response, like sweating, flushing, breathing faster, etc. A person cannot feel emotions purely on the physical level; it is the mind that generates a response in the body.

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.

Does Eckhart really believe this? How can he suggest that anger, as one example, is part of a single primordial emotion? Or love? Each is a distinct reaction to an external stimuli caused in the present, or a reaction from a memory of a past event. To suddenly say that things like love, joy and peace are what he calls Being, are reactions of some heavenly order, and are not emotions at all, is again denying human physiology. He talks of ‘true love’ and ‘true joy’, as though he has the key to what these mean. What then is ‘ordinary’ love and joy?

He is suggesting that man’s basic drivers – satisfy hunger, find shelter, protect one’s life – are negative elements that prevent a person from attaining enlightenment, a constant state of the ‘present’. That will work okay if I am in a comfortable room with a drip in my arm that is feeding me! It will not work for an ordinary person who has a family to support, pay that mortgage, keep his job, come to terms with modern life’s pressures.

Consciousness: The way out of Pain

Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening.

The mind does not resist the Now! To live, the mind must accept external stimuli all the time in order to properly react to events and information external senses provide. Time is a physical event through which everything moves, we have no control over it. To the mind, past, now, and future are all elements it must deal with all the time. It is ridiculous to think that the mind maintains some control only in the past or future.

Eckhart is confusing physiological pain – a body’s reaction to a physical threat – with ‘regret’, or ‘what if only’ thinking. That is destructive, yes. The present moment is not what we ever have! Everything that makes us up in the ‘now’ has been generated from our past memories and everything we have learned. To deny our past is to live like a vegetable, accepting and reacting only immediate stimuli. We cannot always say ‘yes’ to the present moment, as making a choice depends not only on the initial stimulus, but is controlled by our past experiences. Saying ‘yes’ to the present means being prepared to take wrongful action, and making a choice of right and wrong, of ethics, human values, behavioral laws, is gained only from our past.

His arguments about the ‘pain-body’ are in my view pure fantasy. Eckhart is again ignoring basic human behavior to external stimulus, human psychology, suggesting that only what the inner self in the ‘Now’ is thinking is relevant.

Don’t think about it — don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyze. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.

It is only by thinking, analyzing, judging, about current and past events that man can control himself and his future, and orient his behavior in the social context.

The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger.

Ah, this is so wrong! A person may be in a cell and is in no immediate physical danger, but he may have fear, because he is in solitary confinement! There are lots more examples to demonstrate the fallacy of his statement.

The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.

All these things are you! But they are not only your ego, they are part of your conscious self, part of you as a person, formed through life’s experiences, social and environmental factors.

Moving deeply into the Now

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

They are definitely not illusions! You are you because of your past…and the future you hope to make for yourself. The future gives us our hopes and dreams, and drives us to achievement. Without thinking about our future, we would never achieve anything.

Sure, there is never a point in your life that is not the Now, that is a physical phenomena. To say that nothing ever happened in the past, only in the Now, is true, but only because what happened has been transferred to your memories of those events. This does not make them less real.

The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind.

Ah, how can he say that! Of course the mind understands! Nothing can be said, written down, or planned, without the mind drawing not only on the now, but mostly on the past! If Eckhart believes his own statement, than what he is saying is nonsense.

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now — that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don’t need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now.

Eckhart forgets that people do things because it gives them pleasure, desire for competition, self-improvement, and lots of other reasons! It is not to disengage from life’s problems or thinking, although one may forget some problems for a time.

Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret.

This is clearly untrue. I have read how religions came to being, the forces that created ‘priests’, who sought to control the behavior of the ignorant and the poor through supposed greater knowledge of nature’s forces and their ability to ‘prophesize’ events – and keep themselves in power, doing nothing. Man seeks comfort from someone who is supposed to be in a position to give it, and turning to a mystic has always worked. Spiritualists have not focused on the Now, but on a promise of salvation through blind belief and unquestioning obedience to some higher ‘laws’ which only the priests can dispense and have defined. Look at the Catholic church. We are meant to blindly believe in whatever the priests say in order to be ‘saved’. At the same time, we must be prepared to offer ‘sacrifices’ in the way of giving them money as the price for a ticket to salvation.

Clock time is not just making an appointment or planning a trip. It includes learning from the past so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals and working toward them. Predicting the future by means of patterns and laws, physical, mathematical and so on, learned from the past and taking appropriate action on the basis of our predictions.

The above is a major contradiction in Eckhart’s philosophy, invalidating everything he has said. He is advocating abandoning the past and the future, yet he clearly believes in the importance of both!

The enlightened person’s main focus of attention is always the Now, but they are still peripherally aware of time. In other words, they continue to use clock time but are free of psychological time.

Sure, focus on the Now not to make a bad mistake, but to do so, you are drawing on your past and whatever plans you have for your future. You cannot be free of your psychological time.

There is never a time when your life is not “this moment”.

That is a trick statement. Physically, that is true, but we always live simultaneously in our past and our future! We skip from now to the other two always, and that is the fascinating and delightful thing about being human!

All problems are illusions of the mind.

I want to ask him to say this to a beggar who is seeking money to feed himself!

Mind Strategies for Avoiding the Now

As a general observation, it is interesting to read the supposedly independent ‘questions’, which in reality are designed to support Eckhart’s philosophy.

To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.

Again, Eckhart is ignoring basic human nature. Our past and our future is intricately woven into our fabric, and are elements of our ‘self’. No one can extricate himself from his past our future plans.

For most people, presence is experienced either never at all or only accidentally and briefly on rare occasions without being recognized for what it is. Most humans alternate not between consciousness and unconsciousness but only between different levels of unconsciousness.

People live in the present all the time – they must. It is the life’s driver that contributes to our past and affects our future. We are very much conscious of the Now. That we live at different level of unconsciousness is unsupported by any physiological and psychological evidence. If Eckhart means people don’t pay much attention to the Now, that can be true when nothing relevant is happening, but we are very much conscious and aware of our environment, people around us, and what our senses are telling us. We must be in order to survive. The associated paragraph on people living in an unconscious state, to me, is unfathomable.

Do you resent doing what you are doing? It may be your job, or you may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but part of you resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken resentment toward a person close to you? Do you realize that the energy you thus emanate is so harmful in its effects that you are in fact contaminating yourself as well as those around you?

Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important.

Negative thought and emotions are destructive! However, Eckhart’s explanation is that ‘we’ are creating our own unhappiness, thus ignoring external factors in our lives. Someone in a badly needed job must put up with poor factory living conditions, a bad boss, or accept pressure when working to a deadline, or dealing with patients in an emergency. These things lead to stress and perhaps unhappiness, but these are natural psychological reactions. They might be negative, but most people cope and adjust. Eckhart cannot say we cause our own unhappiness simply because we dwell on our problems and cannot concentrate only on the Now. Life is a tapestry woven from many threads, and the Now is simply one of those threads. A person cannot pull it out and imagine that this single thread is his life and that nothing else matters.

I cannot agree that a person should always accept what ‘is’. That is denying your self, your ego, your hopes and dreams. It is denying your past. It is denying reality. Someone said that no man is an island, and that is true. No one can live simply in the Now, ignoring what happened a moment ago, however unpleasant it might have been, striving to achieve some nebulous state of nirvana. That state isn’t living, it is a nothingness.

So deal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a “self” out of it. Don’t misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There’s the past in you.

This is so contradictory! Eckhart urges us to forget the past and the future, yet here, he encourages us to consider our past and somehow transform it into ‘self’. To say that we should not focus on the past as past is incomprehensible. How can someone not recognize that he is focusing on his past, his past memories of events and emotions? The past cannot be transformed into the present.

The State of Presence

You can’t think about presence, and the mind can’t understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

But we are always immersed in the presence, in the now! Our mind understands that very well, otherwise it would not be able to react to constant sensory stimuli. He states that the past cannot be transformed into the present, yet in the previous chapter, that is exactly what he said! The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it.

When consciousness frees itself from its identification with physical and mental forms, it becomes what we may call pure or enlightened consciousness, or presence.

How can consciousness free itself from its physical body? The two are one, and neither can exist without the other. What Eckhart is proposing here is some mystical state of fugue, something like self-hypnosis, utterly useless to the man on the street, or even someone superbly educated. He is proposing that we sit in a lotus position, thinking about nothing, accepting only what is happening now, devoid of hopes, dreams, our past, our responsibilities and obligations. It is denial of life.

Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.

The “second coming” of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man or woman. If “Christ” were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you other than this: “I am the Truth. I am divine presence. I am eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now.”

It took Eckhart a while to reveal himself as an evangelist, but here, he shows his true colors. He is not interested in the scientific method to promote his philosophy. He is simply advocating a flawed personal belief that his approach to life and how we should behave is the correct and only path to salvation and achieving the God state.

The Inner Body

Over the centuries, many erroneous views and interpretations have accumulated around words such as sin, due to ignorance, misunderstanding, or a desire to control, but they contain an essential core of truth. If you are unable to look beyond such interpretations and so cannot recognize the reality to which the word points, then don’t use it. Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It’s an abstraction.

Sin is nothing but what priests tell you, something that will threaten their power over people. Words are certainly not an abstraction! Words were invented to describe our environment, our behavior, our laws, our creations, enabling us to interact with each other. They have meaning, as they reflect our understanding of reality. Words are what differentiates man from animals.

If you had a strong aversion to the word God, which is a negative form of attachment, you may be denying not just the word but also the reality to which it points.

Here, Eckhart contradicts himself. He states that words are an abstraction, but denying God is denying reality? He cannot have it both ways. Anyway, God is not a reality, merely an abstraction of man’s psychological need for some superior being on whom all causal worldly effects can be attributed, as well as blame for all evil – ‘Why does God allow these things to happen?’ God, if one exists, doesn’t make anything happen. Man has free will and is responsible for what he does to the world and each other.

A long time after their fall from a state of grace and oneness into illusion, humans suddenly woke up in what seemed to be an animal body.

Ah, Eckhart descends into Genesis and Adam and Eve! I thought he was presenting a workable philosophy for human behavior!

As his narrative continues, he further uses the Bible, abandoning his own pseudoscientific theory. I am not really surprised by this. Although he has elements I agree with about human behavior and how people should interact, it is wholly unpractical. This work is an interesting ego trip in itself – for Eckhart! I wonder whether he believes or practices what he has written.

When he starts talking about slowing down the aging process or strengthening the immune system through the acceptance of ‘Now’, he is ignoring basic human physiology, which demonstrates that he really doesn’t know what he is talking about.