ECKHART TOLLE

Who is he? Do you know him?
 I bet, all decomers students semester 4 know about him.  

He is Eckhart Tolle the writer of the article, Thinking Folly.

Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany, where he spent the first thirteen years of his life. After graduating from the University of London, he was a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. When he was twenty-nine, a profound spiritual transformation virtually dissolved his old identity and radically changed the course of his life. The next few years were devoted to understanding, integrating and deepening that transformation and marked the beginning of an intense inward journey. Eckhart Tolle is not aligned with any particular religion or spiritual tradition. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

THE POWER OF NOW 

Tolle is the author of The Power of Now, which has been widely recognized as one of the most influential spiritual books. Published in the late 1990s with an initial printing of 3,000 copies the book's sales' growth accelerated in 2000 after Oprah Winfrey recommended it in her magazine, It has appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and been translated into 33 languages. As of 2009, three million copies had been sold in North America. He says the book "represents the essence of my work, as far as it can be conveyed in words" and that it "can be seen as a restatement for our time of that one timeless spiritual teaching, the essence of all religions".

The Power of Now is widely regarded as one of the most influential guides to spiritual enlightenment of our time. This is because Eckhart Tolle speaks form a place of knowing. As the title suggests the book explains how true power can only be found in the present moment. After all, isn't the now the only real time? The past is a memory and the future is a projection, they are not real.

This is one of the quote that I got from the book when I do some background reading.

 "The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible." - Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now)

From the quote that shown above, Eckhart Tolle is dead serious and seems too deep to grasp, but then he suddenly makes a funny conclusion like the one above, or bursts out into giggles at something he finds very amusing. Typically, the things he finds ridiculous and laughable, are often the things we consider norms or truths. Eckhart Tolle questions those and makes us realize that we are not our past pains and we do not need to feed our own or other people´s pains either. 

As Eckhart Tolle says, if you just become aware of that parasitic energy field called pain-body, you can take steps to lessen your own and the collective suffering. If you remain unaware, you will deny its existence and actually create more pain and suffering. That is the meaning on how the pain-body exists and grows. We can see that Eckhart Tolle is not a person who always wants to give up. He makes the reader gain motivation and inspiration through his book, The Power of Power.

The past has no power over the present moment - Echkart Tolle