I have a terrible memory. I forget books I’ve read. I knew I’d read The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle because Amazon tells me I bought it in 2017. I couldn’t remember, however, what I’d read or why a friend of mine thinks it’s the most important book he’s ever read. I searched for my copy on the bookshelves but couldn’t find it so I ordered a new copy. I’ve begun to read it.
This time, I understand how it short circuits all my Christian conditioning. I still think too much, wanting to explain things in blogs in ways that don’t disturb you, the reader, too much. Why do I worry? After all, fewer than 100 people read each of the last two blogs I posted. Some of the people who did read them want more – want me to publish my writings. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to encourage you to buy The Power of Now. It’s always safer to place challenging ideas in front of people ‘second hand’ by quoting someone else. To hell with safety! Except that Tolle puts it all so much better than I can so I’ll quote from the first three pages of his first chapter.
God
“The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. By misuse I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind the word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as ‘My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false.’”
The ability to achieve radical change by the campaign being pursued by a coalition of eight groups for equality for LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England is thwarted every step of the way by obsessive disagreements about whose God is the true, authentic deity, the deity described with such precision, so our opponents think, in the Bible.
“The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.”
And that male deity, of course, is the reason why biblical Christians are so obsessed with male homosexuality.
Being
Those who have not found their true wealth, says Tolle, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth.
“Enlightenment is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment.”
Eckhart Tolle puts it much better and more simply than I ever could, carrying, as I am, a voice that expects me to describe enlightenment and Being in theistic terms that won’t frighten the conservative evangelical horses. If we continue to live with an inability to feel connectedness within ourselves and with the cosmos in which we live, then we will defend our vulnerability obsessively.
“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. 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. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of “Feeling-realisation” is enlightenment.”
Being, the God-essence, is within the core of our being, our bodies and emotions, our innermost invisible and indestructible essence. In general, the Christian church doesn’t teach this because its adherents and practitioners don’t know this. They have not been shown how to discover the divine within your own being and body. The church began to teach me this when I was at theological college and I have pursued the teaching ever since. I trusted the invitation to pursue the teaching because I met people, ‘wisdom’ people, who, my intuition told me, embodied the energy of Being, the indestructible essence. In subsequent years, I have met fewer of these people in the church. Church leaders and teachers have become increasingly head-centred, body-unconscious, disconnected from the real presence of being in their bodies and emotions.
“Neither God nor Being nor any word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word. The only important question is does the word point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you yourself believe in, a mental idol?”
“The word Being explains nothing but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realisation I am that is prior to I am this or I am that.”
Opening ourselves to Being
Eckhart says it is only a small step from the word to the experience of Being. I had been in counselling and therapy for a number of years post-ordination before I found the courage to acknowledge that I was unable to identify feelings in my body. I felt sensations, depression, pain, ‘love’, excitement, admiration of beauty, but I was divorced from my Self and from the emotions within that I assumed came with a sense of Being Alive. I left my therapy group and began the journey towards training as a body-centred therapist. That worked! I’m still working at it. The move into a training that helped me feel my body and allow the energies and streamings of pleasure in my body to flow was a whole new, challenging, learning experience. It is, I have no doubt, an essential step to take on our spiritual journey if we are to truly value ourselves and trust our intuition and innate wisdom. We have difficulty discovering the Being, the God, within and without, about which the church talks so much, if we remain stuck in our intellectual, conceptual heads.
The difficulty of Being in the church
There are, of course, many examples in every century, of Christian women and men who experienced the deep presence of Being, of the divine energy, the essence of the holy God. The authorities of the church tended to be disturbed by such intuitive wisdom people and marginalised them. They are the mystics and divines whose writings we learn to revere and emulate. But the church today has largely lost trust in the experience of the wisdom path of life and prayer in which the whole is seamlessly interwoven by unconditional, infinite, intimate love. The women who followed Jesus knew the experience but the male leaders, post-resurrection and in every century since, have distrusted and marginalised women. The church still marginalises women – the ordination of women as priests and bishops hasn’t ended the distrust of women’s spirituality and experience.
The power of now
I didn’t mean to distract you from the prime purpose of this blog – to introduce you to the wisdom teachings and practice of Eckhart Tolle – by focusing on the contemporary weakness of life, spiritual and sexual and gendered, in the Church of England.
So now, for five minutes, stop attending to your phone or computer screen. Look up and around. Notice where you are. Breathe more consciously and deeply. Slow your breathing down. Notice the space you are in, the light, sounds, smells. Notice your body, the within of your body, your belly and heart. Breathe into your body, deep down into your belly. Nourish and enrich your inner self.
And do this, every day, for five or more minutes, as a core spiritual practice, before you begin to say the office or begin your time of prayer. Start your spiritual practice by discovering how to Be. You might also buy The Power of Now if you don’t have a copy.
Tolle, E. 1999, 2005, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. London, Hodder and Stoughton