Eckhart Tolle is widely recognized as one of the most original and inspiring spiritual teachers of our time. He travels and teaches throughout the world.
Eckhart is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition, but excludes none. His profound yet simple and practical teachings have helped thousands of people find inner peace, healing and greater fulfillment in their lives. At the core of his teachings lies the transformation of individual and collective human consciousness – a global spiritual awakening.
Eckhart Tolle is the author of The Power of Now, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, which has been translated into 32 languages and become one of the most influential spiritual books of our time.
In his most recent book, A New Earth, he shows how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world.
Preview Eckhart’s Searching for Happiness?
The Golden Thread of Wisdom and Oneness: The Great Teachings That Enlighten and Unite Us All conference. This inspiring talk will explore the dynamic illusion that we are unloved and separated from God, resulting in the response to become judgmental and the impulse to punish—leading human beings to turn to hate and fear to solve problems.
The grace and humor, Tom will discuss how the development of the ego and the false self has become one of the greatest challenges confronting humanity, overshadowing the thread of love and compassion that unites all great teachings — how forgiveness stands at the center of human love.
Our very existence is equated with consciousness. To the extent that we are conscious we know ourselves and understand the world around us. The more conscious we become, the more capable we are of grasping Reality, both personal and Absolute.
Consciousness is a new soul-sense. Like the evolution of the eye which gave us a new sense, higher consciousness awakens us to new perceptions, adaptations, and mastery.
We become more finely tuned – to our bodily needs, our instincts, our feelings and thoughts, but also to the heart-beat of the world around us, to Nature and to our fellow-creatures.
Instead of experiencing ourselves as alienated, isolated beings, we experience ourselves as part of an indivisible whole – the world-wide-web of creation.
Now, before we go further, let’s review the difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is a feeling, external and temporary. It comes from something outside of the self—a purchase, an encounter, etc. It’s what I call the “sparkly pony” emotion. It’s fun. It feels good. And it’s over pretty quickly.
Joy, on the other hand, is internal and it lasts. And it can coincide with other feelings, like grief. Joy can be present in the middle of a life storm, whereas happiness can’t survive the tempest. And while happiness can increase over a person’s life span, it is also strongly determined by genetics and personality. Joy is more of a constant, and people can strengthen it by learning to recognize its nuances.
So, to recap: Happiness: external, temporary. Joy: internal, constant.
Dennis Prager, in his book called Happiness is a Big Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual, makes the argument that happiness is a moral imperative. He claims that as members of society, we should strive to be happy not solely for personal improvement, but also as an altruistic endeavor to improve the larger society. According to Prager, we have an obligation to at least act as happy as possible, because it affects others. He likens it to a form of hygiene. And he contends that everyone is capable of it. Yes, we have problems, which we share with our close friends, but we shouldn’t inflict a bad mood upon anyone. He insists that happy people make the world better and unhappy people make the world worse.
I heard an interview with him and found his message stirring. It made me say “Yeah!” But something in the back of my brain was not agreeing so easily. I hushed it down for a few years, but finally went back and took a more critical look at his work, and things got a lot less simple.
Prager is a conservative commentator, and when I went poking through more of his arguments, I found some real problems with other things he says. But let’s just stick with his “happiness is a moral obligation” statement. Why was I so ready to swallow that one? What made it so compelling to me?
Prager is Jewish, but his message is strongly consistent with modern Christians who would link an individual’s faith with their cheerful countenance. And, it’s awfully consistent with messages from the New Age movement that if we can control our words, we can control our perception of reality. And because we’re so powerful, we should choose to be happy.
If we’re not happy, it’s our own fault because we’re not trying hard enough.
And at that point it is as if expressing anything but happiness is somehow being disloyal or inobservant of the grandeur of one’s God. So this whole happiness thing becomes a theological statement as well as a moral imperative.
But where does this leave people who are genetically or neurologically predisposed to depression or unhappiness? What are we to do with ourselves if we are simply unable to plaster an artificial smile over our sadness or despair? Are we failing when we fall into a funk? Are we being selfish if we get stressed? Are we disconnected from the God of our understanding if we’re overwhelmed? Does it mean that we are denying the presence of grace?
What if joy was the antidote to this heavy-handed insistence on happiness?
As part of my wrestling with these ideas, I sat down with a man I know who is living with depression and bi-polar disease. I enjoy being with him… even if he’s not enjoying being anywhere. I asked him about joy, happiness, moral imperatives—the whole mess.
As I suspected, due to the neurochemistry in his brain, he’s not happy most of the time, and he has difficulty recognizing joy when it shows up. I think he appreciates the way that joy can accommodate other emotions, like grief. He’s seen grieving families have joyful memories even amidst their tears. But when he is in a depressed state, he’s just not going to recognize joy even if it perches on his bedpost and sings him awake each morning. He’s too occupied carrying around the heavy gray stone of depression.
So, even though it’s not particularly uplifting, my friend’s depression brings him painfully close to understanding his God. And he has discovered that if it comes down to being right or being kind, he’s choosing to be kind. He can’t do happiness, he can do kindness. And the choosing is what allows him to feel that he is participating, not just surviving. Because kindness creates connectedness, it brings him about as close to recognizing joy as he can manage.
And just like that, I saw joy in the middle of my life storm, in the middle of my anxiety and peevishness: the beauty of a beetle and roses, the deep satisfaction of bringing home food for my family, the silliness of riding on a grocery cart. Some of these joys were external, but they shone light upon the deep
The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.
For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing.
This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment.
When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities — including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.
Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.
Related Questions
THE YEAR 1992 marked the release of a film that challenged all conventional notions of filmmaking—and that nevertheless received nearly universal critical acclaim, much to the surprise of its makers. That film was Baraka.
Filmed at 152 locations in twenty-four countries on six continents with no narrative or dialogue, Baraka was described as “a guided meditation on humanity” by the film’s cinematographer Ron Frick and “a meditation on the planet” by Roger Ebert. Frick claims that making it was like “doing a prayer.”
The film’s distinctive use of time-lapse photography has the effect of both speeding up and slowing down our experience of things, simultaneously compressing and expanding our sense of time and space, relentlessly tracking the frenetic activity of human beings before stopping to linger like a gentle caress on a person, place, or thing of remarkable beauty or awful import.
As Ebert put it, Baraka “makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile.” But it also captures the wonder of the creation and its creatures. The stated intent of the project was to “exalt the human spirit by emphasizing the flow of energy between people from around the world and by revealing the often unrecognized phenomenon of the interconnectedness of all beings as a living, breathing whole.”
The title comes from an ancient Sufi word translated variously as “blessing” and “ the thread that weaves life together.” As such, the film reveals not only diversity among peoples and within the earth itself, but the startling (and sometimes disturbing) sameness of human practices and proclivities — seen not only in the shared patterns of joyful communal worship and dance but also in the death camps of Auschwitz and Cambodia.
It casts both the particularity and the commonality of human beings in poignant and sharply painful relief. In spite of its aesthetic power and apocalyptic implications, Ebert concludes that instead of effecting change in the people who see it, the film is akin to “a dream, from which we awaken, instead of a warning, to which we respond.” Decades earlier, C.S. Lewis remarked that: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
In this postmodern, post-Christian, and what is increasingly being referred to as a post-human age, where the systems and technologies within which human beings must operate take primacy over consideration of the human being itself—we are now situated in a context surprisingly like that of the ancient pagan world, with a multiplicity of belief systems competing for our allegiance, and where the definition and consequent value of what it means to be human are very much in debate.
For people of faith, this is perhaps the fundamental issue of our time, for it determines how we perceive: the complex tapestry of the world we now inhabit and our responsibilities and responses to it. It may be that Ebert’s remark about the fragility of life is more prescient about the state of human beings reflective of Baraka the film.
BARAKA is a transcendent global tour that explores the sights and sounds of the human condition like nothing you’ve ever seen or felt before.
These are the wonders of a world without words, viewed through man and nature’s own prisms of symmetry, savagery, harmony and chaos. From the filmmakers of the upcoming SAMSARA.
Dis~ease = A LifeOut Of Balance
The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating “it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words.
It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation.
It no longer describes the world in which we live.”
In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “unbalanced life”.[4] The film is the first in the Qatsi trilogy of films: it is followed by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology
“While Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi examine modern life in industrial countries and the conflict between encroaching industrialization and traditional ways of life, using slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes, about eighty percent of Naqoyqatsi uses archive footage and also stock images manipulated and processed digitally on non-linear editing (non-sequential) workstations and intercut with specially-produced computer generated imagery to demonstrate society’s transition from a natural environment to a technology-based one. Reggio described the process as “virtual cinema”.
Koyaanisqatsi – reverse ( ISTAQSINAAYOK ) life out of balance / life back to balance… https://www.youtube.com/watch?
DO NOT WATCH THIS UNDER THE INFLUENCE !!!
