|
THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
In the Bible, God declares, “I am the Alpha and the Omega and I am the living One.” In the timeless realm where God dwells, which is also your home, the beginning and the end – the Alpha and the Omega – are one.
The essence of everything that has ever been and ever will be is eternally present in an unmanifest state of oneness and perfection. In our world of seemingly separate forms, however, timeless perfection is an inconceivable concept. Here, even consciousness, which is the light emanating from the eternal source, seems to be subject to a process of development, but this is due to our limited perception. It is not so in absolute terms.
Everything that exists has “Being,” God-essence and some degree of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness. Otherwise, its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive: The sun, earth, plants, animals and humans. All are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
The world arises when consciousness takes on thought forms and material forms. Look at the millions of life forms on this planet alone, replicated millions of times. To what end? Is someone or something playing a game with form? This is what the ancient seers of India asked themselves. They saw the world as Lila, a kind of divine game that God plays. Individual life forms are obviously not very important in this game.
In the sea, most life forms don’t survive more than a few minutes after birth. The human form turns to dust pretty quickly too. When it is gone, it is as if it had never been. Is that tragic and cruel? Only if you create a separate identity for each form and forget that its consciousness is God-essence expressing itself in form. But you don’t truly know that until you realize your own God-essence as pure consciousness.
If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish, that’s tragic. But it’s only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none.
Consciousness takes on the disguise of forms until it completely loses itself in them. Present-day human consciousness is completely identified with its disguise. It only knows itself as form and, therefore, lives in fear of the annihilation of its physical or psychological form. This is the egoic mind where considerable dysfunction sets in. It now looks as if something had gone very wrong somewhere along the line of evolution. But even this is part of Lila, the divine game.
Finally, the pressure of suffering created by this apparent dysfunction forces consciousness to awaken and become unidentified with form. It regains self-consciousness, but at a far deeper level than before it lost it.
This process is explained by Jesus in his parable of the lost son who leaves his father’s home, squanders his wealth, becomes destitute and is forced to return home. When he does, his father loves him more than before. The son’s state is the same and yet not the same as it was. It has an added dimension of depth. The parable describes a journey from unconscious perfection, through apparent imperfection and “evil,” to conscious perfection.
Can you now see the deeper and wider significance of becoming present as the watcher of your mind? Whenever you watch the mind, you withdraw consciousness from mind forms and it becomes what we call the watcher or the witness. Consequently, the watcher – pure consciousness beyond form – becomes stronger and the mental formations become weaker.
When we talk about watching the mind, we are personalizing an event that is truly of cosmic significance. Through you, consciousness is awakening from its dream of identification with form and withdrawing from form. This foreshadows, but is already part of, an event that is probably still in the distant future, as far as chronological time is concerned. The event is called the end of the world.
Adapted from The Power of Now, copyright 1999 by Eckhart Tolle. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 800-972-6657 (ext. 52). Visit www.eckharttolle.com.
|
|
