Reviews
A really good book, teaches us how to lead a better life on our daily routines, without all the struggles that our mind make us suffer. The insight is quite good for people who understand the topic but it may be a kinda weird language for people who are not familiarized with it.
Some good reminders about being present and not letting the pain body take over you. A little longer than it probably needed to be, but then I can also see that some of the repetition is to drive the point home.
Fantastic book. Here are some quotes I love: A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. This book - will draw attention to what is false in you. Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Bring and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scrapes of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all these things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgements and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be a lie, the emotion will be the truth. Love, joy and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I would call emotions. They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper level. So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel what lies beyond them. 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. On pain-body However, it’s more important to observe it in yourself than in someone else. Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form- it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy, it finds it quite indigestible. The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and had temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification. It had turned in on itself and become anti-life, like an animal trying to devour its own tail. Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the stoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. - If conscious, you’ll have an unsettling feeling of not being good enough - if unconsciousness, it will be an indirect feeling of intense craving, wanting and needing. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. 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. To be identified with your mind Is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusive through memory and anticipation.
i felt extremely meh about this book, i read it for my brother and was expecting to hate it given i'm not really a self-help book kinda person so feeling meh about it was actually positively surprising. there are some bits where i felt i was actually gaining useful advice which was cool!
Changed my life. The only downside is banging on about certain points a bit too long.
I believe everyone can gain some wisdom from this book.
it's not applicable at all, i barely made it through that book, and i barely remember taking any insights of what he said —such a shame for such a famous book.
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Awful.
Very deep, very moving account of how one man has come to embrace the present moment. This book is a definite required reread in order to obtain the maximum learning from it's pages... this is one of those books that has the potential to change how you are living your life. Read it now!
Every “past” was once a present moment. Phenomenal achievements come from being present. >learn to separate yourself from your mind. Question your next thoughts. Set yourself in active waiting to raise alertness of the present.
A good read for resetting your consciousness. A bit long and slow for the simple message it was trying to convey.
I have no idea why I've seen this book on so many recommended lists. He gets a star for a few good nuggets on basic mindfulness, but otherwise comes off sounding like a self-appointed prophet of esoteric nonsense. There is no science, there are no citations and he freely twists quotes from (insert religious figure here) while talking down to the reader, as if spending a year sleeping on park benches has granted him valid credentials. I practice meditation daily and read a lot in the personal growth/mindfulness categories, so it's not like I had it out for this book. The few good lines were in the first half, after which I started speed-reading as it went steadily downhill. Upon seeing that the last half inch of pages does not consist of citations, like most other books I read, I'm moving this puzzler to unfinished and moving on with my life. If you're interested in mindfulness and learning to be more present in your life, read something by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Or better yet, get yourself a subscription to Headspace and start practicing it.
It was good and I was excited to read but I was getting bored towards the end and just wanted to finish the book.
Some parts of this book I felt deeply connected with and highlighted. Other parts made me want to throw it across the room. Good messages in there, but nothing you can’t find in any other self help book, written in a better way. Would recommend some of the lessons and concepts, but would not recommend this book.
what even was this??
I really enjoyed reading this book by Eckhart Tolle. There were plenty of great ideas which I will constantly use for the rest of my adventures of life. It feels good to stay in the Now.
The lessons in this book are good. I think he tells a truth a lot of people need to hear. I like the Q&A format, but I think this book is needlessly repetitive and I think the writer limits himself by attaching many ideas to religion/God specifically. This clearly shows it’s catered to a specific audience. Overall a good book, but not my taste.
very thought provoking and inspiring
While the concept of being “present” is great and I believe has the power to change people’s lives for the better, this book could have been condensed to 25 pages and been just as effective. The first few chapters contain the main idea, and the remaining 175 pages only serve to reiterate the same exact idea over and over again. He really started to lose me in the second half of the book when he starts talking about energy fields and twisting the words of Jesus to try and fit his narrative.
Such an important read.
Very deep, very moving account of how one man has come to embrace the present moment. This book is a definite required reread in order to obtain the maximum learning from it's pages... this is one of those books that has the potential to change how you are living your life. Read it now!
A new age take on zen. There is a lot of good stuff in here. There is also some ridiculous stuff in here.
I discovered this book in the strangest of ways and had it for 2 years before I actually started reading it (I was 20 years old back then), its as if it was waiting for me to read it. I started reading it in some of the darkest days I lived, and once I started understanding the book on a deeper level, my life fully changed. It's a wonderful book for those who want to learn more about Enlightenment. Hard to read for the average person, but extremely rewarding and worth the effort. It's been a little over two years since I finished it and I still go back to it at least once every two months. Mr. Tolle is a great teacher.
Highlights
What stood out
The entire book
“You may win 10 million dollars. But that kind of change is skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings”
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.
Realise deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
The secret of life is to "die before you die" — and find out that there is no death.
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any con- Crete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection you cannot cope with the future.
The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know that youll get burned.
Only you can do this. Nobody can do it for you. But if you are fortunate enough to find someone who is intensely con- scious, if you can be with them and join them in the state of presence, that can be helpful and will accelerate things. In this way, your own light will quickly grow stronger. When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater inten- sity. After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the functions of a spiritual teacher. Some therapists may also be able to fulfill that function, provided that they have gone beyond the level of mind and can create and sustain a state of intense conscious presence while they are working L with you.
If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert, Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Ob- serve the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious.
You have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are.
You may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain.
Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don’t think about it — don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Dor'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. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes”.
Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes.
desu Es are Sll Ie-ener When you start to disidentify and become the watcher, the pain-body will continue to operate for a while and will try t trick you into identifying with it again.
Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment.
All pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you?
Its (the pain body’s) survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain you will be forced to relive it again and again.
Look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.
The pain-body wants to survive, 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.
When you thought you knew a person and then you are suddenly confronted with this alien, nasty creature (their pain body) for the first time, you are in for quite a shock. However, it's more important to observe it in yourself than in someone else. Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experi ence it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.
Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
What could be could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is?