Check out Oprah and Eckert Tolle’s webinar
Oprah Winfrey and bestselling author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle have teamed up to deliver a weekly live webinar, called Webinar. It focused on Tolle’s book (and Oprah’s latest Book Club selection) A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. This event, which has been hailed as “the largest classroom in history”, was watched by almost 10 million viewers for ten weeks. Tolle’s book sold 3.5 million copies in its first four weeks on Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Oprah said, “I love this book by Eckhart Tolle because my goal in life is to make people think for themselves in a way that they know who they are. You don’t have to wait until you’re 54 or 63, but the goal of this show, all these years, is trying to bring a sense of self-fulfillment to my audience. That’s what I’m trying to do. This book is the best of its kind. [that] I’ve seen it in terms of its clarity and its ability to make people see the light of who they are, and once you see that, you stop wasting your time.”
During the webinar, a viewer asked, “Why is this happening now?” Why were some 700,000 people watching a program that promoted the awakening of spiritual consciousness? Tolle responded, “It’s happening now because we’re reaching a crisis point. Very essential things don’t happen until there’s an absolute necessity for them to happen. If you look at the history of the 20th century, that gives you an idea of what it will be like if There is no major change.” Conservative estimates conclude that more than 100 million humans were killed by other humans in the 20th century, Tolle said. “It’s crazy unbelievable when you look at that history. So if there’s not a shift in consciousness, we’re going to go downhill very quickly, because we’re already in the process of destroying the planet. But there’s also going to be ongoing conflict, collective conflict.” , and eventually, then, humanity would collapse.”
Oprah: “So you think we’re at a crisis point, right?”
Tolle: “Crisis point, yes.”
Tolle’s main teaching point is that we must move away from our ego-centric view of who we are to one that is part of the greater whole of all life.
“You don’t become special, you become quite ordinary as that new awareness arises. He doesn’t say ‘look at me!’ It is this need to be special that is part of the mental sense of self. He says, “Please let me be special. If I can’t be more successful than other people, please let me be special in my misery. Please let me be special.” let me be more miserable than other people. The need to be special disappears. You are in the field of now. It is vast. Its alive. You are space around phenomena. The need to stand out, to make an impression is not there. The words will still come out of your mouth, but not in a selfish way.
“Instead of going through life and reacting to the content that continually arises in your life – new things, thoughts, emotions, external events, people, places, the landscape around you that continually changes – you allow the content to be. content arises in the ‘now’ but you become aware of the right now, beyond the phenomena that arise.
“What does that mean? You become aware of the right now. You become aware of an undercurrent of stillness in which everything happens. Then you realize that you are that deep undercurrent of stillness around which phenomena occur. A from that moment on, the world is no longer problematic. Any content in your life, including my story, is no longer problematic. It’s just my story. But you don’t get your identity from that. What’s left are photo albums, whether physical or physical. photo albums or those that are in your head, those things that happened to me. It’s okay. They’re not an illusion. They happened. But you’re no longer in a reactive relationship to those events. You’re not looking for yourself. yourself in your reaction to these events or people. You are not looking for yourself in these. You cannot find yourself in them. You are in the undercurrent of stillness around which all these events occurred and continue to occur and relate yes
“The future is no longer threatening, nor is it promising! It just is. And you face it without looking for an identity with it or with it. It is simple, effortless, without looking for yourself in something or someone. From the now, there is great power flowing through you.
“Some people have experienced this in emergency situations. They just took steps to deal with it in the now. And they did the right thing. There was no thinking involved. There was a higher power taking over. There was no ‘me’ involved in their actions. Your entire life can be like this simply by dwelling in the undercurrent of the now field, the still awareness around which all phenomena occur. The fear of loss is gone. Loss? Because there is identification with some content, and if I lose it, I lose a part of who I am. Content just comes and goes. No content remains. It is always changing. You can see what a miraculous transformation this is. You no longer live in fear of loss, you can live constantly in a state of joy and vitality no matter what comes or goes from you.
“You and the universe are playing with form and content. When you create unselfishly, you create beautifully.
Oh, I have to have that! Oh, I have to fight him or her! He might get there before me. Oh, I have to compete. consciousness itself flows through you. It loves to create! It will create through you. Let it flow. Then all that is left in your life is the simplicity of this moment, and it is always quite simple. Accept the now. Embrace what is. Through that embrace, you know the spaciousness around the form that is there. This is the new state of consciousness that is emerging.”
As you can see, Tolle is clarifying ancient Eastern teachings in modern terms and situations. It is the “being here now” concept of living in the present, with an added twist of feeling the deeper, calmer awareness, or “watching,” that views life’s events and relationships with detachment, without being possessed by they. This frees one from the wheel of incarnations and self-awareness.
It is not a higher place to go; rather, it is a state of mind, a state of heart, wherever and whenever we are. We still care and act in life, but we do not find our identity in these circumstances of life and these relationships. Our identity is in the infinite stillness around which life unfolds. We try to improve it, to raise it to the highest ideal that we perceive, but we do not find ourselves in it. It is the flow of creative content and form. We are one with the source of that creativity, the pure consciousness, the eternally still observer and selfless co-creator with the creative Forces. The ideal motivates our actions and thoughts, not selfishness.
Let’s try to spend a day with this attitude and state of consciousness. A morning meditation will help us start the day against the background of stillness.