January 10, 2013: Elkhart Tolle, presented by Skye

     This meeting was presented by Sky, discussing his special "guru" Eckhart Tolle, author of two well-known books among others:  The Power of Now,  and A New Earth.

      Eckhart Tolle was born in 1948 in Germany and now lives in Canada. He says that he was depressed much of his young adulthood, but then had "a transformation" when he was 29.
I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.^[11]

      After experiencing this new sense of "deep bliss," he became a spiritual teacher. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada, and travels, speaks on his beliefs and writes to teach his ideas about spirituality.

     In the introduction to his second book, Stillness Speaks, he says: "A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which separates you from the truth ... The words are no more than signposts."^[18]

     Tolle says that "the most significant thing that can happen to a human being is the separation process of thinking and awareness" and that awareness is "the space in which thoughts exist." He also says that "the primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it."  He believes that a spiritual awakening as he sees it is the next step in human evolution. He proposes that we need to lose our illusory  sense of self because it is based on an unconscious identification with our memories and thoughts  which are often painful because they are an accumulation of old emotional pain.

     At the following link site, which is the Official Site of Eckhart Tolle, are many videos of Tolle speaking, and having conversations with widely respected spiritual and ethical leaders from around the world.
http://www.eckharttolletv.com/free/default.aspx?f=1#/483665614/What-is-the-purpose-of-mental-illness