I am thrilled to have my first guest post on the blog for the series “For the love of literature”!  Please, welcome Min who blogs over at Min’s Mash where she writes about a variety of subjects including parenting teens and young adults, her passion for photography, health and wellbeing, and occasional delicious recipes.  I personally love her Flashback Friday posts and her 365 Grateful Project.  Thank you very much Min for providing a post for my series.  I did not know about Eckhart Tolle and found the subject of his book particularly interesting.

I am an avid reader.  I always have a book on the go!  I love to curl up in bed at night and read until I get sleepy.  I usually read fiction, but a friend told me of the Eckhart Tolle book called ‘The Power of Now’ and how reading it had brought her peace and happiness, so I ordered it.

I am becoming more interested in things like meditation and spirituality.  These are all things that help us to become more grounded, settled and happy, gain a sense of inner peace and generally be nicer people!  Even Oprah Winfrey says: “The Power of Now can transform your thinking.  The result?  More joy, right now.”

There are so many amazing excerpts I could use from the book, but here is one:

“You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be spoken of – yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it now not to give you something to believe in but to show you how you can know it for yourself.“

- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd publisher 2011, p. 92.

Tolle believes that our lives are eternal.  Quite a comforting thought isn’t it – to think life is eternal?!  Of course the life he is referring to is not our human forms, but our inner selves that he refers to in the excerpt above.  I’m guessing that what he speaks of is similar or the same as what we usually refer to as our ‘souls’ though that word is never mentioned in the book.

One of the key things Tolle tells us in this book is that he believes that the ‘mind’ has become the worst enemy of humans.  It never stops thinking!  It is fuelled by fear.  It is driven by the past and the future and rarely lives in the now.  Because of the incessant chatter of our minds, he believes we are ‘unconscious’.  To be ‘conscious’ we would need to connect to our inner selves – ‘Being’.   The first step in trying to connect with ‘Being’ is to start listening to the voice in our heads.  Be the watcher!  Watch the thinker!   He says that you’ll soon realise:  there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it.  This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought.  It arises from beyond the mind.

Whether you agree with Tolle’s opinions or not, this book is a very interesting and thought provoking read and contains some great methods/strategies to quieten a busy mind!

Have you read any interesting books in the self help/spiritual genre?  Is there one you would recommend I read next?

Min

You can find Min here:

Blog: Min’s Mash

Twitter: @_MinsMash

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/minsmash.wynnummanly.blog

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