Two Recommendations

Clear insight emerging from presence

The moment you enter the Now with your attention, you realize that life is sacred. There is a sacredness to everything you perceive when you are present… There is an aliveness in you that you can feel with your entire being…

– Eckhart Tolle 

In a recent Substack (Listening without Ideas, 8/13/23),  I shared some writing by my friend and teacher Toni Packer, along with information about her and Springwater Center and the YouTube channel where you can find her talks.

Another teacher who speaks from presence and whose work I love and very highly recommend is Eckhart Tolle. I consider Eckhart one of the clearest and most accessible contemporary teachers. You can feel the presence and the stillness when he speaks and in the pages of his books, and his teaching is very similar in its essence to that of Toni Packer. He also has a lovely sense of humor and a beautiful way of gently and lovingly imitating and poking fun at the egoic/thinking mind.

I especially want to recommend two old favorites of mine, both on video: (1) the videos of a retreat Eckhart gave immediately after 9/11, and (2) an excellent movie in which he speaks with a young man. Here is a description of each and where to find them:

The Post-9/11 Retreat:

Recently, I was thrilled to discover, free on YouTube, the videos of eight talks from a retreat at Omega in New York that Eckhart gave in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks. These talks are immensely powerful, in part because of the very charged situation at the time. I got the videotapes of these talks soon after that retreat back in 2001 and was very deeply moved by them. At some point, I passed the tapes on to someone else, and then videotape itself disappeared into history.

So I was thrilled to discover that they’re available on Namaste Publishing’s YouTube channel. They’re out of order there, but you can easily figure it out. They are best heard sequentially.

The video quality is less than perfect—but I actually preferred the simpler video style back then, where there is just one camera, simply resting on Eckhart, so that you can really enter deeply into what he is saying. (I was not an enthusiast for the busier style of videography that evolved in subsequent years with ever-changing multiple views of the speaker intercut with views of the audience, all of which I felt distracted from stillness and deep listening.)

These talks are also available for purchase as audio only from Eckhart Tolle’s website with the title “Sustaining Presence in the Face of Catastrophe.” But because he does so much with facial expressions and gestures, the videos are much better in my opinion, plus they’re free. I recommend them very highly.

The Movie with the Young Man:

Also available on YouTube is an excellent movie of ET that was made some time back and that I found quite wonderful, in which a young man comes to Eckhart with questions. For the first fifteen minutes or so, they talk while sitting by the water along with Eckhart’s partner Kim Eng, but soon they move into Eckhart’s home and it’s just Eckhart and the young man for most of the movie, and Eckhart does almost all the talking and is really on a roll. The video quality is not great, and there’s one little editing glitch where something the young man says about guilt is accidentally repeated, but the error resolves quickly. Very highly recommended:

I also very highly recommend Eckhart’s books: The Power of Now; A New Earth; Stillness Speaks; Practicing the Power of Now; and Guardians of Being: Spiritual Teachings from Our Dogs and Cats.

More about Eckhart at his website.

Finally, for those who haven’t yet discovered it, I have an annotated list of recommended books and authors on my website, and there’s also an audio/video page on my website with links to all of my own audio and video recordings and a books page describing my own five books.

As I say in the introduction to my website recommended books page: These are some of the books, writers and speakers that I've enjoyed, resonated with, and/or found helpful over the course of many years. I'm not endorsing every single word spoken or written by any of the authors I’ve included here (including Joan Tollifson, whose mind has been known to change). Some of these authors I read decades ago, and I might see their books differently now.

Sometimes when I return to a book, I hear it in a whole new way. In fact, we never read the same book twice, any more than we step into the same river twice or are the same person from one instant to the next. The printed word can seem set in stone, but it isn’t really. It’s alive, and reading is a kind of dance between reader and text.

This list includes books from a variety of different perspectives, and in many cases, they may seem to contradict each other. Who has it right? What should you believe? No words or concepts can capture reality. Maps are useful, but they can only describe and point to the territory itself, which is alive and ever-changing, and can be seen in many different ways. Eating the meal is what nourishes you, not reading the menu. Take what resonates and leave the rest behind. Don't believe anything you read, but instead, question, look, listen, feel into it, and see for yourself. Always be ready to question your conclusions and to see something new and unexpected.

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Much Love to you all….