Punctum Saliens

Tonight, the Kansas City Friends of Jung showed the first hour of a DVD set of Eckhart Tolle talking about “Approaching the Self.” We’ll be viewing the rest of the 4-hour DVD set at later times. This was my first exposure to Tolle although I had heard of him before tonight. It was very interesting although hardly new — it was essentially Buddhist mindfulness mixed with a hint of Jung. Tolle’s strength, from what I saw tonight, was putting the ideas into language easy for Westerners to comprehend. I’ll go over just a few highlights of what I saw:

Tolle’s main topic was about reaching the Stillness inside us all; a Stillness that we don’t have to get or find because we already have it — we just don’t always notice it. He described this Stillness as “the dimension inside yourself far deeper than the movement of thought.”

“Analysis always destroys the object.” This reminded me of something from The Gateless Gate about the difference between a Westerner and a Buddhist appreciating a flower. The Westerner plucks the flower and analyses it by pulling it apart to see how it’s made and see inside it. The Buddhist leaves the flower where it is and just looks at it.

“If you become truly present [in the now] you will find the sacred everywhere.”

We are not truly present because we are always thinking; thinking about the future, worrying about the past, focusing on our problems. We rationalize it by saying, “I have important problems to think about.” But all our “problems,” the future, all of it are thought forms and all forms crumble.

We focus on who/what we think we are as a separate, independent person. We have a compulsion to search for more, to add more to who we think we are — more possessions, recognition, etc. Yet all these things are thought forms. We complain about things because “complaining makes you feel right and the other person wrong.” This conflict helps us keep our separate sense of self in tact.

We reduce others to caricatures. We relate to the thoughts in our heads that we have about others and not to the persons directly.