Eckhart Tolle Discussion Community

I would offer a simpler notion: conscious awareness is attention. It's not important whether or not this is a function of mind. Thoughts, feelings, sensations are the "forms" as Tolle likes to say that attention or focus can be directed to, but it is the attention itself that is consciousness. Thoug...

Elkhart often says that suffering is a great teacher, and I have to say that the experience of suffering (physical pain, emotional pain, loss of loved ones, failure, disappointment etc.) seems to go along with living longer. That being said, it is also my experience that the learning, discipline, an...

I really appreciate the references to Victor Frankl - there is so much wisdom there. Like him, I've always felt that happiness was a byproduct of living a life that is true to my nature, not a goal. Perhaps it would be easier to grasp if we called happiness a form of joy - joy being the undiluted fo...

As Einstein once said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." Our sense perceptions are so very limited - even our ability to see light is limited to a very narrow range of frequencies. Even Plato's allegory of the cave teaches the same lesson. I sometimes hear people talking...

I've read Frankl's work a number of times during the past 50 years, but what I took from it was a bit different I believe. It was really quite simple: we cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can ALWAYS choose our attitude toward those circumstances. In Eckhart's teaching, he says this in a...

A-theism is not the lack of belief, just the lack of belief in theistic memes. Strong atheism is, in fact, an affirmative belief that there are NO gods, period. We don't choose our beliefs, they simply are what they are - based on experience, custom, habit or whatever. Beliefs can change, of course,...

Eckhart Tolle's description of our pain bodies is very helpful with exactly what you experience. The activation of the pain body can indeed seem like being possessed by an "entity." The pain body is made up of all mental-emotion complexes (to use a word from psychoanalysis.) These are like sense mem...

I would like to add that in my view the ego/emotional complex is what most of us think of as our "selves." It is how we chiefly distinguish ourselves from others in our species, the "false" sense of of duality that is necessary to survive as a social species. What is more interesting to me is that t...

I think in the limited domain of human sensory perception, this computer analogy is a reasonable analogy. You might add the output of the programming languages: like a graphical user interface. It's obviously a neuro-chemical process, that is ultimately interpreted in our sphere of consciousness. It...

If you live long enough, life will challenge you in ways you can scarcely imagine. The earlier poster asked the right questions - are these "problems" or challenges? Death of loved ones, serious health issues, loss of status, conflict at home or at work - all part of life. I've been through deep emo...

Both action and inaction have consequences and both involve a choice. There is a moral guide that might help - the Golden Rule: do to others what you would have others do to you. Another way to look at is to simplify the question: if a child is being abused and another is present and fails to act to...

I am reminded of the words of Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor. He was the author of "Man's Search for Meaning" published in the year of my birth: 1948. In a nutshell, Frankl pointed out, based on his own dreadful experience in a death camp, that though we cannot always control...

Lest I sound too judgmental, I should point out that tinkering with our own brain chemistry - particularly the limbic system - has been part of human culture and experience for tens of thousands of years. Whether it is alcohol, drugs, video games, computers, food, sex, gambling, even compulsive read...

Alcohol consumption always causes a certain level of "anxiety" but it usually not noticed because of the intoxication. It is however, suspected as the reason after a couple of drinks the desire for more arises. Alcohol is toxic and the extent of damage it causes is dose-dependent. Unlike opioid-like...

I would just like to add that believing something does not make it true - no matter how much one believes it to be. Do you also apply this 'belief' to the following quote as well? The notion that consciousness somehow exists apart from the material universe is demonstrably false and a dualistic con...