Yes, Eckart Tolle, like a small percentage of people on this earth, is an enlightened being. That means he grasps the underlying madness of the ego mind and transcends it through his insights and awareness. He came to his understanding through many years of mental and emotional suffering and unhappiness.

He is generous to share his discoveries about why the world is in such a state of insanity. All the killings, the tortures, the child abuse, animal abuse, that fill the news and our history books. He points out that, as long as we allow ourselves to be driven by the automatic and repetitive fearful churning of our lesser minds, the world will always be in trouble.
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He is able to translate his vision in words that are easy to understand and accessible to all. Everyone needs relief from their anxious, restless minds. Eckart Tolle points to many different pathways. But his primary path is to be continually aware of and awake to the present moment. In this indestructible moment lies the core of peace, freedom, and creativity.

A zen person lives completely in this moment. Each action and thought takes place completely in the present. While he or she is doing any task, whether it is walking or washing hands, they are always right there. They are not thinking about what’s for dinner while they are washing their hands. They are not thinking about last night’s dinner either.

This takes great discipline. For the mind is unruly. It wants to charge ahead. It wallows in past mistakes and hurts. It can experience everything but the present moment. It oscillates between these two illusory states. For you cannot put your finger on the past and you cannot capture the future. They don’t really exist.
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The zen person knows, and experiences first hand, what it feels like to be in the deep peace of the Present. It cannot be described but you can feel who has attained this state. They do not drag anything into the present that is not essential. They take out the mental garbage and stay clean.

One of the best ways to lead a harmonious life is to avoid people who do not love and support you. This one step, staying away from toxic people who want to drag you down into their whirlpool of negative energy, would solve so many problems that lead to disharmony.

Sometimes we don’t have a choice because work and home situations are complicated. We can’t just walk out because someone is behaving hatefully towards us, for a number of reasons. We have financial commitments, we have children to consider, etc. This is when we need to build our inner sanctuary.

When we are around people who are behaving badly or events that are difficult, we can still deal with them in a calm manner. We can use Don Miguel Ruiz’s brilliant, “Four Agreements.” They are Ancient Toltec words of wisdom that simply and clearly lead to inner peace and harmony. If you follow them, you will not fail in living a harmonious life.
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One of the most powerful of the Four Agreements is, “Don’t take anything personally.” The haters are behaving according to their own conditioning, their moods, what they ate or didn’t eat that day, etc., and it has nothing to do with you at all. You just happen to be there. They would be like that with someone else. Think of that next time someone tries to spread their toxic vibes to you.

The “why,” or the cause of things, is more fundamental, because it comes first. Yet, if we continue to ask why, we will end up with many unanswerable questions. We can ask, “Why is the sky blue?”.

• A scientist will tell you the sky is not really blue. It depends on how light is refracted and reflected, and how it is dealt with by your optic nerve.
• A mother might say the sky is blue, “Because I said so, now go and clean your room.”
• A religious devotee might say the sky is blue because God ordained it to be that way.

The “how” is about what action do you need to perform to accomplish a desired goal. It comes after the “why.” First you need to know “why” you want to accomplish something. Then you go about “how” to do it. The why is, “I’m, hungry.” The how is, “I put together some food to make lunch.”

But if you ask me more fundamental questions about our lives, such as, “Why are people so cruel to each other and why is life so painful?” I would have to go on for days to explain all the why’s.

If you ask me, “How do I go about living a happy life, in spite of people’s cruelty and all the pain?” I will be able to give you some actions that have helped me achieve happiness. And I might even give some blanket statement about the human mind being hard-wired to survive at all costs. But then, you could keep asking, “Why, Why, Why?” Why survive at all costs if it is so painful?
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Therefore, “why,” the ultimate Great Unknown, is like the Source Energy of the Universe. It can never be completely explained in a way that takes all the factors involved and is fundamentally unknowable. But a step-by-step process of how to do something is within our grasp and a secondary part of an intention.

Usually it’s the reverse, your diet becomes cleaner as you become more and more enlightened.

Enlightened beings want to support the process of life within themselves. They do not want to eat food that doesn’t contribute to the health and well-being of their cells.

Some people think that if they give up junk food and alcohol they will speed their way to enlightenment. But it isn’t really that way. There isn’t a formula for becoming enlightened. especially concerning eating. “If I eat strictly vegan I will be so pure.” Often, this kind of end-point thinking leads to holier than thou behaviors that we have all seen with people who are trying to prove they are “perfect.”

You cannot buy your way into enlightenment by abstaining from one food or another.
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Many enlightened people I have known are not terribly concerned with the body anyway. They understand it is a magnificent thing that allows their souls to experience time and physicality but they know that they are not their bodies. On the one hand, they understand that their bodies are dependent on food. But they also know that they are not just dependent on food, because they are beyond all that.

Yes, within the context of Tononi’s definition of consciousness. He describes consciousness as a measure of information. It depends on the brain.

According to Tononi, the brain consists of billions of neurons. But these billions of neurons when added together are equal to more than the sum it their parts. That is consciousness to him.

It’s kind of like bread or wine. Bread is so much more than just flour, yeast, and water. Wine is so much more than just squished grapes. And so our brain, though consisting of parts, has something else that is more than just the individual parts. Something that is above and beyond.

He calls this Phi. And to him, Phi represents the degree to which any being remains conscious. This applies to animals as well as humans.

Yet, to me, this is just one form of consciousness. And it could be used as a measure for people in a coma or people on the way to crossing over into death. This is consciousness tied into the physical form of a being. It goes away after the cells die.
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Tononi does not address Cosmic Consciousness, which is not tied into the organic brain cells and is not dependent on physical forms. Cosmic Consciousness cannot be measured. And this has always been the problem in the great divide between Science and Spirituality. How can you prove what is unseen in a laboratory? Cosmic Consciousness does not depend on the senses, so how can scientists, who rely on their senses, prove that it exists?

Inner peace is always in the background. This can be a problem because the mind is trained to focus on the foreground (what is “out there”). So we are constantly scanning the scene “out there” for danger, trouble, what is out of place, what could bring us pleasure. And how we can avoid pain. We are not trained to look within.

As long as we continually focus on what is “Out There,” we will never find or keep inner peace. But if we retreat into that silent space within, from that vantage point we can watch the passing parade. We can still be a part of it but we are primarily an observer.

This doesn’t mean we become zombies, with no feelings. We cannot opt for only the good feelings and not feel the bad ones. We will still feel sorrow, pain, and happiness. But we also realize how transitory all these emotions are. They depend on our moods, our thoughts at the time, how much sleep we got the night before, etc.
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Continuous inner peace is possible, as the Buddha pointed out in his Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. But we must be devoted to understanding how to achieve it. It doesn’t come on its own and it takes vigilance to maintain it.

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​Nature is a process that is in constant transition from one phase to another. This includes rocks, which are eventually eroded away by forces of nature such as wind and water, to become sand and soil.

More than even a process, nature is an interaction. Nothing in nature exists on its own. Everything depends on everything else. Plants couldn’t live without the minerals in the soil from eroded rocks. Animals could not live without plants. Even if the animals are carnivores, somewhere along the food chain someone depended on plants. Plants could not live without water. Water follows the process of gravity, rains down on us and flows to the sea.

The sea is full of animals, that, like on land, are being born, surviving, eating each other, and dying. Their bodies nourish other animals and so it goes until the planet is consumed by the eventual death of the sun.

Within these processes and interactions we have what appear to be substances. These substances appear differently to different animals with their unique sensory apparatuses. A solid rock to us may look completely different to an octopus. We don’t know. We don’t see through the eyes of the octopus.
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It is all one enormous continuity, always changing, always transmuting into something else. Nothing is ever completely destroyed. It always changes into something else.

Many people who have been “brought to their knees” by suffering have found the spiritual path. It is almost a prerequisite. If we were all happy and contented with how things are going in the world and in our lives, we would not need to turn to a higher power to find answers for our struggles.

This is especially true for children who have found the world of the Spirit as a solution to their problems. This was so for me. I needed to make sense of the illness and deaths in my family. I needed to understand the cruelty I saw around me. At 5 years old, I threw myself at the mercy of my Higher Power (I used to call God, but now call Source Energy of the Universe). And, through my deep sadness came consolation from the powerful world beyond.

If these misfortunes had not been in my life, I would have been happily and thoughtlessly playing with my toys and dreaming of ice cream. Instead, I began an dialog with Higher Consciousness and found a deep solace that has stayed with me my entire life. I built inner resources that remained in the background of any turbulence.
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Eckart Tolle once remarked that if we didn’t have all kinds of drugs, alcohol, and tranquilizers, more people would hit bottom and be forced to seek the spiritual path as the only permanent way to peace. But because we are switching off our misery with all kinds of substances, we are not completing the organic journey towards enlightenment. We are creating a false Nirvana and have not found the natural pathways within ourselves.

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The Buddha is saying that anything apart from the underlying Source Energy of the Universe is impermanent, comes and goes, and can be destroyed in a second. This means that anything that appears to be solid matter, made of many distinct atoms and molecules can be gone in an instant.

Houses burn down, tsunamis kill thousands in an instant, cities can vanish in an earthquake. They are all made of separate parts and can all be destroyed. But the underlying principle that manifests in all these various forms can never be destroyed. It never goes away. It is never born. It never dies. It is forever, eternal, and indestructible.

When Buddha says, “Strive with earnestness,” he is referring to how easy it is to be swept up into believing that all this impermanent stuff is real and worth our time and energy. We get diverted onto the path of amassing more and more and lamenting our losses. We are driven by constant fear that it all will disappear and that it is all meaningless.
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It takes work and sincere passion (earnestness) to keep from being caught up in the whirlwind of the material world. It takes work to set ourselves apart from this form of mass hypnosis and create that contact with Eternal Source Energy. But Buddha didn’t say, “Be miserable while you strive with earnestness.” Misery does not fit into this kind of work. It is light, free, peaceful, and happy work.