Of the several influences I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from in my journey, the most accessible and the one speaking most clearly and practically to Western audiences is Eckhart Tolle. In his works, one will consistently find a clear, sober, and easily-understandable presentation of the hallmarks of Self-realization, largely stripped of extraneous, confusing and elaborate symbolisms, vocabularies, and mythological themes common to the presentations of so many others hailing from religious or academic traditions. Eckhart has provided Western culture a modern-day vernacular for the consideration of the spiritual journey, delivered in such a way that even youngsters can follow the basic ideas and motifs with few or no problems. He speaks to the man and woman on the street, in practical, concrete terms, and yet throughout there can be no doubt that deep peace and joy bubble ceaselessly within him. Eckhart has also provided several meditations that are perfectly suited as entry-level paths into the art of meditation, and yet all have the capability to carry one very deeply into higher states of consciousness.
His seminal book, The Power of Now, came out in 1997, with subsequent books released periodically in the years after 2001. It was an interesting, real-time evaluation of the accuracy and validity of his presentation, to have been exposed to the work prior to my crossing of a spiritual threshold and again afterwards. In the former case, I could not see, but only intuit the essence of the subject matter and I could only provisionally grant the plausibility of it; in the latter, I understood clearly what he was saying at the level from which he spoke. He knows whereof he speaks, and I can wholeheartedly endorse his simple, yet very effective approach to opening these doors for his fellow man. If one is looking for a less daunting, but no less profound approach to an integral spiritual life, one could do no better than to begin with Eckhart’s teachings; they may well prove to be all one would need.
Eckhart was a tortured academic as a young man, subject to bouts of extreme anxiety, depression, and self-loathing. At age twenty-nine, his mental states came to a crescendo one night, when he spontaneously declared to himself that he could not go on any longer as he was, that he could not stand the person he was for a moment longer. The paradox of the statement arrested him and began an automatic and instantaneous deep self-inquiry – who was the “I” who could not stand himself? Was there one, or two “I’s”? He felt a vortex in his chest and heard an inner command to “Resist nothing”, then fell into an inner void. When he awoke the following morning, all was changed. There was a deep peace and stillness suffusing him and all around him, and the world shown with an inner light. His thinking mind was stilled. It took him two years to identify that a transformational event had occurred, as he had no prior basis for understanding such things. After years of quiet assimilation and integration, he began to share his event with others, and gradually began to write of it.
Today, Eckhart Tolle is widely recognized as one of the most inspiring and visionary spiritual teachers in the world. With his international bestsellers, The Power of Now and A New Earth—translated into 52 languages—he has introduced Westerners to the practice of presence and improved immeasurable numbers of lives in the process. His teachings focus on the significance and power of Presence, the awakened state of consciousness, which transcends ego and discursive thinking. Eckhart sees this awakening as the essential next step in human evolution.
Source: https://eckharttolle.com/about/
Via Perennis 