If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many people have discovered how to experience greater inner peace as a result of reading one or more of Eckhart Tolle’s books. Yes, that truly is wonderful, for all those people, and for their friends and family. Here I want to describe what in all my observation is usually the next step for these same people to go forward. Unfortunately, many of them don’t seem to get to that step, — well, not fully. So I do hope this helps. (Some people see me as just spouting more Tolle criticism. I hope from this article it’ll be particularly clear that what I’m really trying to do is give people good suggestions about how to apply what Eckhart Tolle says more deeply in their lives.)

So let’s take it that you’ve read one of Eckhart Tolle’s books, and now you’re better able to sense and experience inner peace. (Again, you already have my congratulations and genuine appreciation.) Let me ask you: Is the following possibly true for you, in some way?  Almost anybody and anything you love keeps bringing up a little bit of pain inside you. You never specifically noticed that pain before, but now you’re somehow a little more sensitive. Maybe you’ve even noticed that that pain doesn’t go away – not until you’ve summoned up the courage and the persistence to just keep on facing it. As you “out-stare” one bit of pain, another bit arises to take its place, and it seems to be more intense. All of it coming out of or with your love, somehow. Then, with more of your “out-facing” of the pain for some days, it kind of magically lessens and disappears. It “dissolves,” if you like. At least for a while.  

Well, unfortunately some of Eckhart Tolle’s writings seem to suggest at times that you “dissolve” that pain with one click of your fingers, so to speak. And that then it’s all gone away, maybe one second after you identified it was there. But I’m sorry to say it simply doesn’t work that way. The more you become able to realize inner peace, the more deeply life will sooner or later put you into hell, and through the very people and things you love. Don’t worry! You haven’t lost any of the realization of peace that you’ve ever achieved, from any time in your life. What’s happened is that life always throws a deeper level of hell at you precisely because you’ve reached a deeper level of peace. You’re ready to handle it.

Simply keep going, keep facing what is. It’s my hope that because you’re somebody who’s reading this, there’s a good chance that the pain and the hell will eventually get less intense, permanently – but normally that’s only after a lot of baggage gets shipped out. Honestly, don’t you love a challenge?

Everybody knows that love somehow always brings lots of pain as well. And many of the classical myths are about how the hero has to go through the length and breadth of hell to win back his love the way he wanted that love to be. If you’re serious about inner or spiritual growth, this is surely your story too.