While I was on my daily walk, I listened to “The Everyday and the Transcendent” a podcast on Spotify in Eckhart Tolle’s “Essential Teachings” series.
Was it worth the listen? I say yes.
I enjoy learning from Eckhart occasionally but not all the time. He has a soothing voice and his stream-of-consciousness delivery style is hypnotizing.
However, after a couple hours of his teachings, they all begin to sound exactly the same. And that’s because his core message never changes- which isn’t a bad thing.
Beware self help or spiritual gurus who hold up a carrot of further secrets. As my hairstylist said after visiting an aura cleanser for the first time, “You can overdo stuff like that.” By which she meant, pouring piles of money into someone’s hands to “fix” something you can’t even perceive.
The cool thing about Eckhart’s teachings is you can begin practicing and perceiving what he’s talking about right this second, no matter your situation or state-of-mind.
For example, in this podcast, a practical tool he offers for spiritual insight is to simply observe what he calls your “inner body”. His focus, which he says he’s used over the years to great success, is to monitor what the energy of his hands are doing.
How do you do that? Simple- feel your hands. Act like you’re going to pick up a pencil, but don’t move. There! You can feel that can’t you.
Do this multiple times a day or just once in awhile and you’ll begin taking your focus away from what Eckhart calls “thought forms” and enter the state of “the now”.
This particular podcast deals with “the everyday” which Eckhart describes as your job, your family, your home, all of the trappings of the physical life. He says most people never move beyond the everyday. We can get lost in the world around us, which he reminds us, are simply projections that we create through our perceptions.
He describes the everyday as a horizontal line- a visualization that I found very helpful.
When you are lost in anxiety or fear, you’re moving either forwards or backwards on this line and not staying in the present moment, which is where the second part of his visualization comes in.
Eckhart describes “the transcendent” as a vertical line that intersects the horizontal line of daily living. He says we travel upwards and downwards on this line through our thoughts as we go about our lives.
The thing is: most of humanity isn’t aware that we’re doing this. We unconsciously move about our day, responding in a kneejerk way to things we perceive as “happening to” us. And, Eckhart says, they actually are “happening to” us because we aren’t aware we are doing it.
If only we could realize our own internal processes, then, he says, we would realize that nothing really “happens to” you. It is all movement along the metaphorical everyday and the transcendent lines of our lives.
We break the power that thoughts have over us and enter into the timeless state of the Now. The holy grail, so to speak, of spiritual experiences.
Highly recommended for spiritual seekers who are looking for practical ways to practice being present. Thanks for reading!
If you’re interested in Eckhart Tolle’s further teachings, here my book review of his “Stillness Speaks”:
And you can listen to the podcast yourself here:
- The Ballad of a Small Player: a Metaphysical Movie Review
- Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-Of-Body Traveler by Kurt Leland
- Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self by Michelle Belanger
- Archetypes on the Tree of Life: The Tarot as Pathwork by Madonna Compton
- The Goddess and the Shaman: The Art & Science of Magical Healing by J.A. Kent
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