[mgcardin]

The summary of Eckhart Tolle's teaching that Skiwi offered earlier this thread pretty much sums it up for me.

I think the huge majority of modern peoples -- and by "modern" I specifically mean the citizens of 21st century industrial/technocratic/consumerist society -- aren't satisfied at all. In fact, I think they -- we -- are some of the most miserable people ever to inhabit the planet. In material terms, even considering the freefall of many into poverty as the gap between rich and poor widens, people have never had it better. Even the huge majority of poor people enjoy the equivalent of hundreds of "energy slaves" working for them daily in the form of electricity-powered machines. Food, shelter, and clothing are abundant (at least in the First World) on a scale that most previous generations and civilizations scarcely even dreamed of.

But even with all of that, we moderns are afflicted with a collective malaise that renders us fundamentally unhappy and pitiful. I think the original 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead got things just right when it portrayed a group of people living in a consumerist paradise, locked away safely in a shopping mall with every conceivable luxury available to them while the world died outside. And these people with "everything" available to them felt their souls slowly wither as they slid into utter despair.

Tolle's statement in The Power of Now and A New World of the unchanging "inner" purpose of life addresses and remedies this situation by locating the ultimate goal and meaning of everything right here, right now, in the present moment, instead of deferring it into some future realm or otherworld whose very imagined remoteness then becomes a source of perpetual dissatisfaction and despair. And it does this without collapsing into the vapid, zombified pseudo-purpose of the poor folks trapped in the pseudo-paradise of Dawn's shopping mall, because it recognizes that all of those ultimate spiritual graces and meanings that most religious belief systems have always posited as residing elsewhere, in another time and place, are actually located in the perpetual present. The present moment is actually the "kingdom of God," the paradise, the blissful place of ultimate rest and fulfillment, that countless peoples have imagined in countless forms.

Of course Tolle isn't the only one to have stated this. It's always been the deep inner meaning of all high-level religious, spiritual, and philosophical systems, and it's been stated quite well by quite a few people over the course of several millennia. But for my money, Tolle is the single best communicator of it for us moderns. And it only enhances his credibility when you discover that he speaks quite directly about the fact that human civilization across the planet is currently suffering from collective insanity, and that the global civilization that we have built in the grip of this pathological mental/spiritual state has now entered its death throes and will soon eat itself alive, or suffer a permanent breakdown, or self-destruct, or disintegrate (pick your description). No pie-in-the-sky guy, that Eckhart Tolle. He sees things quite clearly and realistically, and recognizes the massive problems that we have created for ourselves. But he also provides the answer to the question of what's worth holding onto as the world flies apart, and of what's the ultimate value that any sane and sustainable civilization is going to have to base itself upon.

[vision-master]

We are living in the "dark ages" of consciousness.