I’d been noticing this sitting on varying desks in the American Corner of Sofia City Library for a while now and finally decided to give it a try. I must say that it wasn’t as good as The Power of Now, which I loved and want to return to. It could be because this one I read, while The Power of Now I listened to Eckhart Tolle himself reading, which was an experience in its own right. A New Earth was sort of repetitive and nothing really new was introduced, as if Tolle was contractually obliged to write something but couldn’t come up with anything new. But as I’m writing these words I wonder: what new could there be? I suppose the lesson is and will always be the same – though you can play around with the presentation: awareness is all there is, be wary of the ego in yourself and others, meditate. Maybe my criticism is invalid, then, which wouldn’t however change the fact that I didn’t find it as appealing as The Power of Now. But for you, if you read or listened to this one first, it could – for all I know – work the other way around.
These are two of my favourite bits:
“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.”
“Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two world’s. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purposes have not merged.”
I thought the cover was beautiful too. Here’s something similar I stumbled upon on Tumblr yesterday. Click on the pic for the post.
TLDR; in order to make a new habit stick, just try to do it every day for 7 weeks – 49 days. The catch? You have to have a card like a calendar on which you’ll physically draw a big red X on and for each day you’ve worked on your habit.
The above comment became such a hit (notice the 4× Reddit gold? That’s having won the internet) that it inspired a whole new subreddit, theXeffect, and even a whole new website dedicated to this idea, fortyninedays.com.
As you might have realised by now, I like this sort of challenge thingies, because they help me structure my life, which in its normal state makes a random splotch of red paint on a wall look like the epitome of predictability and order.
So I decided to try it.
On May 8th I made not one, not two, but four cards. I thought it would be challenging, but entirely feasible.
3 weeks + 1 day later, this is the state of things:
The habits I thought I wanted to make permanent in myself by using these cards are:
Making a daily sketch;
Watching something in the languages I’m studying;
Writing something apart from morning pages every day, be it posts, poems or working on those stories I have in my head;
Meditating.
Some of these daily habits were more successful in their conception than others.
The state of things right now is that, as you can probably see, it’s become pretty difficult to stick to my goal. Week 1 was more ore less smooth sailing, but since then I have been finding myself more and more in situations where I just can’t focus on my tasks, be it because of oversocialising (here in Sofia it has come to the point where there’s almost never a time when we don’t have a guest staying over – which means going out with them, spending time together etc, on top of the usual EVS chaotic experience), travelling, internet distraction…
Three weeks in, as things are now, I think I can safely say that I have bitten off more than I can chew . Two of the habits are creative, one needs me to clear my head from all the day’s little nagging things (which I’ve always found very difficult, hence I’ve found meditation to be so demanding and never really stuck to it) and the other needs me to have at least a block of undistracted 45 minutes to spare every day in front of a screen. It sounds easy enough, but my life right now is so disorganised (perhaps for good) that I’m struggling to find even the structure needed to work on structuring it!
The most trouble I’ve had with creative writing, which is just too broad a term. I combined it with writing something in the languages I’m learning at the moment, which has culminated into my polyglot diaries, but this doesn’t seem to be working out right now, since it’s already been a week since I wrote anything for them. At least today’s X has already been taken care of by me writing this post.
My progress on the rest of the challenges isn’t in much better shape: watching something in a different language has been reduced to watching Battlestar Galactica with Bulgarian subtitles – I don’t have the patience to watch anything else dubbed -, after many days, it was only yesterday that I sketched anything apart from logos or plants, and my meditations have been so full of inner noise I often come out more stressed out than I was when I went in. It’s adviseable to meditate in only certain altered states: experience says that mild-to-moderate drunkenness is not one of them.
I wanted to share my progress on this because I think it’s time I did something to make these challenges a priority. What is that which is most direcly influencing the way I spend my time, how much free time I think I have, and what I do with it? What is it that is so deeply influencing my capability of finding and creating stillness, the flow of my creative juices, my focus on my EVS and my language studying – in other words, how I use my alone time?
I… um… “enjoyed” The Power of Now in audiobook form — difficult choice of words here because “read” would be a lie and “listened to” would make it Power of Now sound like a song. I guess audiobooks need their own transitive verb now. Anyway.
Audiobooks have their strengths and weaknesses, obviously. I had the pleasure to enjoy the Power of Now as I was exploring a part of my city that had long been invitingly mysterious and still. The setting reinforced the listening and vice versa. The experience would have certainly been very different had I visually read the book in that jungle of reed. Those hours of exploration are now inseperably interwoven with the listening in my mind. I touched the Power of Now as described in the book while I was there; my attention was not in the past, nor in the future, it was squarely focused on my ears and eyes. I didn’t finish it during that exploration, however, and most of my subsequent listenings were rife with inattention. I thus have problems now remembering which parts I do not have any recollection of; I have no page to turn to. When you’re visually reading a book, the lack of memory is connected with an image related to the book — perhaps a page number or even the visual arrangement of the page, the shape of all the letters in tandem jumping out to create a subconscious bookmark. When aurally reading a book, this image is connected with the surroundings, especially if one listens to the book when using mass transit and all kinds of faces and other people are there to capture the attention and fantasy in ways reeds cannot.
Enough with describing the medium. The book in itself is very good. I did not find Tolle awfully didactic and the Q&As through which he chose to convey his teachings were satisfactory catalysts for bringing out what he wanted to say. Neither was I annoyed with his “recycling” of old teachings; essentially, that’s what religions have been doing anyway, repackaging old wisdom in different flavours. His message is more important and relevant now than it ever was, what with our lifestyle crisis and general existential confusion: 1) There is no past or future, only present. Giving in to dominance of the mind filters out true consciousness and presence (as in being in the moment wherever and whenever one is, not in the past and future) 2) People’s minds are imposters pretending to be their true selves and worrying about all sorts of things when there is no real reason for it.
What I found slighlty annoying was his insistence on quoting Jesus. Then again, my being annoyed with Jesus is only part of being disgusted by the church and naturally connecting hiw with it. That is however, as I understand it, a logical fallacy (I would like to mention at this point that discrediting the book because Oprah popularised it is comitting the very same fallacy). To do Tolle justice he does say that he’s not in that way supporting Christianity over other religions (he often quotes Buddha as well as other enlightened figures of the past), he’s merely putting Jesus’ words ouf ot the context of that religion and into the context of the shared meaning behind all religions, of course with added stress to Eastern philosophies which emphasise more strongly on those aspects than the –generally moralistic– monotheistic ones.
Now that I’m trying to sum up the actual contents of this book I’m finding it hard to describe, even though I think I did get the gist of it. If I knew how to accurately and meaningfully reproduce it I wouldn’t have felt the need to read it. I guess “true wisdom cannot be shared through words; it lies within and waits for the right wake up call”. Yep, it’s one of those…
Today, I woke up early, after just 3 hours of sleep, for my morning Virtual World & Animation class. In this class we discuss about the history of computer animation, analyze short and long films and talk about the philosophical aspects of cyberspace and virtual worlds.
I was caught off-guard when Mrs. Dimitra showed us the works of John Whitney, the person who is credited as the first to make animated films using computer graphics. His works are of course remnants of another era, where computer animation did not have the huge potential it has today. However, they show as well as any film the time-transcending power of art…
These films reach a form of spirituality in their abstraction… I felt as if I was genuinely meditating while watching Arabesque. I like the music very much as well. Genius.
Oh it feels so good having classes and attending lectures as fulfilling as this! 🙂
A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
