Remember: we live in time.
I gave the mindfulness movement, the fans of the now, credit in my last blog. Now I want to take issue with one of their leaders, Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now about 10 years ago and Oprah helped him sell about a jillion copies of his books. He is a good spiritual thinker. I give him credit for much, and you can check him out on YouTube for yourself.
But he is way off for many Westerners who don’t have a real home in Eastern thinking. We all can learn much from the East, and I have, of course. But most of us are not wired to have our spiritual/intellectual roots there. And Tolle is so wrong when he opens his The Power of Now with this line, “I have little use for the past and rarely think of it.”
What kind of ridiculous over-statement is that! As if those of us who reflect on our memories are too un-evolved to stay in the now. Give me a break, Eck. No disrespect here, but come back to the planet please.
Jung spent years studying the East, and ripped into the intellectual pretense of Westerners who “tried” the East, mimicking its facade but not its essence. And he warned us not to go where we don’t belong. (I also believe that, in the 50-plus years since Jung’s death, the West has acquired some Eastern DNA it did not have when he was studying it. Like the gender thing, we have moved on as a species, into new territory.) Still I like his warning.
This is how Jung put it in one of his riffs during his Seminar on Dream, about 1930:
We live in time. Their watch (Easteners) is eternity. To ignore time is useless and fruitless for us.
Jung says more that actually complicates my point here, but you get the point I hope.
Stay in time, everyone. Do your yoga and meditation and breathe and be mindful. Say your prayers. Just don’t ignore your past. The now contains your past, and your past saturates the now.
Image above Some rights reserved by gadl