Stillness Speaks
Eckhart Tolle
This short book is a very versatile and easy read, one which is not designed to be digested in full, rather to be picked up and put down regularly, sometimes even just sitting with, in stillness.
He talks of the importance of this moment, the beauty, power and wisdom in stillness, the silence of it. He has written a much more detailed book, The Power of Now, one which I will review in another blog, another powerful read. Both teach us about the illusion of the past and future, which the leads to the illusion of fear. We are either anxious about the future, or dwelling in some kind of regret or pain of the past. In doing so we are missing right now.
We only have right now. This short book serves to draw us back to now, to celebrate stillness, the ability to surrender to silence, to discard distraction. His words do not preach, in fact, as he describes, the only true role of a spiritual teacher is not to provide new lessons or information, but to help you remove that which separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you already know in the depth of your being.
It is this wisdom, this knowing, that we find ourselves, only beyond all the clutter of noise, life, work, TV, phones, traffic and activity. He draws your focus to the here, and encourages you to just “be”. I love this concept because it underpins the activity of mindfulness and meditation, two practices I am getting better and better at. Wisdom and knowing, for example, is in the rustle of the leaves in a quiet breeze. But he takes this concept deeper, pushing you to ask, who is looking at the tree, or the leaves? Is it you or it is something altogether deeper, consciousness itself, looking at its own creation?
This book, although 129 pages, really stretches the way in which we view our own reality, our own existence. It is a book to keep close, because each paragraph is carefully designed with its own message, one which suspends you in the moment, and changes everything you have ever thought, and everything you have ever witnessed. The title really does capture exactly what the book shows:
“Stillness Speaks”.
The paradox is that he describes words as no more than signposts. That to which they point is not to be found within the realm of thought, but a dimension within yourself that is deeper and infinitely vaster than thought. A vibrantly alive peace is one of the characteristics of that dimension. A beautiful book, and one I will never put down for long, the pages already earmarked from several years of love.
