Soul’s Code

Contrast the highly Cartesian approach of the medical experts in HBO’s Addiction with, say, the non-dualistic diagnosis of addiction offered by three spiritual teachers we’ve posted about during the past couple of weeks. HBO probably deemed this kind of examination too challenging for its mainstream audience:

Don’t misinterpret stillness with going off to sleep, or the kind of stillness you might have after a few drinks. You might drift off a bit, you can’t remember your problems so you might feel a little bit better. People sometimes drink to get rid of, for a little while, the torture of their mind telling them what their problems are. So they drink, and for a moment they don’t remember their problems. But of course there’s a price to pay because there’s a lowering of consciousness. So you go lower towards the vegetable realm.

• Eckhart Tolle, Living the Liberated Life and Dealing With the Pain Body

There is no such thing as an addiction to an object; there is only attachment to the uninvestigated concept arising in the moment.

If you think alcohol makes you sick or confused or angry, then when you drink it, it’s as if you’re drinking your own disease. You’re meeting alcohol where it is, and it does exactly what you know it will do. And if you believe that you really want to keep drinking, just notice what it does to you. There’s no pity in it. There’s no victim in it. And eventually there’s no fun in it — only a hangover.

• Byron Katie, chapter 11, Loving What Is

So I’ve been reading about being in the moment. It’s a great idea, but it sounds impossible to live in today’s world. I mean, imagine focusing on the now of eating a meal. You chew your food, you smell it, you feel it, you taste it you chew it some more and you swallow. It’s intense. It takes time. I can just imagine my boys asking their mother what daddy was doing at the table, having a three hour dinner.

So is there a middle road down the middle road? Can you live in the moment and live among normal people? Eckhart Tolle doesn’t offer us much in the way of advice in how to balance the two pursuits. Is presence more easily pursued in a monastery or on a mountain than within the confines of our mundane lives?

You may have noticed from our last few posts that some of the biggest brands on the enlightenment circuit are criss-crossing the continent right now. We’ve put all the links we’ve scattered around Soul’s Code in one place here. Click on a speaker’s name for their full tour schedule, which we’ve annotated with highlights.

Caroline Myss, the author of Sacred Contracts tours a new book, Entering the Castle

• March 8 Jacob Javits Convention Ctr., New York
• March 21 L.A. Convention Ctr., Los Angeles
• March 23 Masonic Center, San Francisco

Eckhart Tolle, the Grandmaster Flash of spiritual teachers, has been living the reclusive and contemplative life we kind of expect of a post-modern mystic. He hasn’t made a public appearance for more than two years. (One of the very last was recorded as this talk in the fall of 2004 in Santa Rosa, CA). His publisher, Penguin, blew eight head valves when he declined to do a single signing, speech or interview to promote his 2005 book, A New Earth. And we loved it! There’s a definite symmetry between that style and Tolle’s teachings, which revolve around the connection between being and silence.

But today, Tolle entered a new phase when he posted the itinerary for a speaking tour that will take him from Dallas to Denmark — and a fundraiser on Feb. 22 in Beverley Hills that has stars like Rosie O’Donnell, Ben Stiller and Paula Abdul attached to it.