The Hidden Power in Spiritual Books | Eckhart Tolle

Just as reading a book can be helpful, any book that has come out of presence, a spiritual book, has a very different quality to it. I talked earlier about classics and that this is slightly different. Spiritual book, there are many spiritual books around. Many of them have good, excellent information that will be helpful to many people. And some books, in addition to having helpful information, have an added quality to it that is very hard, if not impossible, to define. But you recognize it somehow when you read it, when you open it. And one of the things you recognize it by is that you can go back to the book after you've finished it and read it again or open it anywhere. And it's always fresh and new. Although you might already know the information by now, you might even have read the book two or three times. And obviously, you know the information. And yet, when you read those lines, something happens inside you. And that is, it helps you enter presence. So the book then has a secondary function in addition to providing new information, helpful advice, techniques, whatever it may be. Also, somehow, in a way that I cannot explain because I don't understand it, the energy field of presence has somehow crept into the words, into the flow of words, other words, and that when you read it and there is an opening in you, then that happens. You become present as you read. And this is why some people have read The Power of Now or other books five, six times over the years. Some people say they've read it 10 times. You can live with a book. At some point, you don't need to read sequentially anymore. You can open it anywhere and read a passage. The little book that I wrote, Stillness Speaks, is particularly helpful for this. Stillness Speaks is for meditative reading rather than informational reading. So you only need to read a page at a time or a chapter, the chapters are very short, or even just one of the little entries at a time. And then these are powerful pointers. And after reading, as you read, immediately it puts you into presence. Anybody who tells me they love Stillness Speaks, then I know that, well, that means you're already an advanced practitioner of presence. And others say, well, Stillness Speaks doesn't say so much to me. I understand that on the level of information. It doesn't give you that much, but it has a different purpose. And this also applies to other books like I Am That by Nisargadatta, the chain-smoking guru. A very powerful passage, I Am That, Nisargadatta. That is a similar kind of book. You don't have to read it sequentially. Each chapter is self-contained. And you can just read one chapter at a time or even just a paragraph at a time. And there's a power in the book, that is. And this is a book that was based on the spoken word. And that spoken word, somebody else took it who was also able to tune into presence and translated it from the language, whatever language he spoke, Gujarati or something, I don't remember what it's called. And that translated into, and in the translation also, he was able to provide a translation without loss of presence. That's quite an enormous achievement. So that's a great classic that I would recommend. And other spiritual books, they may come to you. You may already know them. Depends also whether you are, what kind of form of teaching you are drawn to or resonate with, whether it's Eastern, more the Eastern teachings coming out of India or Buddhist teachings, or whether it's, you still feel you resonate more with Christian teachings, but you're not satisfied with conventional Christianity. Otherwise, of course, you wouldn't be here if you were satisfied with conventional Christianity. But perhaps you can sense there is something there that has a depth that is not usually revealed to you in church. And in that case, A Course in Miracles would be one because A Course in Miracles uses Christian terminology, but takes it to a deeper level. And another teacher is, of course, Joel Goldsmith, who was teaching in the 50s and 60s in the United States, who also uses Christian terminology, but takes it to a much deeper level than what you would hear in a church. So that's the, those are also books that are spiritually alive. And of course, the ancient classics, the Tao Te Ching, in a good translation, there's so many different translations of the ancient Chinese Book of Wisdom going back two and a half thousand years. More in, not that long ago, Stephen Mitchell published a translation or interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, which is really good. Stephen Mitchell is the husband of Byron Katie. So he translated the Tao Te Ching, or rather interpreted it into English. And that's good. It takes somebody who translates a spiritual book into another language, needs to be present. Otherwise, a lot can get lost in the process of translation. The famous expression is lost in translation. Always great, the Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi, beautiful, powerful spiritual teachings, highly recommended. He talks of the self, which it means the deep eye, what I call sometimes the deep self. Again, has that energy field that is always alive. You can go back again and again and again, and it's alive. So these books are like living beings, almost, living entities. They contain something. How it got in there, I don't know. Somehow it did. But it needs you to release it, to bring it back to life. So it's there. It needs somebody, not just anybody, because there may be people that open the book, Ramana Maharshi or whoever, and say, what's he talking about? The same way with The Power of Now. I have reports of people who have given The Power of Now. They were deeply changed and influenced by The Power of Now and said, oh, I have this relative. He really needs this. I'm giving it to him for Christmas. And then it's great. Look, this is a fantastic book. You have to read it. It'll change your life. And a few weeks later, they call it, did you, have you started reading a book? Yeah, I read two pages, but couldn't understand a word. And then the giver of the gift was very disappointed. Oh, how is that possible? There was not yet anything in the reader to resonate with it. It was too blocked. It wasn't there yet. And that's fine. There's nothing you can do. You can say, you keep, just keep reading and you'll get, no, you won't get it. Even if you force yourself and keep reading, you won't get it. But the best advice you can give in that case is put it on the highest shelf you have and go back to it in a few years' time after you've suffered a bit more. And actually people have told me that they were given the book or they found it somewhere and it was meaningless to them and they put it on a shelf, years passed and something happened in their lives and then they made them pick up the book again. And the same book that was meaningless a few years ago suddenly is amazing. So that means something has opened up in the reader so that the spiritual message can be received without being totally obstructed by the conditioned mind, the density of the conditioned mind. There's been a little crack has opened up in the egoic shelf. And that probably was the result of some kind of suffering. So the book was meaningless until I lost my job, my investments and my wife left me and then I got sick. And then suddenly I picked up the book. That's how suffering can work. So suffering isn't all bad. As I said, it's necessary until you realize that it's unnecessary.