Summary: A guide to spiritual enlightenment in your every day life
Rating and Recommendation: 4/5; recommend for the spirtual but not religious, and for anyone looking to open their minds
Review: Let me say, first and foremost, that I found huge swaths of this text to be problematic. That being said, there are bigger portions of this text that I found fascinating.
Eckhart’s whole theory is that your ego - your mind - feeds on chaos. It literally needs to create problems in order to function, to solve and to cure and to progress. Which means our minds are fundamentally disordered, and the point of enlightenment is to remove the chaos and allow ourselves to live in a state free of problems and problem solving.
The trouble is that we’re addicted to the chaos. It’s how must of us live and operate every day, and we’ve come to think of this ongoing battle - between calm and chaos - as normal. It’s not.
Personally, I identify really strongly with my own brand of drama and destruction. It’s like when you tell a story over and over again and realize that you’re no longer recalling the event, but rather your identification with its fallout. That’s probably the takeaway here: that your life and your life situations are not the same and are actually wholly unrelated. If you can stop yourself from projecting your feelings onto your surroundings, if you can instead just live in the Now, you’ll be on the path to enlightenment.
As an aside, anyone who knows me knows that I have an almost irrational reverence for my brother. He’s not perfect, but he has a wisdom that’s hard to come by and a peace that I find contagious. I quote him a lot. I hear his voice in my head more than anyone’s, because his mind works naturally in a way I have to train mine to work. Reading this was like having a conversation with my brother. It was a steady stream of logic, insightful and thought provoking, but also a bit condescending, which has been the tone of our relationship for nearly 30 years. That’s sort of the beauty of this book, though - you can read it over and over and when you get to the end and finally don’t feel condescended or talked down to, it probably means you’ve reached enlightenment.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and as someone who finds comfort in hippie holistic health, I was pretty familiar with a lot of the language being tossed around in the book. There’s much talk about mind energy and vibrational frequencies, which I’ll warn you, become a little outlandish. Even I found it to be a bit fringe, a bit out there, and it turned me off pretty early.
If you can overlook the language, though, and really get down to the crux of his messaging, I think his suggestions and practices are more or less applicable to all aspects of life. HOWEVER, there are certain sections where he bites off more than he can chew. Namely, trying to apply his theory of enlightenment to the physical pain of menstruel cramps. Hard pass on any man who feels confident enough to talk about the physical pain of being female. It‘s reaching, and it was frustrating to read.
Obviously the goal here is enlightenment, but the theme (in application) is forgiveness. I find that an apt end to 2018 or perhaps an apt beginning to 2019. The whole premise here is that time is a concept and that the present is all you have. So forgive yourself your past and your future. Let it go. And just be.
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