Naming Clouds … Space: Eckhart Tolle, Part 1

I had paused, looking up while stepping toward my front door, initially drawn to three clusters of clouds, but then, focusing only on the second of the subtlest pastel pink, my mouth dropped open. Suddenly I was seeing “a convocation of eagles”—beaks, wings, and trailing-behind bodies, diaphanous tail feathers serenely passing. Then with a change in the wind pattern, the clouds rearranged into other, still lovely forms, but gone was my magical inspiration. By exploring the subject of clouds, I identified these as mid-level Altocumulus—but by whatever scientific name, they had unsnapped my childlike delight.

Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now has remained in my bookcase with no more than a glance since my first reading. I felt ambivalent about how well I understood his views and had been unsuccessful at adopting a practice. Seven years later, with greater consciousness and a renewed effort, I am now carrying out several new behaviors—one of which is looking upward more often.

My attention was first drawn to Tolle’s account of space. Reading selected sentences that I could understand, I learned that “Space has no ‘existence.’ … Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. … So what happens,” he questions, “if you withdraw attention from the objects in space and become aware of space itself? What is the essence of … [a] room?… Space, of course, empty space. There would be no ‘room’ without it.”*

I had found that a room was too small to invite my exploration. It was a clear day when I first looked upward and felt my attention hold. I was looking at vastness. Its emptiness felt friendly. As I continued this practice almost daily, I found my body feeling more and more like a twin of space—empty while contemplating. Tolle takes thought of space a step further. “You cannot think and be aware of space. … By becoming aware of the empty space around you, you simultaneously become aware of the space of no-mind, of pure consciousness: the Unmanifested. This is how a contemplation of space can become a portal for you.”*

A portal is a doorway from the manifested world to an Unmanifested God-essence in you. With this language, my reading becomes more thinking than feeling, which blocks my openness and requires my experiencing as necessary for understanding. But I accept my limitation, and that for me now, my ongoing thought to look upward is a beginning.

My realization is, “Truth can offer itself in a simple practice that gradually leads to a fuller and deeper understanding of what already existed, unknown, at our first step.”

* Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Canada: Namaste Publishing Inc., 1997), 114.

* Ibid., 115.