SDS 094: The power of now

Hello and welcome everybody back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Today I’ve got something super special that I want to share with you, it’s a book. The book is called “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. I’ve been reading it for the past couple of months, I’m about halfway through, and it’s a super popular book. It’s sold millions of copies and it’s been translated into dozens of languages. And this is a spiritual book. It’s about how to find happiness and how to grow conscious as a personality in your lifetime. And I find there’s so many exciting and interesting things that he talks about in the book, it’s very hard even to think of how to get started, how to approach this book, because there’s so many things I want to share with you.

But I’m just going to share one thing, the core underlying motif of the book, or the core underlying concept in this book, and then you can decide for yourself if you’d like to pick it up and read more about it. It’s quite a big book, by the way.

Let’s think about this. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are constantly thinking, like your brain is constantly churning away. You might be driving to work and you’re thinking. Or you might be walking in the nature, but you’re thinking about stuff, like problems, the future, the past, something that’s going on in your life. You’re constantly thinking. Or you’re even talking to somebody, somebody you care about a lot, but you’re not present, and you’re somewhere far away. You’re nodding along, but you’re thinking about your own thing, about your own problems, about something that’s going to happen, or something that you need to prepare for, or something that has happened.

And so everybody’s had situations like that. We have them on a daily basis. And that’s because our minds have taken over our lives. And this is what the book talks about, that most of the time – let’s think about it. What do we think about most of the time? We think about mostly two things, either the future or the past. We are either anticipating the future, does this sound familiar? “Right now I’m not happy, but that’s because I’m working towards this goal. As soon as I achieve this goal, I will be happy.” And then time passes, you achieve that goal, a new goal pops up. And then a new goal pops up. And you might be happy for a few seconds, or a few minutes, or a day or so. You might think you’re happy, but then again, you’ve got another thing to work toward. So you’re always looking to the future because that’s where your happiness lies.

Or the opposite. You’re thinking about the future because you’re worrying. This is even more common. You’re thinking about the future because your mind is projecting all of these possible scenarios and calculating what might happen and how you’re going to react and what you need to prepare and so on, so you’re constantly worrying about the future. And again, in both situations, you’re not present. Life is passing by. You’re walking, let’s say, in a park, and there’s beautiful nature around you, birds are chirping, but you’re not there. It’s as if you hadn’t walked in the park. You were always in the future.

Same thing goes about the past. We might be thinking about the past in a good way, reminiscing the past, or being proud of something that we’ve done, and you’ve probably had this in your life when you’ve accomplished a big goal, and then even weeks later, you find yourself daydreaming and going back to what an amazing job I did back then. Or you might be dreading the past. Something horrible might have happened in the past, and you cannot let go, you’re constantly thinking about it, it’s constantly affecting your mood.

And again, in both scenarios, we are not present. You might be talking to somebody, but you’re so affected by that emotion that you had 2 or 3 or 10 days ago, you are still under that, you’re still digesting that in your head all the time. And it’s as if you’re not talking to the other person. Or you might not even remember what they said when you leave the conversation. Or maybe you were reading a book, and like I find this a lot of the time. When I’m reading a book and I start daydreaming about the past or the future.

And so the reason for all of these things, Eckhart Tolle explains in his book, the reason for all these things is the ego. And why is that? Well because our identities are tied, are defined, by what we’ve accomplished in the past. The way society works, the way we have been raised, is we are defined as human beings by all of our accomplishments. By the amount of money we have, by the amount of degrees we’ve completed, by what we’ve done, by where we work, to what level we’ve risen in the corporate ladder, and by what car we drive, and things like that. And that is just basically pure ego. That thought that we are, as humans, as conscious human beings, we are defined by what’s happened in the past.

And the future is important, because as we’ve discussed, that’s where our mind thinks we will find happiness. That’s where we think we’ll find happiness. But that’s all an illusion. And Eckhart Tolle destroys this illusion. He says that this is all an illusion, you are now. You are what is present. You are not in the future. You are not in the past. You exist now. Right now. Not 5 minutes from now, not 10 minutes from now, not 10 days from now, not a year from now, or not a year ago. You exist now. There is nothing else as important but the now. And that’s why the book is called The Power of Now. And now is the time to be alive.

And moreover, he explains that it is an illusion of the mind that you will find your happiness, your love, or your joy, somewhere in the future. Or when you meet someone in the future, when something happens in the future, the reality is that you already have the love, joy, and happiness inside of you. You just need to see them. And the entity that feeds on the past and seeks the future is not you. It’s actually your mind. And you are not your mind.

This is the fundamental underlying principle of the book. That you are not your mind. Descartes said a long time ago cogito ergo sum. That means “I think, therefore I am.” Everybody’s probably heard that quote. And it was like a major breakthrough in psychology or philosophy back in the time, but Eckhart Tolle says that’s the biggest misconception. That our minds are merely tools in our bodies, just for us to use to solve problems. When we need to advance our life situation, and we need to overcome challenges, that’s what our minds are for. But right now, they’ve taken over us so much that they’ve possessed us, and we think we are our minds, and if you think about it, about 90% of the thinking that we do per day is useless thinking. It’s either dreading the past, or worrying about the future, or daydreaming, or things like that. It’s not useful thinking to actually overcome challenges. And that is the biggest problem. That is what this book helps you realise, and helps you overcome.

And so, to prove this point, to substantiate the point, because it’s very hard to believe in this if you haven’t experienced it for yourself. I’m sure we have experienced it. We’ve all experienced this fact, that we’re not our minds, for ourselves. And there are points in time when there is no mind. When the mind stops. It happens rarely in life, usually, unless you’re very conscious about your life, unless you’re very present all the time. The only times that people normally experience it is when something so significant happens that your mind just stops for a few seconds. For instance, you see something or someone so beautiful that you have no words. That you have no thoughts. And your mind just stops. Or something terrible happens, and you’re lost for words again. Or Eckhart Tolle gives the example of when you see the birth of a child. It’s such a different experience, an experience out of this world, that again your mind stops. Something so significant has to happen to stop your mind.

But at the same time, I’ve got two exercises now that I wanted to share with you that might help you experience this right now. And when you actually experience it, when your mind stops, you can actually see that you are not your mind. It’s such a cool experience. I find it very bizarre, and very counter-intuitive even. It really inspires me to explore this further. So the first exercise, as it’s explained in the book, is when you’re by yourself, when you have some time, when you’re sitting somewhere on a couch, or on a chair, close your eyes. And then just say to yourself, “Hm, I really wonder what my next thought will be.” And concentrate really, really hard to wait for that thought. Try to catch it. As if you are a cat looking at a mouse hole, waiting for the mouse to come out.

And once you say that, once you say the words, “Hm, I wonder what my next thought will be,” and you really wait for that thought, you will find that you’ve just confused your mind. Your mind will be caught off guard, it won’t know what to do. And for a few seconds, 1, 2, 3, maybe even 5 seconds, you will have no thoughts. Because your mind can see that you’re observing it. And this is another principle in the book, that you don’t necessarily have to get rid of your thoughts, sometimes it’s enough just to observe your own mind. And so it can feel that you’re observing it, and it’s like it doesn’t know what to do. But then it finds its ways, and within 3 or 5 seconds, it will slip in a thought and you will find yourself in this thought pattern, and you will get carried away again. But for those 2 or 3 seconds, you will see that your mind stops, but you still are. You still exist. You’re still there. You’re watching your mind. It’s a really cool experience. It’s like a mind blowing experience. And for me, that shows that there is some merit to what he says, that we are not our minds, that they’re separate, that the mind is separate to you.

And the second exercise is something that I came up with for myself. In the book he talks about there’s two ways to be conscious, to be absolutely present. One way is to switch off your mind, and so then when you’re walking through the nature, or seeing the trees, or observing the sunset, or even driving, or talking to someone, you can actually have the full experience. You can take it in and feel the joy, feel the love, feel the happiness that’s inside you. But the other way to do it is, instead of stopping your mind, try to focus immensely on the situation where you are, on the present. Try to have so much focus on the present that your mind won’t even have enough capacity to think about the future or the past. You can always do it, but again, it only lasts a few seconds, unless you train yourself to do it more and more and more. It only lasts a few seconds, and then, again, thoughts start to slip in.

And so the way I do it for myself is, whenever I go into an elevator – so right now, I’m living in a place where there is an elevator. And whenever I go into an elevator, I try – I don’t always remember, but I try to remember that yes, I’m in an elevator, now I’m going to be super conscious, super present. I look at the walls of the elevator, I feel the texture of the walls, I try to observe the colour of the walls. If there are people, I try to understand what colours they’re dressed in, and just try to absorb as much as I can, and not let my mind think about the past or the future. And it’s good, an elevator’s a good example, because it only lasts like 20 seconds, or half a minute, before you get to your floor, so it’s not a very complex exercise. It’s very hard to get carried away. It’s easy to maintain control. So if you don’t have an elevator, maybe there’s an escalator that you get on to, or maybe there’s, I don’t know, maybe every time you get in the car and put your seatbelt on, maybe during that action of putting your seatbelt on, you can be super conscious and super present.

So there you go, that’s what the book is about. Very interesting. Those are just some of the examples. If you apply the same principles, I’ll just give you another application of this. If you apply the same principles, he says that for instance, a lot of people look for love in another person. But the reality is that love is already inside you. And if you’re constantly just present, you will find that love, joy, and happiness inside your own heart, and then you can share it with other people even more. So there’s lots of ways that this knowledge can impact your life.

And I personally enjoy the book a lot. I’m halfway through and continue reading it. It gets complex at times, and sometimes I don’t understand all of the things that he says, and I probably will have to reread it again in the future. But the things that I have understood, they’ve really opened my eyes to looking at my own life in a different perspective.

And so I really hope that what we discussed today was useful, and if you are interested in the book, again it’s called “The Power of Now”, and maybe you’ll learn some more things from there. And thanks so much for being here today sharing these 15 minutes with me. And I look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, happy analyzing.