Di Indonesia sudah terbit terjemahan buku "The Power of Now" tulisan Eckhart Tolle. Buku ini sangat laris di Barat. Banyak orang mengatakan bahwa ajaran yang terkandung dalam buku ini sangat mirip, kalau tidak hendak dikatakan persis sama, dengan ajaran Krishnamurti. Tetapi mereka yang cukup mendalami K akan melihat perbedaan yang nyata antara ajaran Tolle dan ajaran K, perbedaan yang tidak terlihat oleh mereka yang tidak atau kurang memahami K.
Di situs Amazon.com buku "The Power of Now" (TPON) jelas menjadi bestseller, terbukti dari banyaknya orang yang me-review buku itu; tidak kurang dari 903 review. Sedangkan kumpulan tulisan Krishnamurti yang terbaru, "Total Freedom" (TF), hanya di-review oleh tidak lebih dari 19 orang. Yang menarik adalah, dari 900+ review terhadap TPON, sekitar 13% di antaranya memberikan 'bintang satu' (sangat jelek) atau 'bintang dua' (jelek), sedangkan di antara ke-19 pe-review TF semuanya memberikan 'bintang lima' (sangat bagus) atau 'bintang empat' (bagus), hanya satu yang memberikan 'bintang tiga'. Jadi jelas, para pembaca TPON sangat bervariasi: ada pencari spiritual yang serius, tapi banyak pula yang sekadar "spiritual shopping". Fakta bestseller tampaknya disebabkan karena buku Tolle memenuhi harapan ego banyak orang akan pencerahan spiritual; orang-orang ini tidak tertarik pada ajaran K yang tidak menjanjikan apa-apa.
Daripada repot-repot menjelaskan apa perbedaan antara ajaran Eckhart Tolle dan ajaran J. Krishnamurti, di bawah ini saya sampaikan tulisan yang dibuat oleh seorang yang menamakan dirinya "Northern Light" terhadap buku TF dan buku TPON sebagai review di Amazon.com. Penulisnya memberikan 'bintang lima' untuk TF dan 'bintang satu' untuk TPON.
Salam,
hudoyo
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<bintang lima> The austere beauty of Truth , May 13, 2005
By NorthernLights (Beijing, China)
Krishnamurti...
Who reads him nowadays? Who ever listened to him when he was still with us? At the end of his life, people were deriding him because apparently nobody, not a single child in all the schools he had founded in Europe, America and India, had awakened. Apparently, it was all a failure and today Brockwood Park, the school he helped set up in England, is begging money because hardly anybody sends gifts or remembers K's noble educational cause in his will.
This message is truly an austere and challenging message of no hope, of no tomorrow of guaranteed liberation. There is no comforting Krishnamurtite doctrine to hold onto. This the mind must irrevocably hate if it is flippant, looking for pleasure or security.
I first read Krishnaji when I was still a staunch traditionalist Catholic. I think the title of the unassuming little volume was "Letters to Students". Although it was couched in very simple terms and contained no slick neo-advaita paradoxes about nonpeople having ever bought any shoes, I didn't understand a word of what was said and thought the man must be some sort of crazy radical. The only idea that stuck with me was the saying "a truly humble man doesn't know he is humble". That sounds awfully trite, but it isn't. It is so true.
We never know it. We can never say: "This is it!"
Krishnamurti truly has nothing to offer you. Most of what he says are questions, invitations to enquire. But he also knows how to write delightful prose, describing nature and people with a love that is both quiet and poignant. In his essays, which make up about half of this superb collection of Krishnamurti's works, one is first invited to wonder at the fragile beauty of the world and to rest for a timeless moment in the innocence of trees, rivers, mountains and a clear starry night sky, before being taken to the enquiry and the clarity of its burning flame.
Who can enquire at all?, some clever neo-advaitists will perhaps ask derisively. You. You can look at your life and see all the deception and mischief wrought by the predatory "me", the "self". Although it is true that K. speaks of going beyond the self, there is not so much as a hint in all of K's works that people are walking nobodies devoid of volition. Buddha, who preached anatta, non-ego, also enjoined people to act. Krishnamurti assumed as a given truth that we could truly do something about ourselves and therefore about the terrible state of the world. But the doing was first and foremost a seeing. One is invited to see, and to keep seeing.
Seeing what? One's desperate and ugly face, one's mean ego and its for ever reborn attempts at escaping reality. To see it in the chaos and violence in the world outside and also within, for "the world is you and you are the world". This coming face to face with oneself happened through the teachings, which he liked to compare to a mirror.
It is important to see in the context of rampant teachings about Consciousness Already Realized and Being Perfect Right Now that the image K showed his hearers wasn't a hypothetical and dogmatically asserted feel-good "perfect oneness", but "what is" in all its disturbing crudeness. Therefore it is no wonder that the Ultimate Mystery, when he talked about it, which he did rarely, was expressed by the word "Otherness". How could "otherness" be "already the case"?
For that to arise, the reality of evil had to be faced. But it was to be faced without judgment, in choiceless or passive awareness. Then and only then, would the transformation occur as the observer would realize his fundamental identity with the observed. It is certainly one of the great and painful paradoxes of this teaching that it vehemently denounces evil within and without, but at the same time shows that colllective and individual holy wars against it will inevitably not only fail, but aggravate the situation. Yoga, rituals, breathing techniques and the rest of the religious arsenal of self-improvement are dismissed as so many routines of the ego. There only remains a passionate inquiry, which is wisdom in search of itself.
Asked by a swami how he would sum up his whole message, he reluctantly said: "Look". It is important to see, specially in our sense and eye-obsessed culture, that he didn't say, "See this", "this" referring to the outside world. K. is not inviting you to lose yourself in the object. Rather he is inviting you to observe, relentlessly but affectionately, the movement of thought, which is the ego. When its utter destructiveness is recognized WITHOUT any judgment or preconception, something else arises, which K. always refused to theorize about.
The difference between "Look" and "See this", which is the slogan of neo-advaita, is a crucial one, one that distinguishes a teaching about immanence and transcendence and the creative and challenging tension between the two, and one that confuses the Absolute with sensual experience and thereby dissolves all creative tension in the mere frictionless movement of the "already" known.
There can be no rest and its corollary, dogmatism, in this. Krishnaji often summed up our existential condition by conjuring the striking metaphor of someone living in a small room with a deadly cobra. As he often said, "It is only the serious man who lives". One is invited to realize the danger and seriousness of living in the world. And even when the transformation has occurred, it isn't the case that one simply self-contentedly celebrates, but there is a constant "learning", a deepening without end and without accumulation because Life is never known completely, because Life is for ever new. To use a word that is greatly appreciated in some quarters, there is for ever more "oneness" because the content of "oneness" is inexhaustible.
Therefore learn, o eternal beginner!
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<bintang satu> Beside the mark, May 19, 2005
By NorthernLights (Beijing, China)
This review is from: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Hardcover)
Many years ago I went through a spell of compulsive thinking that was particularly acute and painful. One day, while I was in the grip of these tormenting thoughts, I walked into my garden. Suddenly I saw my cat jump on a small rodent. I immediately rushed to the rescue of the tiny animal. After I had delivered it and given my cat a good but useless scolding, I remembered my previous painful engagement with thought. To my utter astonishment, the problem and the thinking that went with it-- or rather had created it--had totally disappeared!
This simple anecdote may serve to illustrate the main error of Eckhart Tolle's teachings. The mournful round of thoughts had come to an abrupt end not because I had tried to stop it, but because there was a sudden, unpremeditated gap in it, caused by an unexpected incident that had required all my attention. Now what Eckhart wants you to do is to bring about this change through effort, and he gives you tricks to achieve it. All this obviously implies a motive (putting an end to an unpleasant state), compulsion and time, all of which indicate that thought--the cause of all the mischief and misery--is still active. Instead of identifying with thought or resisting the now, what one is now doing is trying to disidentify oneself from it or to say "yes" to the now. This is another game by exactly the same actor.
Therefore this path is not going to lead you very far. It is as simple as that.
The book itself is written in very simple English and in a question and answer format. I noted that the author claims that his words, specially the repetitive parts of the book, can draw you into the nothingness from which they came. Maybe. What I have found is that the Power of Now is mostly very vapid prose full of cheap and hackneyed notions spiced up with a few Gospel and Zen quotes. The aim seems to be the "end of suffering", which makes enlightenment a kind of Ultimate Prozac. The author insists that it is something that is "felt" and speaks of the unending bliss resulting from residing in Being. All this seems too superficial, too epidermic to be true. And creates tremendous expectation. No wonder people start making superhuman efforts to be awake after reading the book. Unfortunately, when you try to force thinking to stop, it comes back at your throat with a vengeance. Remember the anecdote at the beginning of this review.
If you are a serious spiritual seeker, I recommend J.Krishnamurti instead of E.T. See my own review of "Total freedom" for more information.
Finally, let me tell you something: Eckhart Tolle sells photographs of his uninspiring face on his website. Five dollars for a view of his congested face absorbed in meditation or smiling at the disciple/customer. Isn't that enough to show the vulgarity of the whole thing?
Move on, truth is not to be found here.