I’ve been reading Eckert for the past 6 months now. I think it’s pretty good stuff.
Our lives are only our present moment. He goes against and states plainly that Descartes dictum - I think therefore I am is wrong.
He says we are not our ego or actual thought - we are the consciousness that observes these thoughts. Our ego does not live in the present moment only the past and in the future. The struggles in our lives earlier are only struggles now because our ego will not let go of the past. To be free from stress of the past is to accept it. To not let our bodies continue to believe that the war is still on going.
I haven’t read his new book, and I don’t think I even will. For all the positive reviews, I did not like his, Now. I think his concepts are way wrong. Why do people like him perceive mind as a disease? Why is it more true-to-self (or God) to live without a mind? They say that the mind is evil because it divides all things, but isn’t this how evolution works? Don’t things in nature become more and more differentiated/speacialized (in an effort, I assume, to become more and more efficient?)
I have noticed that many of such people’s moment of enlightenment (for those who become enlightened instantaneously, especially) comes as a result of intense psychological shock, and when they let go/give up, or stop thinking, they finally “see the reality of things”.
I see this more as an occurrence wherein a major cog of a machine suddenly becomes damaged and the machine cannot move forward in a straight line anymore, so it idles, or sits there (the mental process of analysis and synthesis just stops). You may call this way of being as a “return to”, yes, but you should not think of it as “progress”.
His stuff is pretty good, and he does understand the human mind pretty well, although i don’t necessary like his way of expressing himself. i read the replay some guy gave to your question before and i think he should check with his therapist this weekend, i think he is running low on the medicine. Human mind and human thought are two separate states, mind is brain, meaning the whole field of activities it engages in, thought on the other hand is marely small fragment, thought is memory, derived from the experience, therefore it is always past, thought is “I”, and what Eckert is saying is that modern man lives in the past, in the ideas, concepts, dogmas, and beliefs. I cannot percieve what is infront of me, only mind that is capable of understanding and observing activities it engages in, is capapble of understand the field of life (the projections, illusions, etc.). Ow and the progress, well is there such a thing? I highly doubt it, we becoming dull, neoratic, paranoid, self-centered, so called “individulas”(another load of crap), destroying nature and one another, over ideas and concepts. So where is that progress?