Dear ,
I hope you are well. My main event of the last month was attending and speaking at the Eckhart Tolle foundation conference at Huntington Beach, near Los
Angeles. It was great to spend time with the other authors and teachers at the conference, including Mr. Tolle himself. Eckhart is such a lovely person - just as humble and humorous and warm-hearted in person as you would expect from reading his books or seeing his videos. I really enjoyed hanging out with him, and witnessing his interactions with other people. You’d think it might be burdensome to be as well known as he is, and receive so much attention, but he responds to it with great grace
and equanimity. His partner Kim is lovely too, and I also really enjoyed meeting people like Elizabeth Lesser (also very down to earth and free of any sense of self-importance) and the neuroscientist Dan Siegel, who is possibly the cleverest person I have ever met. But the highlight of the conference for me was meeting and listening to Brother David Steindl-Rast, whose talk was the most profound and moving of the whole conference.
My talk went well too. I’d never given a talk to such a large audience before - about 1100 people, I was told. I wondered if I might be a bit nervous, but I wasn’t. I really enjoyed reading some of my poetic pieces, mainly from The Calm Center, and there was a wonderful atmosphere of calmness and stillness as I read them. I’ve realised that large groups of people can share and amplify presence until it becomes
very powerful. I had to do a book signing session right after the talk, and copies of the Calm Center were already sold out by the time I reached the table. During the rest of the conference, so many people came up to say they had enjoyed the talk and the poems that I thought, ‘This is what it must be like to be Eckhart Tolle!’ I hope I responded with as much equanimity as him!
You can watch all of the talks from the conference at this
link:
As noted above, I would especially recommend Brother David’s talk, which at the bottom of the page. I haven’t
actually watched mine - for some reason, I don’t particularly like watching myself on video. The other day I said that my wife Pam, and she said, “I’m glad - it would be a bad sign if you did like watching videos of yourself speaking.’
Here’s a picture of Eckhart and Brother David at the end of this talk:
American Experiences
My funniest experience of the week was the morning after my talk, when I went along to the hotel
gym. I went into the restroom to change - the door was unlocked, but I found an elderly man sitting on the toilet reading his kindle. "Oh wow - sorry,' he said. 'I thought I'd locked the door.' 'Don't worry,' I replied. 'These things happen.' A few minutes later I passed the man, sitting on one of the exercise machines, still reading his kindle. ‘Hey Steve, come and look at what I was reading,' he said. It was my book The Calm Center. 'You see - it was meant to be,' he said. It can’t be
a common occurrence to be sitting on the toilet reading a book, then to have the author of the book walk in on you.
Apart from the conference itself, it was a really exciting adventure to visit the west coast of America for the first time. It was my third time in the US overall, and I’ve really begun to like the country. When I was at the airport, heading home, a shop assistant to me very enthusiastically, ‘You have a good day sir!’ It
crystallised my feelings about the country. Maybe it's sometimes automatic when American people say such things, but it still sent a little wave of positivity into my soul. I love the atmosphere of openness and friendliness, and the sense of vibrancy. To a rather reserved British person like me, it's very refreshing.
I have a feeling that one day I’ll live in the US for a while. Funnily enough, a while ago I saw a part-time university
teaching job advertised which would be ideal for me, but it’s not the right time at the moment. My parents are both ill, and need me to help take care of them, so it’s my role to stay here for the immediate future.
Spain and Ireland
Next week my travels are continuing - I’m off to Barcelona for a few days. A new edition of my book
The Fall is being published, together with a translation of Out of the Darkness, so I’m going over to do some promotional events. I was there 7 years ago, when the first Spanish edition of The Fall was published, and loved the all-pervading openness to spirituality in the city. This time I’m travelling with my family, so we’ll have a short vacation too.
A couple of weeks after that I’m off to Cork, Ireland, to speak
at the Infinite Arts conference. I’ll probably do something similar to the Eckhart Tolle Foundation conference, and organise the talk around some of my poetic pieces. The spiritual teacher Francis Bennett - who I admire a lot, and did a talk with in London back in April - will be there too. This is on Saturday November 12th. You can find out more here:
New Material on Website My wonderful
technical helper Amber has recently updated my website with some new material, including some new poems and videos. There is also a link to my ‘Psychology Today’ blog, which has recent articles on indigenous peoples, prehistoric peacefulness and spiritual activism. A few months ago I had an e-mail from Psychology Today telling me that I had joined ‘the million club.’ At first I thought they were offering me a million dollars, but what they really meant was that my blog had now had more than
a million readers. On average, it’s read by 40,000 people every month. It’s strange to think that I reach a much bigger audience through my blog than I ever have through my books.
The Fall Revisited Finally, it’s now 11 years since the publication of my book The Fall. As mentioned above, a new Spanish edition is being published, and I’ve just written a new foreword for it. The Fall is largely a book about anthropology and archaeology, and I did a massive amount of research in those areas. But since the book's publication, I haven't kept up with
developments, as I've been mainly focusing on psychology and spirituality. So before writing the foreword I decided to look into anthropology again, and I was really heartened by what I found. I discovered that over the last few years, a lot of research has been published backing up my theories in The Fall. It's now the consensus view that warfare is a recent development in history, and that prehistoric human beings (up to around 6000 years ago) were peaceful. It's now widely accepted
that hunter-gatherers groups are (and were) egalitarian, and that women had equal status to men. This wasn't at all the case when I originally wrote The Fall - it was a bit crankish to suggest these things. But it seems that the dominance of the 'selfish gene' view of human nature is fading away. There has been a kind of paradigm shift in our view of early human beings. So great news!
The Alchemy of Acceptance Let me leave you with a poetic piece called ‘The Alchemy of Acceptance.’ I read this at Eckhart’s conference and there was a great response to it. People were disappointed to find that that it hasn’t been published yet. So here it is!
Emptiness can be a vacuum
cold and hostile, dark with danger;
Or emptiness can be radiant space
glowing with soft stillness -
and the only difference between them is acceptance.
A task may seem tedious
a chore to rush through begrudgingly
Or a task may seem rewarding
a process to relish, with an attentive mind
that reveals more richness, the more your present you become -
and the only difference between them is acceptance.
Pain may seem unbearable
searing through you from a sharp, concentrated point
so that you have no choice but to resist
to try to escape, to push away the pain;
Or pain can be a sensation
which you can move towards and merge with
which no longer has a centre, and dissipates and spreads through your
being
until it becomes soft and numb, no longer pain at all -
and the only difference between them is acceptance.
Trauma and turmoil can break you down to nothing
destroy the identity you spent your whole life building up
like an
earthquake that leaves you in ruins;
Or trauma and turmoil can transform you
break open new depths and heights of you
give rise to a greater structure, a miraculous new self -
and the only difference between them is acceptance.
Life can be
frustrating, and full of obstacles
with desires for a different life constantly disturbing your mind;
or life can be fulfilling, full of opportunities
with a constant flow of gratitude for the gifts you have -
and the only difference between them is acceptance.
All best wishes and blessings, Steve |
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