Eckhart Tolle and Zen, Part 2

[This is an excerpt from my book "Beyond the Power of Now: A Guide to and Beyond Eckhart Tolle's Teachings.]

Q: The mind is a wonderful faculty. Why would I want to stop its activity? Without it, man would be just another animal.

A: The mind, as Tolle points out, is not consciousness itself. Consciousness, the essence of Being, is a universal constant that exists prior to and beyond thought. The mind is a function or application of consciousness that enables you to mentally understand the universe you live in. When you think, you are using the uniquely human faculty of mind, which, via the process of concept formation, is able to create mental “concretes” that accurately measure and reflect the world you perceive through your senses. Thinking enables you to measure (or ratio-nally compare, contrast, and comprehend) the sensible universe—that which has been “measured out” as a manifestion of the Unmanifested—and, via concepts, form intelligent and creative conclusions about the things you perceive. Thinking, in other words, is a nonpareil tool for measuring conditional reality, the manifested. But Ultimate Reality, the Unmanifested, is immeasurable and, in fact, is often referred to as the Immeasurable.

Therefore, if you want to access the Immeasurable, you have to do so with a tool other than thinking. And because you can only use one tool at a time, mentation must be set aside when you devote yourself to meditation, the process of contemplating, or communing with, the Immeasurable. So the mind is a marvelous tool for understanding measurable phenomena, but an improper one for contemplating the Immeasurable. But is the human mind creative? Not according to Tolle, who claims that “[the mind] is not at all creative.”

If creativity is defined as the power to bring something into existence out of nothing, then man’s mind is not creative. But if it is defined as the ability to combine or integrate things that exist into unique arrangements or innovative products, then man’s mind is very creative.

If “no-mind,” rather than mind, is the secret to creativity, as Tolle claims, then why don’t Zen Buddhists lead the world in creativity and new inventions? In the book Wild Ivy, the Zen master Hakuin (1686–1768) and other Zen monks develop energy disorders as a result of their meditation practice. But all their years of mind-emptying meditation fail to provide them with a satori-inspired solution to their problem, and the Zen tradition itself has no answer for their disease. In order to cure themselves, the Zen master and the monks are forced to resort to the Taoist tradition, which, unlike the Zen tradition, emphasizes a holistic rather than a quasi-nihilistic approach toward life.

If great scientific discoveries are mainly dependent on “no-mind” rather than mind, then why have most been made by men with stratospheric IQs and extensive education? Creative breakthroughs do often come at times of mental quietude. But this isn’t because the mind has stopped working; it’s because the subconscious mind has been working on the problem all along, and when the conscious mind temporarily relaxes its efforts, the answers spring forth from the subconscious. To those unfamiliar with modern psychology—including Einstein and the hundred leading physicists who, in 1900, participated in mathematician Jacques Hadamard’s survey (See: Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, by Jacques Hadamard)—it might indeed seem that great insights arise from a mystical “place” beyond conscious thought. But that “place” isn’t the “realm of no-mind;” it’s the “realm of the individual’s subconscious mind,” which confers creative insights only in response to the individual’s previous conscious efforts.