Alright, I intended on doing the first chapter, but there's just so much here already! I'll go through it as it's written.
Tolle starts off by bringing us imagery of the first flower ever blooming. He paints us a lovely picture of 14 million years ago just after sunrise. The flower blooms and eventually a "critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an explosion of colour and scent all over the planet." Flowers have a purpose and plants may have evolved because of that very purpose in pollination and so forth. However, a paragraph later, he is telling us that flowers are the first things humans value because they "had no utilitarian purpose for them." Except that they do have purpose! Again with the pollination purpose, we also eat them and make clothes out of them. Cotton is a from a flower right?
Tolle than makes the claim that "Jesus tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live." He then compares Jesus' supposedly abstract lesson with the actual abstract lesson of The Buddha when he gives a silent sermon by holding up a flower and contemplating it. I mean come on, did Tolle even read Matthew 6:25-34 when Jesus gave this lesson on worrying? The point was not to reach enlightenment, as Tolle wants us to believe, but on trusting God to provide. Read for yourself right here,
"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
This trust and providence comes when we "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness." Trusting God does not bring enlightenment. In fact, the Bible is not a book on enlightenment, but on salvation.
My next few underlined bits in the book all kinda come under the same heading, and that heading is, WTF!?
Tolle suggests that "we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants" and that any "life-form" can "leap to an entirely different level of Being and, most importantly, a lessening of materiality." I don't understand how this happens. I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a time, thinking that he could very well mean that our emotional responses to these objects of beauty, make them an enlightenment of plants for us. Except the next page he then says that "their special significance and the reason why humans feel such fascination for and affinity with them can be attributed to their ethereal quality." He admits that these things have ethereal qualities outside human perception of them! How is this?
He went on a little to include gems and precious stones as the enlightened form of rocks and birds as the enlightened reptiles. But all of these leads up to the great deceit of this whole book and that is here:
the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form... as one with [human's] own essence
He continues a bit more in this vein, that these enlightened forms draws us to "the realm of spirit," that they're "a window... into the formless," "a bridge between the world of the physical forms and the formless," "messengers from another realm." I think what he's getting at, is that these things attune us to the spiritual realm - whatever that is, he hasn't elaborated on yet. But this is certainly not Biblical. We know from Romans 1:20 that God's power can be known by creation. But that is knowing God is powerful because he created everything, not by being attuned to it! God is not a part of the plants or rocks. He is separate from his creation, he is entirely different from it.
I want to draw on this quote from the last paragraph.
...these "en-lightened" life-forms have played such an important part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; ...a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in Christianity. They have been preparing ground for a more profound shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take place... [yadda yadda]
I know I'm being very picky with wording here, but the dove is not the Holy Spirit, not does it signify Him within the Bible. I looked at multiple translations of Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:10 and Luke 3:22 and they all say that the Spirit is like a dove descending on Jesus. The Holy Spirit is also like a tongue of flame, the wind blowing over the waters, etc etc. The dove imagery is used for one time in the Bible (recorded 3 times) when Jesus was baptised! That doesn't make the Holy Spirit a bird!
Furthermore, the second commandment as recorded in Exodus 20:4-5 is as such, ""You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them." Why, oh why then, would God make himself into an image of a dove to be worshipped? The Holy Spirit is not a dove. He can descend like a dove, he can be like tongues of fire, but he is neither, nor should he be represented by those symbols.
The last part of the quote though, hold most beef for me. God is not preparing the way for a "profound shift in planetary consciousness." God has brought Jesus to the world to die for the sins of humanity and reconcile us to himself. He is doing this even now and people around the world come to know and love him. That is the Gospel, that is the purpose God has for humanity, to be reconciled to him. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 says,
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
No comments:
Post a Comment