PRESENCE

Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, emphasizes the power of the present moment, what he calls "presence."  Presence, he says, is the stillness between words and thoughts, outside the "noise of thinking."  Presence he describes further as spaciousness, and finally as God, although he rarely uses the term God, he says, because it means many different things to many different people.

Tolle notes that the Buddha called presence the "unborn," the "unmanifested," "emptiness," and "voidness."  Regarding the latter, the Japanese Buddhist scholar Hajime Nakamura states that, "Voidness . . . is . . . that which stands right in the middle between affirmation and negation, existence and nonexistence . . . .  The Void is all inclusive.  Having no opposite, there is nothing which it excludes or opposes.  It is a living void, because all forms come out of it, and whoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the . . . love of all beings."

Be the presence more than the person, is Tolle's teaching.