A Conversation with Barnet Bain and Eckhart Tolle

These are the being states, that mindfulness allows us to discover. When we discover who we are being in the moment, then the opportunity to choose up to a higher ground to a different level of response is there for the first time. A fish doesn’t know it’s in water until it throws itself on the bank and flops around for a while, and has that moment of discovery, ‘I’m not in Kansas Toto.’ Mindfulness allows us, we don’t have to flop around on the bank, it doesn’t have to be as difficult as it is for some. It’s a lot more difficult to be reactive to the world, to think that you can out-think life. There are other states of consciousness beyond thinking but mindfulness puts us in touch with the being state of who we are. And with that awareness, reality becomes a very different kind of experience. It’s not as reactive, it begins to mellow out and there is suddenly room for the miraculous.

OMTimes:  The book and film promise to bring Mindfulness to a youth audience.  Eckhart, why did you write the book, Milton’s Secret?  How did you start out on this journey?

Eckhart Tolle:  Well people had been often writing to me and saying, ‘can you not write something for children?’  I felt I needed somebody else and couldn’t quite do it myself because I never had children so it’s harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child. So that’s where my co-author, Robert Friedman came in and helped.