Ho’oponopono And The World of Eckhart Tolle

You must understand that getting to Zero (or the Whiteboard, Divinity, the state of Buddhahood, or whatever you want to call it) has nothing to do with your intellect. Indeed a strong intellect may sometimes be a disadvantage.

Eckhart has a strong intellect. He can quote Jesus, and Buddha, Gotha and Nietzsche as if they were siblings. In a spiritual sense they are, as are Lao Tsu, Saint Augustine, and Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona.

Whilst we may listen to him for hours he rarely provides a series of definite steps to take in order to get into the space he occupies. In other words he lacks a system.

It’s not that he knows of no systems, it’s that he’s so in touch with the Divinity within his make-up that he knows that all methods work, and in any case, eventually we all ‘get there’. Some of us find ho’oponopono and others (like Eckhart, the Buddha, and Jesus) find other routes.

I decided to follow the ho’oponopono way because after practicing as a social worker and later psychotherapist for many years I heard Dr. Hew Len say ‘fixing others never works’. He then quoted some statistics about the mortality among heart surgeons and other professionals. This bore out my own observations.

Just when you think everything is sewn-up it unravels in an unholy mess. This occurs because everything which appears in your life is simply a reflection of who you are, and a metaphorical map of what you’re experiencing.

This is the opposite of how we usually understand our lives. We tend to believe that we’re influenced by our contexts and our behaviour is simply our reaction to them. This is only partly true. Of course we react to our experiences. When doing so we create Karmic-Data, which either improves or reduces the quality of our lives.

Our first step, then, is to remain unaffected by our circumstances. This is, perhaps, easier said than done. That’s when the ho’oponopono practices come to our aid because they are both simple and effective.

Lot’s of people think that the ho’oponopono prayer (or mantra) is the beginning and end of ho’oponopono. They think of it as the modern version of the old traditional Hawaiian ho’oponopono way. This isn’t so. There are many forms of ho’oponopono and all are equally valid. Actually, the idea that we must heal ourselves was always recognised and understood by the ancient wisdom keepers of Hawaii. 

Eckhart Tolle has put out so much material over the years that inevitably he has written about all of this in different ways on many occasions. He knows that ‘healing doesn’t work’ in the sense that one person is setting out to heal, or cure, or administer, to another.

When, however, we take radical self-responsibility for whatever is turning up in our lives then it becomes up to us to put ourselves back into balance, Curiously, when we do so, our problems disappear.

Living from this space isn’t always easy (especially at the start of our practice). This is because we’re still left with old tapes (the remnants of Karmic-Data) which urge us not to take an intuitive action in favour of a logical one which is presented by our history. 

This jumbled dialogue creates confusion within us, and also we’re likely to experience confusion in our worlds and this feeds into our responses to the challenges that are presented with it.

For this reason, sometimes things appear to be getting worse when we start our practice. This, in turn creates frustrations and these confuse us further. Imagine what it’s like when you throw a large rick into a fetid pond. All the muck and soil within it gets corned up reducing its clarity even further.

There is much value to be had in listening to Eckart’s words once you have a full grasp upon the ho’oponopono model and can map them onto its unique model of the psyche.