Eckhart Tolle on Alcohol

An excerpt from a favorite spiritual teacher

Excerpted from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, pages 229-233.

Mystical or Vegetal?

Our experiences with alcohol can feel mystical or magical, especially in our early experiences with it. They can feel mind-expanding, personality-enhancing, and with glimpses of joy and creativity. We can feel a special chemistry with ourselves and with others. But these are all fleeting sensations and perceptions. The sweet spot of these kinds of experiences can easily be surpassed quickly into various potential hellscapes and ignorances, even fatal ones. Anyone who’s been completely sober at a party as it goes into the wee hours can clearly see that no one is as brilliant in reality as they think they are in their inebriated state. Beer goggles are named such for a reason. Many fights and violent acts committed on oneself and others are alcohol-fueled. There are many collective regrets and a shocking number of assaults, murders and deadly accidents. 

Alcohol has played an important role in the history of humankind. But for most of those thousands of years, the strength of the beverages consumed was very mild by today’s standards, and often the act of drinking was heavily ritualized with social accountability. I plan to explore more here in this newsletter the historical and cultural forces at play in our society’s complex relationship with alcohol. For now, I will say that we understand how it affects our prefrontal cortex and areas of decision-making and inhibition among other effects on the brain. It basically relaxes us, dumbs us down, and we feel temporarily high before reaching depressed or unconscious states. The sweet spot I referred to above can be a relatively innocent and social pleasure. In our heavy drinking culture though, I don’t perceive it as the norm. Many tend to go from 0 to 60 and blow right by that tranquil presence and scenery.

Eckhart Tolle is a respected spiritual teacher and one of my favorites. I’ve included a quote from him regarding alcohol. One of the delights of mindfulness meditation and spiritual growth is a feeling of transcendence from the fraught mind of the ego. What Eckhart would refer to as the Doing mind. That part of the mind is the one that loves to complain, to worry, to compare, to strive, to overthink and analyze things, to criticize, and to judge. Instead, when we dwell more in the Being part of ourselves, we are more relaxed, in the moment, joyful, compassionate, holistic in our thinking, accepting, and more at peace. Alcohol can give us a taste of this state, but only ever so briefly as it quickly wields its clumsy brush across our state of consciousness, smudging out any refined state we could achieve with a clear and unencumbered mind. 

I invite you to consider Eckhart’s words and the call to practice a more transcendent state with meditation, embodied practices like yoga and qigong, nature walks, gardening, exercise, creative hobbies, acts of compassion, and a wise choice of companions who nurture these states also. That is what I call a Real Happy Hour. It's not an ethanol-induced one sure to come crashing down in big or small ways eventually. But one that is sacred, fully present, and nurtured moment by moment.

Stay tuned for how we can practice together as I build this community. In the meantime, I’m grateful you’re here and hope you find value in these offerings. 

P.S. Listen to a clip from Eckhart here.