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World-renowned writer Eckhart Tolle (pictured, via) will launch the Eckhart Tolle Editions imprint at New World Library.

The executives behind this imprint have been working on two books: Susan Stiffelman’s Parenting with Presence and Steve Taylor’s The Calm Center: Spiritual Reflections and Meditations. Both titles are slated for a Spring 2015 release.

Here’s more from the press release: “Tolle will work to identify and develop titles for the line, most of them written by other teachers and authors he has encountered over his past two decades of teaching. He will write a foreword for each title in the imprint and use his formidable social media presence — 1.2 million Facebook fans, 345,000 Twitter followers, and 120,000 YouTube subscribers — to promote them. Eckhart Tolle Editions aims to reach a broad audience of spiritual seekers.”

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[Editor's note: Throughout their week of blogging, Caspar and Kate have invited questions from their readers and fans. To close out the week, we're presenting a few of the questions, along with Caspar and Kate's answers.] Jeffrey B.: What's it like when you're not working? What do you do and think about? Caspar: That is [...]

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given field glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.
~ Richard Wilbur (quoted in an interview with novelist, Anne Tyler, in the guardian) 

6:30 a.m.

This morning I awake to a new schedule—START NOVEL. 

No shower, no coffee, don’t even get dressed.  Don’t clean up the desk.  No email, no surfing blogs, no Facebook or Twitter.  No opening the snail mail, no Globe and Mail.  No logging on to the Internet, period. 

I have a speech to write—forget it.  Another blog post—not now.  Another eBook in the works—later!  Just man up to the blank screen, PJ, and thrill to the experience of not knowing what’s going to happen.

6:37 a.m.

I resist rereading The Guardian interview that sits on my desk.  American novelist, Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist), discusses waiting for our muse—big mistake: 

“[I] just go to my room and plug away.  It doesn’t take very long for most writers to realize that if you wait until the day you are inspired and feel like writing you’ll never do it at all.”

I know that!  That’s why I’m here confronting the blank “page”, so to speak.  Perhaps I should write it in longhand, on paper, as Anne Tyler does.  I’ll need a smoother pen, one of those ‘gel’ jobs.  Do they even sell pads of paper anymore?  You know, those yellow, legal-sized…

6:43 a.m.

I pick at some crud lodged under the “L” key.  I overturn the laptop and blow the lint loose. 

6:45 a.m.

The blank screen again.  That sinking feeling.  I’m reminded of something Eckhart Tolle said.  E.T. and the Dalai Lama were on stage at Vancouver’s Peace Summit (2009).  Herr Tolle was riffing about—of all things—Soccer.  About the penalty kick. 

By the time the average college student makes sophomore grade, at least one thing should have been learned. No matter how tenuous one’s grasp is on reality on any given day, the world will stop for a split second as soon as a professor utters the fatal words “Take note, people!”

I don’t have a clue where the phrase began. For my purposes here, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether an individual is able to do the task.

In a world which revolves around speed, competition, and one-upsmanship, a person has to cultivate the practice of taking note. The fortunate person develops the ability early in life; hence, my reference to college sophomores and professors. Observation skills can always be used in daily life. Be honest. Without them our species would have died out long ago.

I bring up the subject because some of us stumble across oddities everyday simply by using the practice of observation.

Take last Sunday evening as an example. Sis and I were at a concert in the park. It was a lovely evening; light breeze cooling temps hovering in the low 80s, people out enjoying the camaraderie of the crowd—lawn chairs in hand—and the music.

And there, in the midst of wonderful musical notes filling the air, a mosquito landed on my forearm. I whacked the little sucker, smashed it flat, and felt vindicated, all in the space of three seconds max. I know what you’re thinking. You think all I took note of was the fact that it was a mosquito.

Wrong! I took note of the fact that it didn’t whine at me. This is something that has been “on my radar,” if you will, since we moved up to Montana. I was taught as a young person that only female mosquitos whined. They were also the only ones that supposedly drew blood from their victims. Since returning to this state last year, I’ve learned that around here, mosquitos are now different.

They weren’t like this when I lived here in the early nineties. No sirree! Always before, they whined like every other variety of ‘skeeter known to man. Not anymore.

I’d taken note last year that around here, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you hear a whine or not, the ‘skeeter will drill you for all it’s worth. Sunday night I had two of the little beasties try for the red stuff in a span of ten minutes and neither of them made a peep of sound.

Trust me; I can hear those devils in a twenty-foot radius. Nada, zip, zilch. No whine.

So, what changed? Are male mosquitos here now drilling prospective donors? Did the females finally learn that their shouts of potential ecstasy warned their perspective donors? These are the kinds of questions for which grant monies are doled out.

Remember that one-upsmanship I mentioned earlier. Well, Sis did it again. The next evening she went out to snap some sunset photos. As a photographer she’s got that camera ready at a second’s notice, and she loves doing sunsets.

As a trained observer, she takes note of things on a regular basis. Her background demanded that skill. When she finished shooting, she came back in with this little observation “Sun’s in the wrong place tonight.” She didn’t wait for any answer from me. She dropped the statement and went into her office to process photos.

Familiarity has bred acceptance into my responses ab

I know this sounds crazy but…is Eckhart Tolle e-stalking me?

It seems that every time I compose a dispatch, I find that E.T. has been visiting my in-box. Most recently, I was making notes for a blog post on a talk I’m giving soon about ‘The Nascent Self’ with respect to fiction.

[nascent, adjective: coming into being, emerging]

Regular visitors to my blog will be familiar with my theories—that any story can be divided into two—before and after the protagonist has exhausted all her options. I would appear to be making a hobby out of putting that moment under a microscope to see ever more deeply into what exactly is happening during that personal crisis.

Fictional heroes are all about Desire. It’s desire that sets them off on the adventure, and it’s desire that gets them deep into trouble. But it’s clear that some kind of awakening occurs during their crisis, and a rearranging of priorities. I don’t know of a single literary critic who speaks of this phenomenon. Mr. Tolle, however, seems to have his finger on drama’s pulse:

“When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or an object should fulfill you, it’s easier to be present in this moment because you’re no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment.”

All the mystics offer the same key to freedom and true victory:

Want what you’re getting in this very moment.

“How Fiction Works“, by James Wood, is a recent book with a refreshingly non-instructional approach. I was surprised to find no discussion sympathetic to my notions of ‘why fiction works’. Wood doesn’t even mention the defining moment in a story – the protagonist’s turning point – with which I appear to be as obsessed as if it were the meaning of life.

In a way, this is good news, because it means that I’m trying to convey something that’s either above or below the radar of other literary critics. Fortunately, it would appear that I have a supporter in Eckhart Tolle. Tolle isn’t in the fiction business, rather he trades in hard-core reality. He’s a great promoter of the advantages of adversity.

Here he is, just the other day, dispatching his weekly e-message to those of us who find his insights irresistible:

“One could say that going through loss is the great awakener.
It is a potential opening if you don’t run away from it.
What is usually condemned as ‘bad’ by the mind and the mind-made self is actually grace coming into your life.”

‘Going through loss’…by definition this is the hero’s journey. Protagonists fight a losing battle until they ‘wake up’. The key, according to Tolle, is ‘don’t run away’. Mere mortals, of course, chose the path of least resistance.  Avoiding ‘bad’ experience is most everyone’s tragic story. The radical outcome of Tolle’s prescription is ‘grace’. Waking up changes everything.

In films, that grace can be seen in the character’s demeanour. Think of Rocky on the night before his big fight. His ego, having already taken a beating, he visits the fight venue and wakes up to his limitations. The realization transforms him physically as well as mentally. The swagger gone, he walks with dignity. A small but important detail.

You notice the same miracle in Moonstruck. The Nicholas Cage character (Ronnie) wakes up to his self-pity and becomes transformed physically. At the outset he’s as dark and deformed as Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, whom he’s meant to represent. But having won Aphrodite’s heart (Cher), he walks tall into the final confrontation of Act Three.

This isn’t the first time I’ve borrowed from Mr. Tolle, and I doubt it’s the last. I’m gratified that the lessons I see coming out of fiction are roughly those taught by a spiritual teacher. Given how much time we spend reading books and watching movies, we can be assured it’s time not so badly wasted.

With whatever spontaneous action arises out of presence,
an intelligence is then at work in the situation.

Whatever the situation, that intelligence is far greater
than the intelligence of the thinking mind.

Sounds like my theme of the last few months, doesn’t it?

At the major crisis of most films and novels, the protagonist gives up her thinking mind. I’ve often deferred to the mystics to explain the fallout of ‘presence’ that descends upon characters who find themselves in a dramatic cul de sac. The above quote – discovered in my in-box this morning – points to some kind of ‘higher intelligence’. It comes from the e-desk of Eckhart Tolle.

I’m inclined now to see a story as a unity in just two parts. They are separated by that all-important moment of presence. Call part one: Complications. Call part two: Resolution. They are really two separate stories. Of course, they’re linked by unities of time and space. But mainly by the hero’s deepest and truest yearnings.

No one operates from depth until they have to. No one functions from truth unless their delusions fail to support their goals. The thinking mind is a miraculous realm of sophisticated delusions. It takes a protagonist very far indeed. In real life, it takes many people as far as they’ll ever go. But fiction is different.

Fiction is the realm of the extraordinary. It’s a place where characters persevere. Subconsciously, we the reader are willing to suffer any amount of painful complications as long as it delivers us to that moment of presence that opens us to our higher selves.

We want to experience the ‘greater intelligence’ that sweeps any good story to its resolution.