Richard Rohr is pretty straightforward. Tolle may or may not read that way for you. For Christians, I think it's really helpful to think of his advice as 'incarnational'--a way the Spirit can infuse our minds and hearts with practical grace in order that the same Spirit can slowly become part of who we most deeply are.
Tolle's recommendations for "freedom, salvation & enlightenment" need to be practiced, repeated, worked into the ground of our experience. The more it is, the more we religious folk are able to turn 'talk' into 'walk.'
To "know ourselves as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain" is surely what St. Catherine was experiencing when she raced through the streets of Sienna proclaiming, "My deepest me is God! My deepest me is God."
---
Our image of God creates us—or defeats us. There
is an absolute connection between how we see God and how you we see ourselves and
the whole universe. The word “God” is first of all a stand-in for
everything—reality, truth, and the very shape of our universe. This is why
theology is important, and why good theology and spirituality can make so much
difference in how we live our daily lives in this world. Theology is not just
theoretical, but ends up being quite practical—practically up-building or
practically defeating. --Richard Rohr
---
For love to flourish, the light of your presence
needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker
or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the
Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the
love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
To dis-identify from the pain-body is to bring
presence into the pain and thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is
to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the
repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.
If you stop investing thinking with “selfness” the
mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge
and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain.
In fact, the moment judgment stops through
acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love,
for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging
others.
