『지금의 힘』과 『현재를 포착하라』에 나타난 “여기 지금”의 초월적 의미

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the transcendental implications in “here and now" in Eckart Tolle's The Power of Now and Saul Bellow's Seize the Day in the light of their religious contexts. The main body of this paper consists of three chapters: time and alienation, the eternal now as an archetypal time, and the transcendental meaning of here and now, following the process of therapy: symptom, diagnosis, and treatment. What Tolle says to his disciples in his book and Dr. Tamkin to Wilhelm in Seize the Day are strikingly similar. Their messages can be summed up by the phrase "live here and now," avoiding the trap of the past and the future. Even the final destination they want to guide their followers to is the same: "the eternal now," where the flow of time itself stops. In this context, the "here and now" they emphasize is distinct from that of "Carpe diem", the traditional aphorism to encourage the youth to suck out the marrow of the present moment, forgetting the past and future. In comparison to the secular meaning of "here and now" in Carpe diem, the meaning of "here and now" in these two books is transcendental and religious in the sense that only the present moment gives us the access to the eternal now. To Tolle, "here and now," like the moment of enlightenment in Buddhism, brings him to the realm of the void, where the sense of time and space stops, while to Wilhelm, it opens up the world of grace, where the sinner trapped in time encounters the God of the eternal now through the vicarious death of Jesus on the cross. The symptoms of the modern man described in The Power of Now and Wilhelm in Seize the Day, regarding their time conception are almost same: they are alienated from "now." And the therapy Tolle and Dr. Tamkin offer is seemingly identical: "seize the present moment." But the religious contexts in which each healing takes place are sharply divided. The "eternal now" of Tolle is based upon the religious pluralism while that of Dr. Tamkin is based upon the Jewish-Christian tradition.