Books: “The Calm Center”, by Steve Taylor

If Eckhart Tolle recommends a book, it’s got to be good, right?

Steve Taylor’s book The Calm Center is one of the first two publications under the new imprint Eckhart Tolle Editions, selected personally by Tolle for writings that “inspire and contribute to the transformation of human consciousness.” It features a foreword by Tolle himself that is a glowing endorsement of the words you are about to read.

This should be a slam dunk, right?

The Calm Center is billed as a collection of “poetic reflections” to support spiritual awakening. I read it on a day of travel back from seeing my spiritual teacher Amma in San Ramon, California, to my home in Toronto. I was inspired and my spiritual batteries were charged from a week in the presence of a true spiritual powerhouse. (I was, admittedly, also exhausted from two nights without sleep.) While Amma is my Satguru, the highest and most profound source of spiritual guidance in my life, I do also have a great deal of admiration for Eckhart Tolle and find his words profound and transformative. A volume of poetry with his glowing endorsement must be good, right?

Here’s the thing. I enjoy good spiritual poetry. I used to try to write the stuff. It’s not my path at this time, but the writings of luminaries like Kabir, Hafiz, Mirabai, Mahadevi Akka, Rumi, and contemporaries Mary Oliver and Swami Sivananda Radha continue to inspire me. The key to these works, though, is that it’s good poetry. What I found in The Calm Center was meditative prose with line breaks. Nice enough, and it mostly felt right in terms of what it was conveying, but it lacked the economy, musicality and vibrancy of word choice that marks good poetry. I found myself tripping over the dissonance between what it was, and what it was being presented as.

Eckhart Tolle has read some of these “poems” aloud in his workshops to enthusiastic reception. To this I have two remarks. One, I think an enlightened person, who is free from ego and fully present in everything they do, could recite the alphabet and it would probably convey spiritual depth. Two, these writings likely do work far better when spoken aloud. The Calm Center could be an excellent audio book to inspire your meditations, particularly if Eckhart Tolle himself were to record it. But on the page, it left me flat. Whether because of my difficulty with the format (take out the line breaks and let prose be prose!), or simply because I had just spent time in the presence of tremendous spiritual energy and this more human offering just couldn’t compare, I am left trying to figure out what merited such a glowing endorsement by Tolle, who even likened it to the work of Hafiz.

You shouldn’t let my experience stop you from checking out The Calm Center for yourself. You can always get a preview through the Look Inside feature on Amazon. I certainly don’t see anything in this book that could lead you astray. If it feels rooted, vital and expansive for you, that means more than any review.

pranadawithhostasmallerPranada Devi is a communications professional living in Toronto, Canada. She is the Managing Editor of Parvati Magazine, and serves as an advisor on marketing communications for Parvati’s various projects. She is the editor for Parvati’s new book “Confessions of a Former Yoga Junkie”, which has sold out out its first two printing runs.