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Book: The Power of Now
Author: Eckhart Tolle
Year: 1999

Review

When a friend handed me this book as a present, my eyes went wide. I couldn't believe the title: "The Power of Now". The president of the company I work for had written a business book with the very same title on real-time enterprises, and "The Power of Now" is our corporate slogan, it is even printed on my business card. How amazed was I to find out that there is more then one book on the "Power of Now".

When I looked at the table of contents of the book I got a bit worried. I found terms like "Collective Pain-Body," "Psychological Time," "The Unmanifested," and "Conscious Death" there. This sounded like a complex book. Fancy terms by a stuck-up author? The only way to find out was to read the book.

I read it. I continued to have the sensation that the autor uses an aweful lot of academic or fancy theoretic terms. Frequently I had to read the sentences twice or three times to understand. Until the end of the book I didn't change my view point. In my opinion Eckhart Tolle could have used some simpler terms to explain his concepts and to get his message across. But this is just minor criticism. I did like the structure of the book. The entire book is presented in the question-and-answer style. He raises concrete questions, part of which were voiced by the audience in lectures given by the author. Following the questions come one or two page answers. The book starts with "Enlightenment - what is that?" and appropriately ends with "How will I know when I have surrendered [found enlightenment]?".

Spiritual Message

The book in a nutshell conveys the message: 'Stop thinking, as thinking is worrying; live the moment, live in the Now'. But the book cannot really be explained in a single sentence. The above phrase if standing by itself without further explanatory context is bound to be misinterpreted. It sounds like: Live for the moment, indulge in getting the most pleasure out of every second and don't worry about the tomorrow. It is not quite that simple.

Let me try to explain. All the time we have our head full of (meaningless) thoughts, full of noise. We don't use the mind. The mind uses us. The instrument takes over. We have so many thoughts that we cannot think clearly anymore. We cannot see the forest because of the trees. He separates the "I" and the "mind". The mind wants to control us. If we live in the Now, if we are freed from the chains of our mind we can look at the mind and identify it as a separate entity. We can shut the mind down, we can eliminate the noise, we can be more focused. In order to control us the mind creates doubts and worries placed in the future. If we live in the Now we can eliminate the worries [=future] and we can eliminate conditioning [=past].

Following this line of thoughts the author derives that the Now is just another term for awareness or consciousness. I am aware, I am in the Now, I am enlightened all becomes the same. The Now (present awareness) no longer involves the domination of the analytic thinking mind which by definition is predicated on either memory (=past) or anticipation (=future).

For us, living in the Now and enjoying the present is difficult because the mind and the ego do not want to give up control. In order to be in the Now we have to make the mind a submissive tool and we have to overcome all sorts of conditioning, our social conditioning, our educational conditioning, our religious conditioning, and our cultural conditioning.

A line I liked a lot was "The secret of life is to 'die before you die' -- and find that there is no death." I interpreted this statement as follows: "The secret of life is to 'die [give up possessions, the thinking process, worries, planning, holding on to the past; to move from the external world of the brain to the spiritual world of the soul] before you die" -- and find that there is no death [that the Now never dies, that you are always in the Now, that to stop thinking does not result in death; moving from the brain to the inner self is not a threat to you]."

Another observation that spoke loudly to me was about the three options we have. According to the book in all situations one has exactly 3 options:

1. One can remove oneself from the situation [walk away, avoid it, leave],
2. One can change it [confront it, speak out about it, do something about it], or
3. One can accept it totally [neutrally accept it, live with it without fighting it].

The author says that there are only these 3 options, and one must chose Now; then accept the consequences; without excuses, without negativity about it, without psychic pollution. One must keep one's inner space clear and calm and positive. If one choses option 1 or 2, one should drop the negativity first if possible. The action will be clearer and more effective if it is made with the negativity removed.

This does away with prograstination. But more importantly it removes anger created in the thinking process of the past. I can apply this to myself. I am handling situations of past-anger-management poorly. Let's take two real-world examples. At the age of 20 I was bashed up and my teeth broken in Vienna by a group of teenage drunk without reason. They just wanted to fight and I was in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Just last year while sleeping in my camping bus two professional thieves broke the window and stole money, credit cards, passport, etc. right in front of my eyes. I both cases I carried the anger inside me for years. Obviously it is not a good thing to carry this anger and frustration within me. Whenever a thought of this past event boils up within me, I am living in the past, and not in the Now. Since I cannot do option 1 (remove myself) nor 2 (change it), only option 3 (accept it) remains. I should accept these past events and have an emotionally calm and neutral attitude towards them. For me this is easily said, but hard to do. I will try anyway.

I think that many people looking for a more spiritual life style can find one or more points in this book that relate to their specific life. Living in the Now is certainly something that can help many of us to be happier.

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