Name: The Power of Now
ISBN: 9781458770943

Eckhart Tolle

A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

The Power of Now

Carolina

fran ♡

I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten. 

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some super human accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying.

Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hin drance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. 

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. 

Can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the "off" button?

Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. 

When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. Do not judge or condemn what you hear for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. 

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down.

It (ego) is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. 

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being Sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. 

If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.

Thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. 

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem." You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind.

What is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.

Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives.

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future.

To make the journey into the Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. From the very first page of Eckhart Tolle's extraordinary book, we move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air. We become connected to the indestructible essence of our Being, “The eternal, ever present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.” Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle uses simple language and an easy question and answer format to guide us. A word of mouth phenomenon since its first publication, The Power of Now is one of those rare books with the power to create an experience in readers, one that can radically change their lives for the better.

A really good book, teaches us how to lead a better life on our daily routines, without all the struggles that our mind make us suffer. The insight is quite good for people who understand the topic but it may be a kinda weird language for people who are not familiarized with it.

The author shares the secret of his own self-realization and the philosophy for living in the present he has developed.

Some good reminders about being present and not letting the pain body take over you. A little longer than it probably needed to be, but then I can also see that some of the repetition is to drive the point home. 

BC Hark

Timeo Williams

Fantastic book. 

Here are some quotes I love: 

A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. 

This book - will draw attention to what is false in you. 

Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Bring and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scrapes of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all these things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer. 


Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. 


The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgements and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. 


If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be a lie, the emotion will be the truth. 

Love, joy and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I would call emotions. They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper level. So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel what lies beyond them. 

Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless. 

On pain-body 

However, it’s more important to observe it in yourself than in someone else. Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form- it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. 

Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy, it finds it quite indigestible. 


The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and had temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification. It had turned in on itself and become anti-life, like an animal trying to devour its own tail. 

Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. 

In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. 

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. 

Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the stoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. 
- If conscious, you’ll have an unsettling feeling of not being good enough
- if unconsciousness, it will be an indirect feeling of intense craving, wanting and needing. 


Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious and other collective identifications. 


To be identified with your mind Is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusive through memory and anticipation.

i felt extremely meh about this book, i read it for my brother and was expecting to hate it given i'm not really a self-help book kinda person so feeling meh about it was actually positively surprising. there are some bits where i felt i was actually gaining useful advice which was cool!

riss

Changed my life. The only downside is banging on about certain points a bit too long.

Sonia Grgas

I believe everyone can gain some wisdom from this book.

it's not applicable at all, i barely made it through that book, and i barely remember taking any insights of what he said —such a shame for such a famous book.

nanafark

egle trovato

Joshua Line

Scott Wilson

Very deep, very moving account of how one man has come to embrace the present moment. This book is a definite required reread in order to obtain the maximum learning from it's pages... this is one of those books that has the potential to change how you are living your life. Read it now!

matej yangwao

Every “past” was once a present moment.
Phenomenal achievements come from being present.
>learn to separate yourself from your mind.
Question your next thoughts.
Set yourself in active waiting to raise alertness of the present.

A good read for resetting your consciousness. A bit long and slow for the simple message it was trying to convey. 

Brandon Eckroth

Sarah Schumacher

I have no idea why I've seen this book on so many recommended lists. He gets a star for a few good nuggets on basic mindfulness, but otherwise comes off sounding like a self-appointed prophet of esoteric nonsense. There is no science, there are no citations and he freely twists quotes from (insert religious figure here) while talking down to the reader, as if spending a year sleeping on park benches has granted him valid credentials.

I practice meditation daily and read a lot in the personal growth/mindfulness categories, so it's not like I had it out for this book. The few good lines were in the first half, after which I started speed-reading as it went steadily downhill. Upon seeing that the last half inch of pages does not consist of citations, like most other books I read, I'm moving this puzzler to unfinished and moving on with my life.

If you're interested in mindfulness and learning to be more present in your life, read something by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Or better yet, get yourself a subscription to Headspace and start practicing it.

It was good and I was excited to read but I was getting bored towards the end and just wanted to finish the book. 

Haley Kirinsky 

Julia

Some parts of this book I felt deeply connected with and highlighted. Other parts made me want to throw it across the room. Good messages in there, but nothing you can’t find in any other self help book, written in a better way. Would recommend some of the lessons and concepts, but would not recommend this book.

Nikola

Anthony

I really enjoyed reading this book by Eckhart Tolle. There were plenty of great ideas which I will constantly use for the rest of my adventures of life. It feels good to stay in the Now.

Eckhart Tolle is emerging as one of today's most inspiring teachers. In The Power of Now, already a word-of-mouth bestseller in Canada, the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday. Tolle took another ten years to understand this transformation, during which time he evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation theory but is also eminently practical. In The Power of Now he shows readers how to recognize themselves as the creators of their own pain, and how to have a pain-free existence by living fully in the present. Accessing the deepest self, the true self, can be learned, he says, by freeing ourselves from the conflicting, unreasonable demands of the mind and living present, fully, and intensely, in the Now.

Lynn

The lessons in this book are good. I think he tells a truth a lot of people need to hear. I like the Q&A format, but I think this book is needlessly repetitive and I think the writer limits himself by attaching many ideas to religion/God specifically. This clearly shows it’s catered to a specific audience. Overall a good book, but not my taste.

Meghan Navoy

Landon Alder

While the concept of being “present” is great and I believe has the power to change people’s lives for the better, this book could have been condensed to 25 pages and been just as effective. The first few chapters contain the main idea, and the remaining 175 pages only serve to reiterate the same exact idea over and over again. He really started to lose me in the second half of the book when he starts talking about energy fields and twisting the words of Jesus to try and fit his narrative.

Vanessa Arenas

Dweedle 

A new age take on zen. There is a lot of good stuff in here. There is also some ridiculous stuff in here.

alali moe

I discovered this book in the strangest of ways and had it for 2 years before I actually started reading it (I was 20 years old back then), its as if it was waiting for me to read it. I started reading it in some of the darkest days I lived, and once I started understanding the book on a deeper level, my life fully changed. It's a wonderful book for those who want to learn more about Enlightenment. Hard to read for the average person, but extremely rewarding and worth the effort. It's been a little over two years since I finished it and I still go back to it at least once every two months. Mr. Tolle is a great teacher.

The Power of Now A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Reviews

Highlights