The text is interspersed with brief analyses of quotations from various religious traditions, apparently garnered from many weeks studying fridge-magnets. One helpful feature is the use of a pause symbol (§) to indicate points at which 'you may want to stop reading for a moment, become still, and feel and experience the truth of what has just been said'. The style is generally chatty, though Eckhart occasionally uses a faux-dialectic to bring up obvious objections to his line of thought, to which he responds with withering scorn. By being more intensely focused on the present, we can be more content and more fulfilled.Īs this doesn't fill 229 pages we are treated to, among other things, lengthy discourses on the 'pain-body', an interesting theory of menstrual flow as a means to enlightenment and the surprising finding that as a member of the human race, I carry personal complicity and responsibility for all crimes and genocides of the twentieth century including those carried out before my birth. It is a shame that our enjoyment of the present is so often ruined by regrets about the past and worries about the future. We exist only in the present our past and the future are mental constructs. The primary thesis of the book is quite sensible, if unshattering. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.'Īfter this experience, Ulrich Tolle became a vagrant mystic for a period, rechristened himself Eckhart (presumably after 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart) and eventually became a spiritual teacher, author and talk-show guest with extraordinary success.

Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. I heard the words 'resist nothing,' as if spoken inside my chest. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. `Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the `I' and the `self' that `I' cannot live with.' 'Maybe,' I thought, 'only one of them is real.'. 'One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. The book opens with what readers of religious texts, the erowid archives and Huxley's The Doors of Perception will recognise as a classic mystical experience, epiphany or trip: In fact, that is what it is and that is what I'll do. It would be easy to dismiss this book as a fruit-salad of New Age and pseudo-buddhist clichés, mashed to a fine purée of nonsense and sold as a cure for what ails you in our age of secular alienation.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle