The Power of Now

Tolle's story and the book's format

Eckhart Tolle opens with his own crisis. Until about age 30, he lived with constant anxiety and periods of deep depression. One night, shortly after his 29th birthday, he woke with a feeling of dread. A thought kept repeating: he could not live with himself any longer. Then a question stopped him. If he could not live with himself, there had to be two of him: the "I" and the self that the "I" could not stand. Maybe only one of them was real.

That question, he says, broke something open. He felt pulled into a void and lost consciousness. He woke the next morning in a state of deep peace that stayed with him. For about two years afterward, he did little but sit on park benches in what he describes as intense joy. Later he began to teach what he had learned.

The book is written mostly as questions and answers. A reader's doubt or objection comes first, and Tolle responds. He draws on Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and other traditions, but he does not ask you to adopt any religion. He asks you to test the ideas in your own experience. He also suggests you read slowly and pause often, because the point is not to collect ideas. The point is to notice what is reading them.

You are not your mind

The first chapter makes the book's central claim. You are not your thoughts. Most people identify with the voice in their head, the constant stream of comment, judgment and worry. Tolle says this identification is the main cause of human suffering. Thinking itself is useful. The problem is compulsive thinking that never stops and that you mistake for who you are.

He tells a parable. A beggar sits by a road for over 30 years. A stranger passes and asks what he is sitting on. The beggar says it is just an old box. The stranger asks him to look inside. The beggar opens it and finds it full of gold. Tolle says he is the stranger with nothing to give, who only asks you to look inside.

The way out begins with one simple practice: watch the thinker. Listen to the voice in your head as an observer. Do not judge it or fight it. When you watch a thought, you are no longer fully inside it. A sense of your own presence appears behind the thought. Tolle calls this the beginning of freedom.

When you watch closely, you also notice short gaps between thoughts. In those gaps there is stillness and alertness without words. Tolle links this to Being, the deep life beneath all forms. He calls the state of being connected to it enlightenment, which he describes simply as the end of suffering.

The false self built from thought is the ego. It needs constant problems, comparisons and stories to survive. It lives in the past and the future, never the present. Emotions, in Tolle's view, are the body's reaction to the mind. An angry thought produces anger in the body, which then feeds more angry thoughts.

Consciousness and the pain-body

Tolle says most human pain is unnecessary. We create it ourselves through resistance to what is. Every time you reject the present moment, you add a little pain.

Old pain does not disappear. It collects in body and mind as an energy field that Tolle calls the pain-body. Every person carries one. It has two states: dormant and active. When something triggers it, it wakes up and takes over your thinking. It feeds on more pain. It makes you pick fights, replay wounds and seek drama, because negative thoughts and emotions are its food.

The pain-body cannot survive your full attention. Tolle's method is to observe it when it rises. Feel the emotion in your body. Do not act on it, and do not build stories around it. When you watch it without judgment, you stop feeding it. He says this turns the pain into consciousness, a process he compares to alchemy.

Fear works the same way. Most fear is psychological. It comes from the mind imagining a future that has not happened. The ego feels incomplete, so it always fears loss.

Time and the Now

Tolle's next claim is that time is the obstacle. He separates two kinds:

• Clock time is practical. You use it to plan, keep appointments and learn from mistakes.
• Psychological time is the habit of living in the past or future. You replay old events or chase a better moment that is always ahead.

The Now is the only moment you ever have. The past exists only as memory in the present. The future exists only as imagination in the present. Yet the mind treats the present as a step toward something else, and so misses it.

Tolle draws a line between your life situation and your life. Your life situation is the story of your circumstances: your past, your plans, your problems. Your life is what is happening right now. Problems, he says, belong to the mind. In the present there are only situations, which you either deal with now or accept.

He describes how the mind avoids the Now. The common form is ordinary unconsciousness: a low hum of unease, impatience or boredom. A simple check helps: ask whether there is joy, ease and lightness in what you are doing. If not, time is covering up the present. Waiting is a clear sign. When you wait for the weekend or for the next stage of life, you reject the moment you are in.

Presence and the inner body

Presence is the state of alert attention to the Now. Tolle compares it to waiting in a special way. Imagine you expect something important to happen at any moment. You are fully alert, with no room for daydreams. That alertness, without the anxiety, is presence.

The main way into presence is the inner body. Instead of living only in your head, you put attention into the body from the inside. Close your eyes. Feel the energy in your hands, then your arms, legs and torso. You do not picture the body. You feel it as a living field of energy. Tolle says this anchors you in the present, because the body is always here.

He calls the inner body a portal into the Unmanifested, his term for the formless source of all things. He lists other portals as well:

• Silence, especially the silence behind and between sounds.
• Space, the emptiness that lets objects exist.
• The breath, when you follow it with full attention.
• The end of thought, even for a moment.

He suggests making these practices part of daily life. Put some attention in the inner body while you listen to someone, while you wait in line, or when you feel a strong emotion.

Relationships, peace and surrender

The last three chapters apply presence to daily life.

On relationships, Tolle says most romantic love is a form of addiction. It swings between love and hate because each partner uses the other to fill an inner lack. When the other fails to make us whole, we blame them. He suggests a different use for relationships: treat them as a practice for becoming conscious. When your partner triggers you, watch your reaction. Do not defend your position or try to win. Accept the other person as they are, without judgment.

On happiness, he says that good and bad are labels the mind adds to events. Happiness depends on conditions, so it always carries the fear of loss. Underneath both happiness and unhappiness is a deeper peace. Many events that look bad at first later turn out to teach or open something.

The book ends with surrender. Tolle defines it as inner acceptance of what is. It is not passivity. You can still act to change a situation. But you act from acceptance, not resistance. If a situation is intolerable, he says, you have three options: remove yourself from it, change it, or accept it totally. Anything else, such as complaining while doing nothing, creates suffering.

He applies this to illness and loss. You may not be able to change the facts, but you can stop adding mental resistance to them. When you stop resisting, he says, pain often becomes bearable and sometimes turns into a doorway to peace.

What the critics say

Critics say the book makes large spiritual claims with no evidence, such as its remarks that inner body practice slows aging or strengthens the immune system. Others find it repetitive and vague, and warn that the language of surrender can be misread as a reason to accept harmful situations. Some readers also question its generalizations about women and a collective female pain-body. Research on mindfulness supports some of the basic practices, such as observing thoughts and focusing on the breath, but not the book's metaphysics.

Who should read it

Read it if your thoughts run nonstop, if you often live in the past or future, or if you want a spiritual approach to anxiety that does not require a religion. Read it slowly, a few pages at a time, and try each practice as you go.