The Power of Now

Introduction

The Power of Now is a spiritual self-help book by Eckhart Tolle, first published in 1997.

• Eckhart Tolle aims to awaken us to the spiritual truth that lies deep within. He argues that we have forgotten this truth and that reconnecting with it can lead to inner transformation.
• He posits that our unhappy and fearful self-identity is a "fiction of the mind" or a "mental illusion." This false self prevents our consciousness from breaking free from suffering.
• After all, even the most beautiful experiences are temporary. Our relationships, jobs, homes, and social identities are all fleeting and do not define our true selves on the physical plane.

You Are Not Your Mind

The enlightenment of Being and a deep, unshakable peace have always been inside us, yet we act like beggars who have not found this greatest treasure.

• Despite great material wealth, we constantly look outside ourselves for scraps of pleasure, fulfilment, validation, security or love.
• Our natural state is a felt oneness with Being, a state of wholeness, therefore at peace. This state is essentially you, yet is much greater than you, because you have found your true nature beyond name and form.
• The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation from yourself and the world around you. When you perceive yourself as an isolated fragment, whether consciously or unconsciously, fear arises. This is why the Buddha defined enlightenment as the end of suffering.
• The relentless mental noise of identity thinking makes each and every individual feel separate, living in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflicts. This world, in turn, reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of our mind.

When our sense of oneness is replaced by an identification with our thoughts, our minds begin to control us, where we are no longer able to switch off our thinking at will.

• Mind includes not just thought, but also emotions, which are the body's reaction to your mind, such as anger or fear in response to a perceived attack.
• When thought and emotion conflict, pay attention to the emotion, because the body is always a truthful reflection of what is happening in your mind.
• The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the voice in your head - the thinker.
• The voice in your head could be a continuous monologue or a dialogue that comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on.
• This voice is not necessarily relevant to the situation you are in at the moment; it might be reviving the recent or distant past, or imagining possible future situations.
• It often imagines things going wrong and conjures negative outcomes, which is the very nature of worry.
• For the ego, the present moment barely exists, as only the past and future are considered important.
• When a higher level of consciousness is activated to observe the thinker, you listen to the voice impartially and without judgment. In doing so, you sense your own presence as the witness of the thought.
• When you begin to see beyond thought, you realize that all the things that truly matter - intelligence, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. These cannot fully flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance, but you may still experience glimpses of them in between.
• With practice, the gap of "no mind" where thought subsides and loses control over you will gradually become longer.
• At the selfless state, the whole external world becomes relatively insignificant.
• Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap of "no mind" simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now (i.e., the present moment).
• Pay close attention to every step, every movement, every sight, every sound and every breath.
• Being highly alert and aware, but not thinking, is the essence of meditation.

NOTE: According to the book The Fifth Agreement, we are born authentic and happy, acting purely on instinct like babies. However, we then undergo a process called "domestication", where society uses a system of rewards and punishments to teach us its rules. During this process, we learn language. We soon misuse this powerful tool, turning it inward to judge ourselves. This self-judgment creates a false self-image - a fabricated "story of you" - filled with the chaotic mental noise the authors call the "mitote".

Consciousness: The Way Out Of Pain

Our mind can never truly fight or remove emotional pain (such as resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression and jealousy).

• All it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily.
• Yet, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain becomes.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary and is self-created by our unobserved mind.

• This pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance or resistance to what is in the Now - for example, a judgmental thought or a negative emotion.
• Remember, the egoic mind (the false, mind-made self) always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. To ensure that it remains in control, the mind seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, causing an increasingly heavy burden of time to accumulate in the human mind. The more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.
• Therefore, when we are able to honour and accept the Now, we cease to create pain in the present. Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have, and only pay brief visits to the past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
• When the present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful, notice how the mind labels it, and allow the present moment to be as if you have chosen it. Then, always work with it, not against it.

As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves a residue of pain that lives on in you and merges with the pain from the past. This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind, known as the emotional pain-body.

• A pain-body may be dormant 90% of the time (i.e., you experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, which may be linked with past loss or abandonment; anything can trigger it). However, in a deeply unhappy person, it may be active up to 100% of the time (meaning they live almost entirely through their pain-body).
• These pain-bodies can be relatively harmless, or they can be physically or emotionally violent to those around them.
• Hence, it is crucial to observe it in yourself, preventing the pain-body from taking you over as a subconscious identity and living through you, feeding on any negative experiences that resonate with it.
• To dissolve past pain that still lives on in our mind and body, you need to disidentify yourself from the pain-body and become the watcher. Consciously accept the feeling inside you, but do not let the feeling turn into thinking, or else the emotional pain-body will take over you once again.

You may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain - so much so that you would rather stay in pain (be the pain-body) than take a leap into the unknown out of this mind-made fiction.

• If this applies to you, observe the attachment to your pain, the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy.
• By staying present as the witness, your conscious mind can cease the resistance and then shift your attention to the emotional pain-body.

Another aspect of the emotional pain-body that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole.

• If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough.
• If it is unconscious, it will be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing.
• In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill the hole they feel within, such as possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship.
• However, even when they attain all these things, there might only be brief intervals of fulfilled craving, but the hole remains bottomless.

Moving Deeply Into the Now

Studying the complexities of the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so will not take you beyond the mind. You only need to understand the basic mechanics of the unconscious state:

• Identification with the mind, which creates a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being.
• The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened, and so it lives in a state of fear and want.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: The compulsion is to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

• This creates an endless preoccupation with the past and future and an unwillingness to honour, acknowledge, and allow the present moment to be.
• The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity, and the future holds the promise of salvation or fulfilment (or the goals to strive toward). Both are illusions.

The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

• The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not "this moment".
• Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.
• Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
• What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace.
• The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it arrives as the Now.
• Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own but can only reflect the light of the sun, the reality of the past and future is borrowed from the eternal present, the Now.

In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to Presence sometimes happens naturally.

• Hence, death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" - and find that there is no death.

If you still find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing your mind's habitual tendency to want to escape from the Now.

• You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present, giving you hope or anxiety. But both are illusory.
• Through self-observation, more Presence comes into your life automatically.
• In short, be present as the watcher of your mind - of your thoughts and emotions, as well as your reactions in various situations.

Importantly, we need to learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock" time - but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with.

• Avoid the buildup of "psychological time", which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.
• All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and the denial of the present.
• Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future and not enough presence.
• Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.
• Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is the loss of self.

Mind Strategies for Avoiding the Now

To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need for the past to give you identity and the future to provide you with fulfilment.

• With increasing practice in focusing your consciousness in the present moment rather than in the past or future, presence eventually becomes your predominant state.

However, most humans alternate not between consciousness and unconsciousness, but only between different levels of unconsciousness, constantly moving between phases akin to dreamless sleep and the dream state.

• Ordinary unconsciousness is most people's normal state, where you are run by the egoic mind and are unaware of Being. It is not a state of acute pain or unhappiness, but one of an almost continuous low level of unease, discontent, boredom, or nervousness - a kind of background static. Many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, or even shopping in an unconscious attempt to remove this basic unease, providing only an extremely short-lived symptom relief.
• The unease of ordinary unconsciousness turns into the pain of deep unconsciousness - a state of more acute and obvious suffering or unhappiness - when things "go wrong", when the ego is threatened, or when there is a major challenge, threat, or loss, real or imagined, in your life situation or a conflict in a relationship. This state brings up intense negativity, such as anger, acute fear, aggression, and depression (i.e., the pain-body has been triggered, and you have become identified with it).

Make it a habit to monitor your mental-emotional state through self-observation.

• Make it conscious. Observe the many ways in which unease, discontent, and tension arise within you through unnecessary judgment, resistance to what is, and denial of the Now.
• If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally (i.e. surrender).
• It is common for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living. Stress is often caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there", or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. In such cases, give up waiting as a state of mind, and come into the present to do your best to move, work or run!
• If you are dissatisfied with what you have got, or even frustrated or angry about your present lack, that may motivate you to become rich. However, even if you do make millions, you will continue to experience the inner condition of lack, and deep down you will continue to feel unfulfilled.
• Once you learn to dissolve ordinary unconsciousness, the light of your presence will shine brightly, and it will be much easier to deal with deep unconsciousness whenever you feel its gravitational pull.

Your life's journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose.

• The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies the future.
• The journey's inner purpose, on the other hand, has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.
• Only the inner purpose can give you lasting fulfilment.

The State of Presence

As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought.

• The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes back in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time.
• To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind will drag you along like a wild current.

Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty and the sacredness of nature.

• Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by its absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness?
• Have you truly listened to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest?

Whenever you watch the mind, you withdraw consciousness from mind-forms, and that consciousness then becomes what we call the watcher or the witness of your mind.

The Inner Body

Through enlightenment, Being can be felt as the ever-present "I am" that is beyond name and form.

• This realization will make you free from the illusion that you are nothing more than your physical body and your mind (the "illusion of the self").
• It will also free you from fear and sin (which Tolle defines as the suffering you unconsciously inflict on yourself and others).

You are cut off from Being when your mind takes up all your attention.

• The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. Because of this, you cannot stop the compulsive thinking.
• Hence, to become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind (the consciousness that was previously trapped in useless and compulsive thinking).
• A very effective way to do this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body. Here, Being can first be felt as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.

Focusing on the inner body is also beneficial for slowing down the aging process, strengthening the immune system, improving the creative use of your mind, and enhancing your ability to listen to another person.

Portals Into the Unmanifested

Conscious breathing, which is a powerful form of meditation, will gradually put you in touch with the inner body.

• Follow the breath with your attention as it moves in and out of your body.
• Breathe deeply into your body and feel your abdomen expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and exhalation.
• You may also close your eyes to visualize.
• Feel the inner body as a single field of energy; by merging with it, you connect to the realm of pure Being (or the Unmanifested).
• When your consciousness comes back to the manifested world (the world of form), you reassume the form identity that you temporarily relinquished (your name, past, life situation, and future).

To feel a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, you do not give 100% of your attention to the external world and to your mind.

• Instead, you keep some attention within your inner body when engaged in everyday activities.

The Now can be seen as the main portal to the Unmanifested (pure Being). Other portals include:

• Deep dreamless sleep
• Cessation of thinking
• Surrender - the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is
• Outer silence - pay attention to outer silence creates inner silence, causing the mind to becomes still.
• Near-death experiences

Enlightened Relationships

Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification because they believe those things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack.

• This is the search for salvation from a state of unsatisfactoriness or insufficiency.
• Invariably, any satisfaction they obtain is short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction or fulfilment is usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away from the here and now.
• This is the unconscious mindset that creates the illusion of salvation in the future. Your mind tells you, you are not yet complete or good enough, because everything worthwhile is in the future.

True salvation is fulfilment, peace, and life in all its fullness.

• It is to be who you are - to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself.
• It is also a state of freedom - freedom from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency, from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all, from the past and future as a psychological need.
• You get "there" by realizing that you are there already. However, there is only one point of access: the Now.

Unless and until you access the consciousness frequency of presence, all relationships, and particularly intimate relationships, are deeply flawed and ultimately dysfunctional.

• A "love" relationship may seem perfect for a while, such as when you are "in love", but it invariably becomes a love/hate relationship before long and finally turns into savage attack or feelings of hostility when the positive/negative polarity is lost.
• To be "in love" with your partner is at first a deeply satisfying state where your existence has suddenly become meaningful because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel special, and you do the same for him or her.
• When you are together, you feel whole, deriving a sense of self from the person you are "in love" with.
• However, you become addicted to the other person.
• The thought that he or she might no longer be there for you eventually leads to jealousy, possessiveness, attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail, blaming, and accusing.
• When your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your ego's needs, the feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of ego-consciousness resurface.
• Your ego starts to attack the partner, attempting to change their behaviour, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain.
• Similar to all addictions, like alcohol, food, or illegal drugs, once the initial euphoria has passed, they bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you, but was previously covered up, causing you to feel the pain more intensely than ever.

For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you are no longer taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are.

• To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, and the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation and enlightenment.
• To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and thus transmute it.
• To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour, especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.

If you stop investing the mind with "selfless", it loses its compulsive quality, which is basically the compulsion to judge, and thus to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain.

• In fact, the moment the judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
• First, you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner.
• The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
• That immediately takes you beyond ego.
• Be present.
• Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way.
• Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself.
• Accusing, defending, attacking - all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met - will then become redundant.

To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities (more closely related to the feminine principle) are needed: surrender, non-judgment, and an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it.

• As a general rule, the major obstacle that prevents enlightenment and the flourishing of love for men tends to be the thinking mind, while for women it tends to be the pain-body.
• Do not use the thinker or pain-body as an identity, but use the spiritual practice of relationship as an opportunity for enlightenment.

Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness There is Peace

Seen from the perspective of the mind, there is duality: good/bad, like/dislike, love/hate.

• However, whenever anything negative (e.g., failure, loss, illness or pain) happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.
• Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life - what ultimately matters and what does not.
• Hence, seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise, they are neither positive nor negative; they simply are.
• When you live in complete acceptance of what is - which is the only sane way to live - there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore.

Essentially, you are not pretending or engaging in self-deception; you are simply allowing the moment to be as it is.

• You learn to forgive the sadness of the present moment to gain a deep serenity, a stillness, and a sacred presence.
• In the meantime, you can do what you have to do, but accept what is.

Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives (the "drama") are created by the ego.

• Most people are in love with their particular life drama; their story is their identity. The ego runs their life.
• When two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues, such as conflict, problems, power struggles and emotional or physical violence.
• However, when you live in complete acceptance of what is, you can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it - no defense or attack. Hence, the argument would not turn into drama.

On the level of form, there are cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly separate forms.

• Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever.
• If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive.
• Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen.
• One cannot exist without the other.
• Hence, there are also inevitable cycles of gain and loss in the life of an individual.
• Failures are not you, but only your life situation.
• Remember, the cyclical nature of the universe is linked with the impermanence of all things and situations.

Your inner peace abides in Being - unchanging, timeless, and deathless. You are no longer dependent for fulfilment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms.

• You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, and appreciate the beauty of it all, but there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.
• One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: "Die before you die." Nothing that is real ever dies; only names, forms, and illusions die (e.g., the body and the concept of death).

The Meaning of Surrender

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic and so on.

• True surrender, however, is something entirely different.
• It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it.
• Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.

• The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now. Therefore, to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. This means there is no judgment of the Now, no resistance, and no emotional negativity.
• Inner resistance becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong", which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap.
• Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from identification with your mind and thus reconnects you with Being.

Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of "I cannot be bothered anymore" or "I just do not care anymore".

• If you look closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment, and so it is not surrender at all but masked resistance.

Focus not on the one hundred things you will or may have to do at some future time, but on the one thing that you can do now, which may include planning.

• However, be sure you do not start to run "mental movies", projecting yourself into the future, and so lose the Now.

You may say that you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, but the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking.

• All that is unconscious.

Summary

The Power of Now is not for light reading; it is a book that requires you to constantly reflect and adjust your behaviour to achieve wholeness with Being.

• Different from usual self-help books, which typically use introductory chapters to build up concepts and momentum, this book employs a question-and-answer format where the grand answer is given at the start, then slowly broken down further.
• Hence, some concepts like ego, presence (Now), and the pain-body may not be immediately well understood, but they improve significantly with later explanation.
• Therefore, you may proceed reading even if you do not understand it at first, but simply listen carefully.

In summary, The Power of Now posits that human suffering is rooted in our identification with the egoic mind and its obsession with the past and future.

• The solution is to disidentify from the mind and the accumulated pain-body by becoming the silent "watcher" of your thoughts and anchoring your consciousness in the present moment.
• This is accomplished through practices like surrender (the radical acceptance of what is), focusing on the inner body and breath, and using relationships and challenges as opportunities for spiritual growth.
• Ultimately, this path leads you to realize your true nature as Being, allowing you to discover a profound and lasting peace that exists beyond the fleeting states of happiness and unhappiness.