The Power of Now

The Power of Now shook all the concepts I had about time, presence, mindfulness, ego and the meaning of life. This book offers simple concepts that are hard to accept and put into practice as we are profoundly unconscious and resist everything that is true.

Personally, it's one of the most powerful and transformative books I ever read. You will either hate or love this book, but you should learn something to become more aware and fight your ego that creates resistance that leads to pain and diseases.

In The Power of Now, spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle shows readers how to go beyond an intellectual understanding of the power of the Now and experience it directly within themselves.

Tolle describes how our ego-based state of consciousness (which is usually the case when we are thinking) often leads us to suffer unnecessarily from either anxiety, stress, or a general sense of lack.In contrast, when our consciousness is free from the ego, we are free from suffering and step into the present moment fully alive and aware.

Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance.

You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

About 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction.

The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.

Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous.

Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body.

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 the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.

Make it a habit to ask yourself: What’s going on inside me at this moment?

In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.

Emotion literally means “disturbance.” The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to disturb.”

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

The more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering — and free of the egoic mind.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

Surrender to what is.

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.

“Unconscious,” the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies.

The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.

Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.

The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory 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 nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.

In the world, on the level of your life situation, you may indeed become wealthy, knowledgeable, successful, free of this or that, but in the deeper dimension of Being you are complete and whole now.

On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental projection away from the Now. On the emotional level, there will be an undercurrent of unease, tension, boredom, or nervousness. Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual resistance mode.

Make it a habit to monitor your mental-emotional state through self-observation. “Am I at ease at this moment?” is a good question to ask yourself frequently.

The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer.

The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.

Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That’s not a judgment. It’s a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness.

Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick?

Wherever you are, be there totally. 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.