The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

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Novato, CA: New World 1999. 191 pp  $21.95 (HB)

Following a personal mystical experience, Eckhart Tolle was transformed from a callous atheist to a spiritual believer. This book shares lovely insights and wise suggestions for ways to reach into the dimensions that Tolle discovered spontaneously. He believes that all of us have this awareness within us, but that our chattering mind obscures this.

Here is one of a variety of approaches Tolle suggests for finding the quiet center where we can be present – following his format of questions and answers.

You keep talking about the state of presence as the key. I think I understand it intellectually, but I don’t know if I have ever truly experienced it. I wonder – is it what I think it is, or is it something entirely different?

It’s not what you think it is! You can’t think about presence, and the mind can’t understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. (p. 77)

Tolle points out that good and evil are two sides of the same thing.

It may appear that if you could only eliminate the negative or destructive cycles, then all would be well and the relationship would flower beautifully – but alas, this is not possible. The polarities are mutually interdependent. You cannot have one without the other. The positive already contains within itself the as yet unmanifested negative. Both are in fact different aspects of the same dysfunction… (p. 124)

Again and again, Tolle makes the point that the only productive spiritual goal is to find the place where we are one with “the higher good beyond good and bad.”

Thoughtful, helpful book – for letting go of thought-fullness!

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