1-Sentence-Summary:The Power of Now shows you that every minute you spend worrying about the future or regretting the past is a minute lost, because really all you have to live in is the present, the now, and gives you actionable strategies to start living every minute as it occurs.
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The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle teaches enlightenment and spirituality through meditation. “The Power of Now” refers to letting go of all the worries about the present and the future and losing oneself in the now.
Favorite quote from the author:
Leading a very troubled and problematic life, coined by many periods of serious depression, Eckhart Tolle found peace overnight, quite literally.
Plagued by depressing late-night thoughts, he started questioning what it is that made his life so unbearable and found the answer in his “I” – the self-generated from the power of his thoughts in his mind. The next morning he woke up and felt very much at peace because he’d somehow managed to lose his worrier-self and live entirely in the now, the present moment.
After spending several years doing nothing but enjoying his new-found peace, eventually people started asking him questions – so he answered. Eckhart started teaching and published The Power of Now in 1997, which eventually went on to become a New York Times bestseller in 2000 after Oprah Winfrey fell in love with it and recommended it.
Here are 3 lessons from it to help you worry and regret less:
Ready for a trip to this beautiful place called the present? Let’s go!
If I asked 100 people to name the two most common bad feelings they can think of, 99 of them would probably respond with regret and anxiety.
Wouldn’t you?
The reason we regret and worry about a lot of things lies in the way our minds work. The constant stream of consciousness and thoughts in our head, which plays 24/7 in our heads, is mostly preoccupied with 2 things: the past and the future.
When you wake up 10 minutes too late in the morning, what’s the first thing you think? “Shit, I overslept, I wish I hadn’t hit the snooze button.” closely followed by “Oh no, now I’ll be late for work, I’m sure my boss will yell at me!” – and voilà, you’ve ruined at least the first half of your day.
Tolle says that the only important time is the one we think about the least: the present. The reason only the present matters is that everything happens here. Everything you feel and sense takes place in the present. When you think about it, the past is nothing more than all present moments that have gone by, and the future is just the collection of present moments waiting to arrive.
Therefore, living in any other moment than the present is useless. If your task is to hand in a research paper in 14 days, neither regretting all this time you procrastinated nor worrying about the big workload that’s to come will actually help get you there.
But if you just start solving the first tiny problem and come up with an outline, it’s all downhill from there.
I’m a big fan of stoicism. Part of their philosophy includes the idea that the only pain you really suffer is the one you create yourself.
Tolle would surely agree since he argues that pain is nothing more than the result of you resisting to all the things you cannot change. We think a lot about the future and the past, but can live only in the present and have therefore no means to change many things from the other two that we’re unhappy about.
Then we fill the gap between these by developing a resistance to these things, which is what we experience as pain, whether psychological or physical.
When you’re angry, that anger usually makes you think and act less rational, which more often than not results in a worse situation and thus, more pain – but it’s really all in your head.
How then, can you get rid of pain? Tolle recommends 2 things:
The first strategy is based on an effect from physics, called the quantum zeno effect. It says that you can freeze any system in its current state by constantly observing it. Asking yourself this question over and over will usually delay your actual next thought, thus giving you enough time to realize how much time you actually spend in autopilot mode. This way you can start interrupting your mind and thus separating from it.
The second method is meant to help you listen to your body and learn to accept the constant, nagging thoughts in your head, about what you should be doing or not doing. The next time you do wake up late for work, just listen to that voice that says “You should’ve done better!”, but don’t act on it. Notice it, see it, accept that it’s there, but don’t give in to its advice.
These two tools will help you separate your body from your always-on, thought-driven mind, after which you’ll be in less pain because you resist the things you can’t change a lot less.
Enlightened spiritual teacher or insane quack? Opinions on The Power of Now couldn’t fall farther apart. But that’s not what we care about at Four Minute Books. We care about learning from the best in the world. And when a book sells 3 million copies, that sure is something to pay attention to.
For someone like me, who’s not too much into meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality, a summary was a perfect, objective, practical recap. I believe there’s a lot to learn from Eckhart Tolle and this summary is a great way to do it!
The 29 year old, who’s worried, because she hasn’t figured out her life yet, the 85 year old who regrets the many stupid things he did during his youth and at war, and anyone who spends more time complaining than actually working on improving things.
Author | Eckhart Tolle |
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Language | English |
Subject | Spirituality, Psychology |
Published |
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Media type | |
Pages | 236 |
ISBN | 978-1-57731-152-2 |
OCLC | 42061039 |
291.4/4 21 | |
LC Class | BL624 .T64 1999 |
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is a book by Eckhart Tolle. The book is intended to be a guide for day-to-day living and stresses the importance of living in the present moment and transcending thoughts of the past or future.
Published in the late 1990s,[1] the book was recommended by Oprah Winfrey[2] and has been translated into 33 languages.[3] As of 2009, it was estimated that three-million copies had been sold in North America.[4]
The book draws from a variety of 'spiritual traditions',[5] and has been described by one reviewer as 'Buddhism mixed with mysticism and a few references to Jesus Christ, a sort of New Age re-working of Zen.'[6] It uses these traditions to describe a 'belief system based on living in the present moment'.[7] Its core message is that people's emotional problems are rooted in their identification with their minds.[8] The author writes that an individual should be aware of their 'present moment' instead of losing themselves in worry and anxiety about the past or future.[2]
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According to the book, only the present moment is important,[5] and both an individual's past and future is created by their thoughts.[6] The author maintains that people's insistence that they have control of their life is an illusion 'that only brings pain'.[5] The book also describes methods of relaxation and meditation to aid readers in anchoring themselves in the present.[5] These suggestions include slowing down life by avoiding multi-tasking, spending time in nature, and letting go of worries about the future.[9] Some of the concepts contained in The Power of Now, such as the human ego and its negative effects on happiness, are further elaborated in the author's later books, in particular A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005).[7]
The chapters of the book are: 'Introduction', 'You Are Not Your Mind', 'Consciousness: The Way Out of Pain', 'Moving Deeply into the Now', 'Mind Strategies for Avoiding the Now', 'The State of Presence', 'The Inner Body', 'Portals into the Unmanifested', 'Enlightened Relationships', 'Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness There Is Peace' and 'The Meaning of Surrender'.[10] Various chapters emphasize a philosophy of destroying the destructive dominance of the mind and ego in an effort to overcome the pain body.[7] According to the author, his philosophy is directed towards people and their search for personal happiness and also has the potential to give insight into historical disasters like the justification of an evil political system such as Communism.[7]
In the book's introduction the author relates his past experiences of continuous anxiety with periods of suicidal depression. Later, when he was 29 years old, he had a personal epiphany and writes: 'I heard the words 'resist nothing' as if spoken inside my chest.' He relates that he felt as if he were falling into a void and afterwards 'there was no more fear.'[11]
In Chapter Two, Tolle tells the reader that they must recognize their personal ego 'without the ego creating an antagonistic response to its own denial or destruction' and explains the purposelessness of the 'mental pain and anguish' that people hold on to.[12] According to the book: 'The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification.'[8] In this chapter the author writes: 'pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible'.[8] The author goes on to write that 'many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness.'[5]
In Chapter Three, the author writes: 'In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.'[8]
In Chapter Four, Tolle says that 'tomorrow's bills are not the problem' and can be a 'core delusion' that changes a 'mere situation, event or emotion' into a reason for suffering and unhappiness.[13] The book also calls 'waiting' a 'state of mind' that we should snap ourselves out of.[13]
The book was originally published in 1997 by Namaste Publishing in Vancouver. It was republished in 1999 by New World Library, and this edition reached and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for years afterwards.[8] The book has been translated into 33 languages, including Arabic.[3][14]
In 2000, the book was listed as recommended reading in Oprah Winfrey's O magazine and, according to Winfrey, the actress Meg Ryan also recommended it.[2] A Christian author, Andrew Ryder, wrote a dissertation saying that 'Tolle moves the traditional [Christian] teaching forward by illustrating how our obsession with the past and the future .. [prevents] us from giving our full attention to the present moment.'[15]William Bloom, a spokesperson for the holistic, mind-body-spirit movement in the UK, wrote that 'Tolle's approach is very body aware. He's done it in a nice accessible way for people.'[8]
Some reviewers were more critical of the book. According to a review in the Telegraph Herald, the book is not very well-written but contains some good teachings.[5] Andrea Sachs wrote in TIME magazine that the book is 'awash in spiritual mumbo jumbo' and 'unhelpful for those looking for practical advice'.[16] An article in The Independent said that 'there is not very much new about The Power of Now' and described it as 'a sort of New Age re-working of Zen.'[6]
When Paris Hilton was incarcerated at the Century Regional Detention Facility in California in June 2007 she brought with her a copy of The Power of Now.[8] Singer Annie Lennox chose The Power of Now as one of her 'desert island books', as did the comedian Tony Hawks.[8] Singer Katy Perry stated that she was inspired to write 'This Moment', a song from her 2013 album Prism, after she heard the audio book of The Power of Now.[17]
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