The Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle · 1997

Thesis

Most human suffering comes from identifying with the mind, the compulsive stream of thought that lives in the past and future and builds a false sense of self, and it ends when a person becomes fully present in the current moment and learns to observe thought instead of being it.

Strength of evidence: tradition and practice-based. Research links present-moment attention with greater well-being, but the book's claims about the pain-body, energy fields, slowed aging and a stronger immune system have no scientific support.

The main ideas

You are not your mind. Compulsive thinking is a kind of addiction, and the self it builds, the ego, is a source of fear and suffering.
Watching your thoughts without judging them separates you from them. You are the awareness that notices thought.
Old emotional pain persists as the pain-body, an energy field that feeds on new pain until it is observed.
Clock time, for practical planning, is useful. Psychological time, living in past and future, is the cause of most anxiety.
Peace comes from accepting the present moment, which Tolle calls surrender. It is not passivity: you can leave a situation, change it or accept it.
Attention to the body from within, and to silence and space, keeps a person anchored in the present.

You are not your mind

Eckhart Tolle writes that the book came from his own experience. At 29 he woke one night in near-unbearable depression, with the thought that he could no longer live with himself. The question of who the "I" was that could not live with "the self" broke the identification, and he woke into deep peace. He spent much of the next two years sitting on park benches in London, watching the world.

From this he builds his central claim. Most people identify completely with their thinking, which runs compulsively and mostly repeats itself. The mind constructs a self out of memories, opinions and anxieties about the future, which Tolle calls the ego or the mind-made self, and that self lives in constant fear of loss and insufficiency. Thought itself is not the problem: the mind is a useful tool that has taken over its user.

Tolle borrows the Buddha's definition of enlightenment as the end of suffering, and describes it as a state of oneness with Being, his word for the life shared by all forms, which can be felt but not grasped by thought.

Implication: treat a stream of anxious or repetitive thinking as an activity of the mind, not as a description of who you are or of what is true.

Watching the thinker

Tolle's first practice is to listen to the voice in your head as often as you can, especially to the repetitive thought patterns he compares to old gramophone records, and to listen without judging. The listener is not the thought; it is the awareness that notices it, which he calls the witnessing presence.

The mechanism, as he describes it, is that observing a thought breaks the identification with it. Once you watch the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes active, and you realize that thought is a small part of a far larger intelligence.

A second technique directs attention to the present directly. Tolle suggests asking what problem you have right now, not next year, tomorrow or in five minutes. The answer is usually none: what feels like a problem is a projection into the future, which can never be dealt with, while the present moment can always be handled.

Implication: when a worry dominates, observe it as a thought, and check whether anything requires action in this moment. If it does, act; if not, the worry is a projection.

The pain-body

Tolle argues that emotional pain that is not fully faced and accepted when it arises leaves a residue. The residues accumulate and merge into what he calls the pain-body, a field of negative energy lodged in mind and body. He describes it as trapped life-energy that has split off and become temporarily autonomous through identification with the mind.

The pain-body alternates between dormant and active phases. When active, it seeks experiences that produce more pain, such as anger, destructiveness, emotional drama and conflict, because it feeds on them. A person in its grip takes the pain-body's reactions as their own and acts them out.

The remedy is the same presence used on thought. Watching the pain-body as it rises, without identifying with it or resisting it, deprives it of the identification it feeds on, and so its hold weakens.

In the chapter on relationships, Tolle extends the idea to a collective female pain-body, built, he claims, from millennia of women's subjugation and suffering, which he says becomes active around menstruation.

Implication: when a reaction is far stronger than its trigger, treat it as old pain activating, observe it and decline to act on it.

Clock time and psychological time

Tolle does not argue for abandoning plans. He distinguishes clock time, the practical use of time for appointments, goals and learning from the past, from psychological time, the habit of identifying with past and future and living in them.

Clock time is necessary. The error is to use it and then remain in the future, rehearsing it and worrying over it, or in the past, replaying it. Psychological time accumulates as anxiety, regret, resentment and the sense that life will begin once some future goal is reached. Tolle's alternative is to use clock time for practical matters and then return at once to the present, staying only peripherally aware of time.

He argues that the present moment is all anyone ever has, since life is always experienced now. A later chapter catalogues the mind's strategies for avoiding the present, including waiting, worry and complaint.

Implication: plan as much as practical matters require, then return attention to the task in front of you instead of rehearsing outcomes.

Surrender

Tolle defines surrender as yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life: accepting the present moment unconditionally, because it already is as it is. Resisting what already exists, he argues, produces unhappiness without changing it.

Surrender is not resignation. If the here and now is intolerable, Tolle writes, there are three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. Each is a clear choice; what he rejects is staying in the situation while inwardly resisting it, which produces negativity without changing anything. Action taken from acceptance is clearer than action driven by resentment.

He separates peace from happiness. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not, so it can survive circumstances that destroy happiness. He applies this to illness: surrender to the physical facts of pain or weakness in the moment, rather than to the mental story of being ill.

Implication: when a situation is unacceptable, choose between leaving it and changing it. If neither is possible, stop arguing with it inwardly.

The inner body and the Unmanifested

Tolle's practice for staying present is to feel the body from within: to direct attention to the energy field that animates it. He presents this as an anchor, because the body exists only in the present, and as a link to what he calls the Unmanifested, the formless source of all things.

He describes several portals into the Unmanifested besides the inner body: the present moment itself, the cessation of thought, surrender, silence and space. Each, in his account, turns attention away from the stream of thought toward a stillness that thought cannot reach.

He also makes physical claims for the practice: that inner-body awareness slows the aging of the body and strengthens the immune system, because illness takes hold when a person is not present in the body.

Implication: when caught in thought, shift attention to physical sensation, or to silence or space, as a direct route back to the present.

Limits

Its specific claims rest on assertion. The book cites no studies; the pain-body, the collective female pain-body and the effects of inner-body attention on aging and immunity have no scientific basis, and reviews of meditation research find only limited evidence for effects on markers of aging such as telomere length.
Its general direction has partial support. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found in 2010 that people's minds wander during nearly half their waking hours and that they are less happy when it does, which supports the value of present focus without supporting the book's metaphysics.
It undervalues the past. The psychologist Mark Freeman, writing in Psychology Today in 2010, granted that present focus is worth cultivating but argued that looking back, in hindsight and narrative, provides understanding that present awareness alone cannot.

Strangers to Ourselves + Redirect — the research on how little introspection reveals about the mind Tolle asks readers to watch.
Thinking, Fast and Slow — an experimental account of the automatic thinking Tolle calls the mind.
The Wim Hof Method — another practice that claims conscious attention can change bodily processes.