Power of Now

It’s been years, I’ve been reading books on spiritualism, philosophy and quantum physics and even explored many sites on NDE. While such readings impart good knowledge and offer much perspective to define the “power”, “God” and “nature”, nothing really convinced me. Soon I started disliking the literature that first deliberately builds a maze, proves that humans are weak, supports the theory of “pre-destiny” and once reader is fully trapped, it quickly attempts to define God/power and starts preaching. The word God is being misused for years and people, who never experienced it, use it with a strong conviction or others who deny it, do so with a confidence as if they know what they are really denying. I was not happy as after investing much of my time, I had calculated the square of one. I was on my way of losing interest and then someone suggested “Power of Now” from Eckhart Tolle.

I bought this one and seeing author’s picture on last page, I was wondering if it was a sunk cost? The book was lying on my desk for months before one day I had a peek into it. The initial few pages sounded little different and then Tolle really challenged me on page 13 ......“Thinking has become a disease”.... I was little surprised by his style of writing and found it too direct as if he was trying to attack the readers who were expecting a “quick n dirty solution”. It did not take too long for me to become his fan and I think he has done an excellent job and given an entirely different perspective on nature, human, mind, soul, thoughts, emotions, energies and pain bodies.

The theory starts with a claim that your mind is not your best friend as mind can process only the past data that has been stored in its database i.e. your past experiences/patterns in life keep on getting processed continuously. It sounds convincing as we always live in the past or else take shelter in future. While facing the “now”, we face only two situations—either it has been “experienced” – in which case mind gives us an inspiration from stored patterns(might or might not be applicable) and if it is new event - mind suggests to park it on future and if you do not listen to your mind , it withdraws and you are then left alone- what to do? It is like either follow the instructions or parachute out and do you really have a choice here?

In fact, our identity i.e. "consciousness of self" is derived from mind and hence all of us are bound to behave this way. There is no separation between “self” and “mind” or at least we are not programmed to see this distinction. Just to give a contrast, when we see a dream and come back to conscious state, we immediately reject the veracity of dream as there is a separation layer between consciousness and sub-consciousness state. However, such separation is not possible with our mind as we perceive “ourselves” as our “mind” and here comes Tolle with a correction “You are not your mind”. He suggests a practical way to get rid of thought noise by watching the thoughts like a dream – a simulation technique to deliberately create a subtle separation layer between you and your mind. So next time when a thought comes to your mind – just watch it (don’t resist it). If you try it consciously, you might smile as you might reject the thought the way you would have rejected it, had it been a dream!