beautiful book :)

Practicing the Power of Now - Eckart Tolle

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◆ Chapter One: Being and Enlightenment

▪ To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself.

THE BEGINNING OF FREEDOM is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.

▪ START LISTENING TO THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old audiotapes that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years.

◆ Chapter Two: The Origin of Fear

▪ For example, even such a seemingly trivial and “normal” thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong — defending the mental position with which you have identified — is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.

▪ Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

◆ Chapter Six: Dissolving the Pain-Body

▪ It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form

◆ Chapter Seven: From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships

▪ Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.

▪ they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.

▪ Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and “enemies” to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends

◆ Chapter Eight: Acceptance of the Now

▪ Attention. Here and Now. Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present.”

▪ FEEL YOURSELF BECOMING TRANSPARENT, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid “wall” inside you.

▪ DON’T LOOK FOR PEACE. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance.

▪ Inner resistance is to say “no” to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things “go wrong,” which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap.

▪ IF THERE IS NO ACTION YOU CAN TAKE, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make you go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being.

◆ Chapter Nine: Transforming Illness and Suffering

▪ Don’t let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering.

▪ if you still harbor resentment about something they did or did not do, then you still believe that they had a choice — that they could have acted differently. It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None. You are not even there. The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of insanity.

▪ Almost everyone is suffering from this illness in varying degrees. The moment you realize this, there can be no more resentment. How can you resent someone’s illness? The only appropriate response is compassion.

"Practicando el poder del ahora" se presenta con mucha más claridad y sencillez que tu compañero "El poder del ahora".

El primero que he nombrado es mucho más práctico lo cual ayuda a su comprensión.

Una vez más, sublimes las enseñanzas de Tolle que brindan un halo de luz a nuestras desordenadas vidas.

A very quick read! Did I understand all the concepts? No...but at 140 pages it was a great intro into Eckhart Tolle’s works. His word choice in this book is a bit more user friendly and I feel more confident moving on to his other books! This also seems like a book that would be good to pick up every so often and re-read to fully understand what he’s trying to communicate to the reader.

کتاب خوبی که خلاصه کتاب نیروی حال بوده و تمرینات مفیدی هم به متن اضافه شده ، این تمرینات باعث افزایش تمرکز شده و انرژی مثبت ایجاد می کنند، این تمرین ها اصالت مکتب ذن رو دارن ولی با زبان ساده بیان شدن ، کتاب کم حجم و بسیار مفیدی هستش که باعث افزایش اگاهی میشه ، اگه فرصت داشتید حتما بخونید و تمرین هاش رو روزانه انجام بدید.

Praktische lessen om een onderscheid te maken tussen je gedachten en jezelf. Op die manier kan je stilte in je hoofd scheppen die je in staat stelt verbinding te maken, in eerste instantie met jezelf maar belangrijker met alles om je heen. Het boek is heel inzichtelijk geschreven, compact en vooral praktisch. De 4 belangrijkste zeken die ik er voor mezelf uithaalde waren:
-Voelen zonder labelen
-Transparant worden voor externe verstoringen
-Overgave aan de situatie zonder ressentiment en in het verlengde daarvan
-Acceptatie van een ander zoals hij/zij is
De kern van het verhaal blijft...Het is een werkboek, niets komt vanzelf.

Lately, it feels like everything in my life has been pushing me in the direction of "mindfulness": the PIXAR movie Soul, the Calm app, Kendrick Lamar's new album, and finally, this book, which I found in a little free library a couple weeks ago like cosmic intervention. I read some Eckhart Tolle in high school, and I found it interesting and useful then. It still holds up, but I'm conflicted.

On the one hand, Eckhart Tolle feels almost undeniably "correct," and this is a legitimately profound book. Mostly, he says the same stuff my meditation app says: ego demands compulsive thinking, which causes a lack of groundedness in the present, which causes suffering. The fundamental idea of selfhood and individuality causes suffering. The ego is hungry and relentless; it will devour everything if you let it. Compulsive thinking is a sickness that everyone shares. The more wedded we are to our concept of ourselves--i.e. our personalities, our accomplishments, our preferences, our significance, our separateness from everyone else--the more we suffer, and the more we resist all the things that infringe on this self-image. In the pursuit of mental, emotional, spiritual, and moral health, this feels like extremely good advice. (Also: I'm pretty sure Tolle's philosophy is basically Buddhism, though I'd be interested in knowing whether there are any differences.)

I guess my only issue is that this feels like a massive undertaking, a fundamental reshaping of what humans are and what they do in this world. And the thinking part of me wishes Tolle would take more time to consider the larger personal and sociopolitical implications of what he's saying. For Tolle, all of this feels obvious, as natural as breathing--but the truth is, it represents a radical shift in human priorities, and it's not really obvious at all. As a highly accessible advice book and a further explanation of meditation and its value, this book is very useful. But Tolle doesn't intellectualize any of this in the slightest, and part of me wishes he were a bit more circumspect, a bit more willing to address skeptics (like me).

Anyway--an interesting and useful and beautiful book.

3.5 stars

Practicing the Power of Now is an effective read with a few handy meditation exercises in the mix. This book is focused on the key techniques to stay calm and to always be present at the moment regardless of the situation.

n  n    “All problems are illusions of the mind.” n  n

Often we let our thoughts wander in time other than the present. We sometimes live in the past causing sufferings to our mind and body or we get obsessed with what may or may not be, meaning we fear the future. Tolle with great emphasis teaches us to live in the now and to not let our egoistic and unconscious mind take the driver's seat.

n  n    “WATCH ANY PLANT OR ANIMAL AND LET IT TEACH YOU acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being.” n  n

However, this book is repetitive throughout like a mantra and reminders on how to slowly but effectively improve your life. The book demands to be read slowly.

I don't have any major complaints however I wish there were couple more exercises. That's it!

n  n    “When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.” n  n

Me lo imaginaba diferente. Creia que daba mas ejercicios y ayudas però repite mas de lo mismo. Està Bien Como lectura meditativa pero no aprendes nada nuevo. Es un resumen del Poder del Ahora.

This was a review, almost verbatim, of the second half of The Power of Now by the Author. It added some very helpful practices and short meditations. It was a much quicker read, since I already had the foundation of Eckhart Tolle's teachings.

This book has proven to be one of the greatest Spritual books written in recent times.it contains a power that goes beyond words and definitely leads us to a quiet place beyond our thoughts.sometimes i didn;t get time to read enough of that and I just carried it around with meand I could feel its POWER affecting me even whern I was not reading it.Here are a few lines made some chemistry in me:
"The begening of Freedom is the realization that you are not "the thinker".The moment you start watching the thinker ,a higher level of consiousness becomes activated .You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought,that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.You also realize that all the things that truly matter-beauty,love,creativity,joy,inner peace..-arsie from beyond the mind..."