Robin's Reviews > The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

"I have lived with several zen masters -- all of them cats."

While that's the best zinger, this book is full of a variety of useful statements supporting mindfulness, meditation, and transcendence beyond our daily anxieties, pains, and mental tailspins. It's also frequently annoying, especially when Tolle gives too much agency to the "pain body" by saying that it wants to thrive and control your thoughts. I understand this is just a way of speaking about it that is convenient for making his point, but I found it unhelpful, especially in a book so focused on peeling away the layers of associations and emotions around words and actions to arrive again and again at the central message of this book: Be here, now.

Also, the format of the book -- a question-and-answer format based on a combination of real and conveniently imagined questions -- was erratically applied with indifferent results. Sometimes the questions reflected relevant, rational responses to Tolle's teachings, but sometimes there were totally inane. Sometimes there were no questions for almost an entire chapter.

Complaints aside, this book still has a lot of value for those seeking to practice mindfulness. I enjoyed reading it and will return to it from time to time.

Some quotes I found particularly helpful in my own mindfulness practice and learning:

Whenever you notice that some form of negativity has arisen within you, look on it not as a failure, but as a helpful signal that is telling you: "Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present."

The word "enlightenment" conjures up the idea of some super-human accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you.

When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. ... The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.

If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won't be able to able to stay conscious when something "goes wrong" or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the way in which you deal with them will show you and others where you are at as far as your state of consciousness is concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or what visions you see.