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

The Power of Now is a book by Eckhart Tolle, that sells itself as the road to happiness (sorry he's against using the word happiness, I mean fulfillment).

What I liked:

I liked how he encouraged you to live in the "Now" and to remove yourself from your inner mind and act as an observer. I liked it when it was over.

What I didn't like:

I didn't like the style of him answering questions that people pose to him. Just because you answer a question, it doesn't mean the answer makes any sense!

I hate his cocky attitude. I think it's great that he found inner peace and he's trying to help others, but come on he's not a prophet or a god. He espouses such lofty claims without any scientific or even logical evidence, insists they are universal facts of the world, and hides behind a lot of new age mumbo jumbo. I guess you have to be confident about any opinion you have to be taken seriously (the follow the leader mentality), but honestly I didn't like his tone at all, and thought he was condescending in a way that made little sense to me. Also, he didn't really give that much practical advice. All of the advice was about theoretical mindsets that people might have.
If he was my therapist I would go even crazier.

My biggest problem with this book, is the apologetic stance it takes on abuse. Whether that is abuse from your spouse, parents, friends, or strangers he claims that you shouldn't be mad, because "they could not have done anything else". What kind of fatalist BS is that? Imagine if a therapist told that to a rape victim! It kind of reminds me of the stance taken in "Radical Forgiveness", but at least that book acknowledges the issue of not staying in a toxic environment, this just throws the whole thing out the window!

As a whole, I don't think this book is horrible, but he makes such strange claims that it becomes a religion on its own. The fact that Jesus and God are just misunderstood concepts for millennia and we should look at what the spirit is, or that he believes the spirit lives on but not in an afterlife? What does that even mean?

Since human civilization came to be, people have been looking for the meaning of life, and I don't feel any closer to it from reading this book, despite him claiming to have all of the answers.

I think people like this book because it fits into a mold of what we would want an ideal religion to be like. Something that encourages love and acceptance of all people and to be at constant peace. While I think that is a great life motto to live by, I don't think the particular beliefs he pushes are in any way rational, and just because something is appealing on an emotional level, it doesn't mean that it makes any kind of intellectual sense.