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

Despite being regarded as New Age or another of the self help books, I think Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now is a very important book. The message is as old as time, but no matter, and it's this: By being fully aware and appreciative of this moment, right now, in your life, being aware of how the world is to you in contact with your senses, you can learn to control your emotions and become positively indifferent or at peace with being in your own skin and dealing with your own ego or problems. A person's ego is a person's identification with his or her own thoughts. The person identifies himself or herself as a thinking thing and assumes that the inner monologue, the narrative self, is the true embodiment of who they are. But ultimately who you are is what you already possess, and what you already are: namely, a conscious being. Too often we get bogged down in everyday life, our habit and routines, and do not stop and literally and figuratively smell the roses. Instead we are trapped in our own interior monologue about what happened in the past, what unsettling event might happen in the future, or maybe we're looking at this moment and panicking. But ultimately, the message here is to make of life a series of mini-meditations, where you identify yourself as consciousness and let the world come to your senses and be at peace with the world. And this is something that is even more important than transitory happiness.

Anyway, read it for yourself and reflect on what you think about it.