Rei ⭐ [TrulyBooked]'s Reviews > The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

This book was actually recommended to me by a psychiatrist as a replacement for treatment for depression. Reading it, I can see why she recommended it for me and at the same time, I'm disappointed that she did.

What Eckhart Tolle does is repackage the beliefs and old ideas that have come before, doing so in a lofty manner as he explains how those who have come before have misinterpreted the bible, Buddha and other things which have come to be seen as divine. He then offers his own points on it. Some of them are good, letting go of negativity and the like, but he surmises that in order to find true enlightenment you have to let go of your mind and use it only as a tool which reminds me of a surrender to God.

Basically this reads like a cross between The Secret and a Medieval mystical text, with scientific method discarded and even scorned upon. He seems to be claiming a knowledge for things beyond what he knows or at the very least disregarding things that he has little knowledge of as unimportant. It's a hard thing to argue against since he can simply say that it's the mind who's arguing it or resisting inner peace and all of that.

The fallacies of his arguments are noticeable and hard for me to ignore. To turn off my mind completely and surrender (as he argues in one chapter) is not something that I want to do. While I can agree with his instructions on self-examination and why we do the things we do, when it takes a turn toward the spiritual he loses me. To argue that we have not seen a flower stressed or a tree or animals is not an equivalent to the stress and suffering of human beings. Flowers do not possess the same mental processes that animals do. Other animals do not possess the same level of thought that humans do.

He argues that the only animals who show stress are those that are close to humans which is demonstrably false as animals live in a high stress environment in the wild as well. Tolle also claims things like the duck flapping its wings to protect its territory is a releasing of energy. It all seems to make sense on the surface, but falls apart under closer examination. Tolle's lectures defy questioning. The questions that seek to broaden understanding are not necessary because in his mind there is no understanding that can be done of this state, only being. This means that we need to go and trust Tolle on faith alone.

There are some good ideas here and if it had been made into a more practical self-help book without the mumbo jumbo it may have been useful, but Tolle seems to speak from a lofty position of a Master who is speaking to his students. Those who question are cast out as not ready for the epiphanies he has in store which is something I just can't get behind.