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

The book has a number of problems. Fundamentally there is a dependence on the "spiritual" which creates an easy out for any difficult questions regarding proving the existence or utility of any claim or assertion. He starts out by stating that religions have a common core truth that has been clouded over the years. I would say much on offer here would be guilty of the very same sin. I'm not certain that most of his spiritual assertions are necessary at all to make much of the book useful and helpful. I am found whenever he tried to use modern science to bolster his claims were dubious at best. His whole point about there being so much space in an atom and between atoms while factual did nothing to further the argument he was making at the time. In fact, it felt like a distraction, something on the lines of, "Hey look this stuff is scientific, really." I particularly cringed at statements like "higher vibrational energy" like that has any validity what so ever. There is a deeper problem that, if these unnecessary assertions are proven false, naive, or misguided, that other, more crucial points, will be brought in to question. I don't see his work as an improvement over much of the vipassana practice here in the West. I also felt that the author didn't do a good job of bridging the gap between the mind identified state and the non-attached state. If it were really so easy, then why haven't more become enlightened. I do think that problem is the essence of millennia of Buddhist practice and teaching. It's not horrible. I'm just very disappointed in the effort.