There are little books out there I would be more willing to recommend other than Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now. In fact, if there is only one book I could recommend to somebody it is this very book. I am also pretty sure, if everybody on this planet would read that book every day, and practice the principles described in it, the world would be such a better place. This is how much of an impact I think it can make and that is also the reason why I would want everybody to read it, and experience more joy and happiness in their lives!
I cannot remember how I got to this book in the first place, but I can for sure remember that I dropped it and never touched it again for quite some time after reading the first three pages. It made no sense to me. And all the spiritual non-sense just didn’t click with me. It felt like wasted time, I mean, I had bigger problems back then, and reading about some spiritual enlightenment clearly cannot help me with dealing with these “real life” problems. At least that is what I told myself. But somehow (years later) I found myself stumbling across this book again. I found it somewhere in my bookshelf and decided to take it with me on my two months trip to Australia. As it turned out this would have been the best decision I made in a long time.
On my two month trip across the Outback of Australia and the east coast of the island I at first forced myself into reading it every day. Each day I read in it for at least one hour, since I always found reading quite relaxing and I was at holidays. But the book was challenging. It was hard to read at first, little stuff made sense to me and a lot of the topics conflicted with my inner perceptions of the world and my issues with it. It almost felt like the book’s text battled with my perceptions of “how life works” and “how life is like”. It shattered a lot of my strongest believes until they finally crumbled. At first I tried to defend myself against it, since I didn’t want to lose all this. I didn’t want to lose my “identity”. There is a huge chapter about who you are and what you are and what you are not, which really freaked me out at first. That was also the first time I heard about what Eckart Tolle calls the ego. The more I read about all that stuff, the more I saw the ego in myself. I saw how I treated people unfair and judged them poorly just because I (my ego?) felt hurt. It was when my perception of how people should treat me or each other and how I felt like people should behave towards me or others got conflicted, that my ego arises and I got angry. It felt like some of my core principles and rules got violated and therefore I felt a lot of pain. I got angry about people just because they didn’t behave in a way I wanted them to behave. I no longer saw the person, I only saw the violation of my core rules back then (the ones made up by mind’s ego) and it made me go crazy.
Reading in this book day in day out made me realize that behavior in myself. I got enormously self-aware and self-conscious. Everything I did become more vibrant the more days passed. I thought a lot and followed the instructions for meditation in the book. Each evening I tried to calm down my mind, with little to no success at first. But the more I forced myself into questioning my understandings and my actions, my emotions and my relationships, the more I felt uncertain and insecure. It was like my principles got scattered and everything I had “achieved” was undone. I didn’t know what I was here for and no longer knew exactly who I was. It was disturbing. He wrote that when you no longer know who you are, you are closer to who you are than you where before. Well, I felt exactly this way back then.
But I was persistent, I saw the benefits in little changes in my actions and thoughts. Everything I did, I did with a more global understanding. Seek to understand first it says and that is what I did. I always reflected back on myself each time I felt an unwanted emotion arising. I asked myself what exactly made me feel this way? Is this me being angry about something? Or is it just some mind-made manifestation of my ego that feels threatened and now tries to defend itself. I became the watcher of my own emotions and therefore detached myself of being caught in them. My mind got calmer and in a lot of situations where I would felt anger and pain, I felt something more like to an inner peace. It is hard to describe but when you accept your life and no longer put resistance towards it, a lot of problems simply dissolve. You realise that most (if not every) issue and every drama in your life is mind-made (or ego-made). And when you detach yourself from your ego and be brave enough to let go of your former identity of yourself you made up in your mind you will no longer feel a need to invest your emotions in unwanted drama situations. You just don’t. Whatever you resist, persists. Put acceptance towards any unwanted scenario in your life and it will dissolve. The more I watched my emotions and looked at the real cause of their arising, the more I found myself at peace. My meditation got deeper, my actions became more fulfilling and enjoyable, and all the benefits of a deep meditation came flooding into my life.
That is what The Power of Now did to me and that is what I want for you too. If you have already read the book, let me know your opinion on it in the comments section below. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. If you haven’t read it already, grab yourself a copy of the book and read it, you will not regret it. I am absolutely sure if you really want to change your life to the better and live a more fulfilled and happier and drama-free life, this is the book that can help you achieve it.
