December 17, 2023

The Power of Now Summary

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

“At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.”

Eckhart Tolle, through his book “The Power of Now”, is trying to show us that the primary focus of our life should be the present moment. There was never a time when it wasn’t now and there will never be such a time. The present moment is all you have and its quality shouldn’t be degraded by our mind’s habit to getting lost in thought.

Give up the habit of daydreaming and find joy and bliss in the now. The past is nothing more than all present moments that have gone by, and the future is just the collection of present moments waiting to arrive.

You should by all means read this book for yourself. Below, I have written out my book notes, but I couldn’t cover hundreds of pages in just a couple of bullet points. That is why I highly encourage you to create your notes whilst going through the book, and for the time being use mine as a guide on what this book is about.

For more books check out Best Self-Improvement Books or Best Classic Books, and for a full self-improvement guide, you can also take a look at my Roadmap to Overman.

Book Notes

I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.
When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the now, being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of being and to abide in that state of “feeling-realization” is enlightenment.
You are one with all that is.
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream – a gap of “no-mind”.
Instead of “watching the thinker”, you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is the essence of meditation. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream in the stream of mind the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task and when the task is completed, you lay it down.
The ego/self consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. To the ego the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that is sees: it misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.
All true artists, wether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
Love, joy and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. Love, joy and peace are deep states of being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind.
All fear is the ego’s fear of death.
Power over others is weakness disquised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole.
Death is stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die”, and find that there is no death.
The problem of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.
End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops, unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time.
Life is now, there was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life, we may call this “clock time”, but immediately return to present moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with. The enlightened person’s main focus of attention is always the now, but they are still peripherally aware of time.
You think that your attention is in the present moment when it’s actually taken up completely by time. You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the now.
Focus your attention on the now and tell me what problem you have at this moment.
To know that you are not present is a great success. That knowing is presence.
Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduces to a means of getting there? Stress is cause by being “here” but wanting to be “there”.
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary, your deepest inner being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using is as a substitute for the feeling of life, for being.
So next time somebody says, “sorry to have kept you waiting”, you can reply, “That’s all right, I wasn’t waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself – in joy in my self”.
Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what your set out to do. But if you destination, takes up so much of your attention that it becomes more important than the steps you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose. Your outer journey may contain a million steps, but your inner journey only has one. As you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.
Do not give all your attention away to the mind and the external world. By all means focus on what you are doing but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible. Stay rooted within.
The art of inner-body awareness will develop into a completely new way of living, a state of permanent connectedness with being, and will add a depth to your life that you have never known before.
You cannot feel someone else’s being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of being, you are one with all that is.
As soon as one of the portals is open, love is present in you as the “feeling-realization” of oneness. Love isn’t a portal; it’s what comes through the portal into this world. Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.
Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still.
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same no-thing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance. Also, as long as you are in this dimension, you are still subject to its cyclical nature and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you no longer perceive this as “bad” – it just is.
I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.
Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures.
Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.
Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks.
Full attention is full acceptance, is surrender. By giving full attention, you use the power of the now, which is the power of your presence. No hidden pocket of resistance can survive in it. Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
Present moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum. Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world except through the gap, that clear space of infinite possibility.