The word I would use to describe Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is “mirage”. I’m not going to lie: I wanted to hate this book. I did not like the book, I wouldn’t go that far, but my thoughts on it are more complicated than I originally thought they’d be. One of the issues with New Thought work is that it’s not always easy to say it’s capital-W Wrong. There are things wrong about what Tolle says, absolutely, but it’s not wrong in a way that responds well to a clear takedown. Tolle references people who call what he’s written gobbledygook. In my opinion, it’s not so much that it’s uninteligible as that it prescribes a philosophy of ignorance.
Getting this isn’t straightforward, and I am not going to do an exhaustive breakdown with citations here, so if you haven’t read the book you will have to trust me. Overall, the problem is that though Tolle’s descriptions of why things go wrong can be compelling, there is no insight offered into these events. The response is always to simply be unaffected by it, something that is completely impossible in a lot of situations.
There’s also something to be said for Tolle’s style, which is structured to lull you into certain patterns of thought. But we’ll get to that.
Summary
I’ll begin with a brief summary of the book, chapter-by-chapter.
- Chapter One – You Are Not Your Mind focuses on creating a distance between the identity of you and the identity of your mind, positioning the mind as a kind of subservient power to the “true you” but one which can, if not prevented, overtake the true you.
- Chapter Two – Consciousness: The Way Out of Pain explores the idea that pain is equivalent to unconsciousness, and that it can only be solved by becoming conscious. This is a kind of mindfulness that Tolle calls being in the Now.
- Chapter Three – Moving Deeply Into the Now is about time and how “psychological time” (as opposed to “clock time”) is the source of unhappiness, or at least, experiencing psychological time is a side-effect of unconsciousness which is the source of unhappiness.
- Chapter Four – Mind Strategies for Avoiding the Now goes further into the idea of unconsciousness and the ways in which the mind keeps itself in a primary position, where one is in a constant state of thinking rather than no-mind.
- Chapter Five – The State of Presence talks further about what it means to be present or to experience presence.
- Chapter Six – The Inner Body is about rejecting the so-called pain-body, the reactive self, and getting in touch with one’s true self. This section has a few exercises.
- Chapter Seven – Portals into the Unmanifested talks about “Source”, which Tolle calls the Unmanifested, which is the plane which generates all else. The main subject is how to get in contact with the Unmanifested, and this primarily involves presence and the Now.
- Chapter Eight – Enlightened Relationships discusses how an enlightened person interacts with other people, especially unenlightened people, and how relationships can act as a tool of achieving enlightenment.
- Chapter Nine – Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness There Is Peace focuses on an idea introduced earlier, which is that positive and negative emotions are opposites of one another, and therefore the “true” emotions (which for Tolle are joy, love, and a third which I believe is peace) have no opposites. The chapter is about embodying that rather than “positive emotions”.
- Chapter Ten – The Meaning of Surrender tries to put a final bow on the idea that enlightenment is not sought, it emerges one when fully accepts the present moment rather than resisting it.
Opinion
There are a lot of esoteric concepts in this work which I either agree with or at least am familiar with, ideas like the pain-body, the Unmanifested, the non-identity of one’s “true self” and their mind. What I dislike is that these ideas are frequently mangled so that they can do something other than their original context. The philosopher who Tolle references most is Jesus, but a clear second is Gautama Buddha. He almost always talks about Buddha in the context of saying things like suffering is the root of desire, reality is an illusion, and so on. These are elements which jive very well with the theme of being present in the present.
Nowhere in this book is an idea like dependent arising. In fact, Tolle’s insistence on the idea that one’s own mental state can be disconnected from all others, that there is no reliance upon others for one’s mental state, seems to entirely negate dependent arising. Tolle also does not make suffering central to existence, he in fact says that suffering is unnatural, that it is meant to be purged. This is not really how I have ever understood Buddhist teaching. I will grant that I am nothing like an expert, but the actions I’ve always seen attached to the overcoming of suffering are escape and transcend. For Buddhism, suffering is nature and the point is to go beyond nature. For Tolle, no-suffering is nature and the point is to return to nature.
Naturalness is one of the major belief-focuses for New Thought, and it is almost always combined with Gloriousness. That is to say that it’s not just that New Thought prefers things that are natural, it also assumes things which are natural have a superior value for that sake alone, a value which cannot be replicated by something non-natural. “Natural” is not merely a description of the state of things for New Thought, it is a value statement, the supreme value statement. To be natural is to be correct and worthy and all of those things. That’s why, in a cogentic mechanical sense, Tolle has to abandon the centrality of suffering to the human condition, at least in the way that Buddha taught.
Tolle is obviously free to interpret things in his own way, it’s just strange to me to bring in the teachings of the Buddha in a way to use that authority while also usurping that authority by taking the teachings entirely out of context. It suggests that the point of bringing the teaching in is not to build off of the teaching but to employ the authoritative name.
The use of Jesus in the book is also highly suggestive of this. If one was to read this book only, one’s idea of Jesus would be as someone interested primarily in impermanence and presence, the things which Tolle is interested in. Tolle is explicitly not interested in social justice, however, and this is something that Jesus always is interested in. Despite saying that he is not a teacher from any particular tradition, he positions his teaching as an outgrowth of the teaching of Jesus, but not because it is. Jesus, if we will remember, chased out the moneylenders to stop them abusing the people. Tolle does not talk about that.
He does talk about letting go of resentment, negativity, and so on. This is where the mirage nature of the teaching truly shows. I want to say “insidious nature” but I don’t have evidence that this is malicious at all, and the text certainly does not read maliciously. Its advice for the downtrodden is Nietzschean, though: just suck it up. This is where Tolle’s teaching falls down.
Tolle’s teaching is gnostic in the derogatory sense. It is world hating in the worst way. The entire premise of the work is that if anything effects you on a more-than-physical level, that is a sign that you are not in your best state, that you are in some way failing. Tolle would quibble with this (he does in the book, he tells you as the reader not to consider yourself a failure etc.), but the fact is that by his teaching, you are only succeeding if you have moved past pleasure and pain as it were, beyond good and evil. This requires a complete ignoring of material conditions.
This is not something that Tolle hides from. As you read through, you will get glimpses of the traditional New Thought belief that material conditions are an outgrowth of your inner condition, such that if you are able to follow Tolle’s advice and be present and in the Now and fully conscious, you will not experience material hardships. Again, you’ll find admissions that material conditions don’t change immediately but the advice given is never to find a way to change conditions, it’s to “surrender” to conditions, to “live with” them.
There is a reason that people who want to rescue Nietzsche have to rely on ideas like “productive ressentiment”, so revolutions can be started by ressentiment but still do good: because without the downtrodden feeling downtrodden and deciding to do something about it, they would never improve their situation. Tolle’s world simply assumes that this would never be necessary. If you follow the work of Buddha or of Jesus or of Hillel or of Muhammad, you will get both a way to peace and a way to action, and not only that, reasons for action. Buddha’s philosophy may be different than the somewhat dualistic ideas of the Abrahamic faiths, but it is a moral philosophy. Tolle’s philosophy is completely amoral, refusing both to make pronouncements and also to give any prescription on how one is supposed to reverse long-term oppressions and the like.
The major fallacy in the book is that Tolle plays games of meaning and grouping. For instance, when he separates one’s true motives from one’s mind, why should we accept that? Why wouldn’t they all be parts of the mind? This is a logical way to see things but it’s not one that Tolle deals with, how one identifies “themselves” from “their mind”. Yes, he does say things like “the mind is the one which dwells on positive or negative” but there’s no obvious reason for there to be a not-mind as well. He makes a move which creates a distinction out of thin air and then simply goes forward.
He also generally proceeds in a Hermetic dialogue, which is to say while there is a back-and-forth, it is one-sided: he, the teacher, is providing all the information, while the student asks for more information but gives nothing of substance. This is opposed to a Socratic dialogue, where the “listener” is challenging the “speaker” and forcing them to justify their position. More than that, though, in Tolle’s book the reader is the student. This means that he has given you, the reader, a script which you are following, and it allows him to make implications about what you will do and what you think.
This has the effect of subtly drawing you along with his line of thinking. By not only identifying you but also putting words in your mouth, in your scripted portions and by saying things like “You must be thinking…” and “Whenever you have…”, he forestalls whatever thing you may actually be thinking and suggests to you a thought instead. If you find it reasonable, you might just go along with it, which gives your original thought a chance to be lost as you keep moving forward.
While I cannot say The Power of Now is malicious, it can certainly be put to malicious purposes because what it advocates is putting one’s defenses down. The only real advice it has to give to people who are in unjust situations is for them to remember that they’re part of a larger universe, and them getting fucked now is just how things go sometimes. It has nothing to say to the exploiter or even about the exploiter. If one is disadvantaged, this book is a dangerous fantasy.