The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle

(I decided to revisit the book and finished reading it. The full review is here.)

The book is evil.

Page 1-15.
From my reading so far, I feel that what the author proposed is similar to the idea of "letting it go, putting it down, giving it up, abandoning yourself"  which is essential to Buddhism. But the author modified the idea a little.

To abandon yourself, you first need to "have" yourself, which means that you need to know your true self, including what's hidden behind your conscious. This would be a painful process to face yourself, examine yourself, fight with yourself, correct yourself, during which you grow and enrich yourself. All this make it possible to abandon yourself eventually and become oneness with the "God". I believe thinking is essential in this process, at least, in initial stage.

In my experience, at numerous moments, especially when I am alone with the nature, I enter a state to "letting everything go", and find the connection between myself and the nature, and the power behind the nature. This is similar to what author proposed. However, I believe thinking should be interleaved with mediation, and thinking is perhaps more important in the early stage.

As a result, I do not think the author's view that we should abandon thinking is right. This view even brings harms since it become a perfect excuse for people to flee from the painful process of understanding and "having" yourself.

Page 14-17. From my understanding, the author uses the word "thinking" to mean "explicit conscious" in addition to thinking's normal semantic. It is true that we should not become slave of explicit conscious, but I believe that the proper way (at least in early stage) to enter the world of unconscious, instead of abandoning/stopping it, as suggested by the author. Again, by emphasizing one side of the story to an extreme, the author's view could bring harm.

As Dr. Scott Peck said, "Much heresy arises when people run with just one side of a paradox in their thinking. And heresies, being at best half-truths, are essentially lies". And I will add that the book is evil.

Page 18-25. I kept my previous opinion, and decided stopping reading. The author has many good observations, but he drew wrong conclusions.


Published by New World Library, 1999. ISBN 9781577314806.