The Power of Now

So,… I’m currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”.  Books are mysterious things. You seem to come upon them randomly but, like the hexagrams of the I Ching, I’ve found they can also be meaningful, and timely. Although not elusively a guide to Buddhist thought, there’s much in here that reconnects me with the paths I trod years ago through Buddhism and Taoism, but only half understood them – and essentially this idea of living in the present moment. On the one hand it ought to be a very simple thing, but just try it and the mind screams out to be released from it and wander about once more in the past or anticipation of the future.

It’s often puzzled me, the idea of a present moment, and at one time I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing, or rather that the present moment was a period of infinitely short duration so as to be practically unobtainable. Indeed our conscious awareness seems mainly caught up in the contemplation of things either in the future, or in the past, and this is interesting because neither the future nor the past can actually be said to exist in any tangible way at all. We spend our lives in contemplation of something we think of as reality, but which is in fact is not. We live in a kind of fantasy. The past is gone, and we distort our memories of it, we make the bad things that happened there worse and the good things rosier than in fact they were. And the future? Well, that’s where our happiness lies – at some point in the future when we have done this or that, for then we will finally be content – it’s also where our deadlines are, either actual or imagined, and it’s also where we die. But the future has a funny way of never quite materializing as we expected it to, and with it our happiness. Indeed I’m sure there are people who wait their whole lives for their lives to begin, so caught up are they in this idea of chasing an imaginary goal, a point in the future when everything is finally going to be in its place and they can relax and begin doing what they always wanted to do.

I’m generally a decade behind with these things. I have a dozen books on Zen, all of them with pretty pictures of Zen gardens and Bamboo, but fairly light on explanation. Tolle’s book was published in 1999 and has been on the reading list of every new-age flake since, but it was only a few days ago I saw it on a colleague’s desk, after he’d picked it up from a charity shop and, noting my interest, he passed it on to me. I’m about half way through, and wishing I’d read the book years ago. It’s not a program, or a trite self help guide, but a very simple thing that Tolle is offering us, something he hammers home time and again, as if in the hope that eventually we’ll be able to escape from our programming and achieve this one simple thing that is the key to everything.

What is it?

It’s that infinitesimally, impossibly small point between past and future we call the present, that thing I’ve struggled so long to grasp and to understand the significance of. You have to find it. And to find it, I suggest you read “The Power of Now”.