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The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment – By Eckhart Tolle

August 5, 2008 at 8:22 am · Filed under Reviews 1000+ ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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and Now…,January 24, 2002

I picked up “The Power of Now” in the “New Age” section of the bookstore. I was determined to make the reading about “spirituality” a short episode in my life… and I was probably right, as far as the reading goes, that is.

I got the book and continued reading at home, and, as I often do with study guides and textbooks, started underlining what seemed most important. Soon it became harder to separate the important from the unimportant, because it all seemed important! Then, I stopped, put down the pencil and said: “Wow!”

Where did this book come from? Why aren’t we hearing about it on CNN? Reading it felt strange at first, as it demanded my total attention: either I was drawn deep into it, or not at all. Do you like to eat while reading? Well, this book will make you feel ridiculous if you try to eat and read at the same time!

The book showed me that I have a pretty thick mold of the mind to break through, and it took me very far on the first day, even farther after that. The message went beyond what I would probably recognize on my own. After all, I was (and still am but to a lesser degree) one of those constant thinkers who mistakenly believe that it’s good to think all the time but almost never stop to see, hear and feel the essence of being. Although the message in the book seems familiar and simple, in the end it provided exhaustive answers to the few questions that I had and also those that I wouldn’t have thought of before. Amazingly, it also managed not to raise new ones. What it did was grab me by lapels and put me into the present moment. Over and over again, it told me what it means, how to enter it, offered a few different methods, and suggested that with practice many opportunities exist to enter it.

Another point is that once I finished the book, its message lingered (may I say “in my mind” here?). The author’s obvious and at the same time subtly effective, repetitive approach somehow kept reassuring me that I was absorbing and remembering the material. The text never strayed far from the core of the message, which seemed to stick with vivid clarity.

I soon began to practice shifting myself into this state of intense concentration, and it feels strange and alluring at the same time, this detachment from the mind. At first, I could only do it while being completely relaxed, just before falling asleep. Later, it became easier to do along with other daily activities. Don’t worry; you will not get hit by a truck while crossing the street and trying to focus into the Now! Also, the people at work will not laugh at you because you look weird trying to focus, but they may notice a difference in you: that you are relaxed, focused and less confrontational (because you are surrendered to the present moment). The most immediate effect for me was that focusing into the present moment helped me communicate better. I began to listen more intensely, meaningfully and less judgmentally than before.

However, I feel that this is only the tip of an iceberg. Trying to be in the Now has inspired me more than any miracle. At the same time, it’s clear that learning to live in the Now is a skill, and like any skill it can be enhanced with practice. The more you work at it, the better and more natural you get doing it.

In short, I don’t need to search for the truth anymore. I got lucky on the first try, by becoming a little curious with the book that seemed unassuming and light in physical weight. Thank you, Eckhart. NOW, I can be at peace, knowing how much I can look forward to in this life, and beyond.

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The Power of Tolle’s message,June 1, 2000

In the past 25 years I have read spiritual books ranging from the works of Gurdjieff and his followers to the discourses and satsangs with Maharaj, Poonjaji, and Gangaji. These have helped me and probably thousands of other seekers. They were the best written accounts available to all of us on the Path who refused to swallow the sugar pills of superficial knowledge of spirituality and enlightenment offered by many. NOW comes Eckhart Tolle with an unbelievably clear, powerful and succinct account of how and why our mind-based ego consciousness runs us, robs us of our birthright as humans, and why our society, at every turn, supports this process. His message is exquisitely eloquent and direct: Learn, through endless practice (unbending intent as Don Juan would say) to observe your mind without judgement. See where this leads you again and again as your sense of who you are escapes psychological time and the vastness, wholeness, and beauty of Creation opens before you. I have read only the first 50 pages and already I know that it will be THE ONE BOOK that goes with me everywhere as I read and reread it until it is part of me.

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Easy to comprehend, hard to live,December 4, 2000

I’ve read this book twice and also saw the author live a few weeks ago in San Francisco. He battled for many years with severe depression, and looked for answers to his life through higher learning before having a complete change of life and finding inner peace and joy through living in the present moment. He encourages the reader to let go of the ego and brain “noise” and be in the now, which is how he says he lives. Most all of the “problems” we have in life don’t directly effect us in the moment, yet we are controlled and tortured by them he says. Tolle also makes the case for healing past pain and suffering through simply being fully here now. Making these changes in our materialistic, image possessed, ego driven society is a challenge indeed, but he would say it’s our only way out. This is truly life changing stuff.

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Utterly profound, a book to TRULY change your life.,August 8, 2001

I was attracted to the title of this book, and when I picked it up and read Eckhart Tolle’s first words, a description of waking up in the middle of the night years ago filled with dread and an unnameable fearfulness, I thought: “This is me”. When I returned to the bookstore a few days later to buy it, ALL of their multiple copies were sold, as was another bookstore’s. Three local libraries had it out on loan, with a waiting list to reserve it. This is a book that connects to people. The premise of “The Power of Now” is that, rather than USING our minds, we have grown into a society that is used BY our minds, trapping us in a neverending cycle of repetitive, negative thinking that totally absorbs us out of ourselves and any awareness about the miraculous moment we are in RIGHT NOW. This is not a new concept, and the author is admitedly influenced by the teachings of the Buddha and “A Course in Miracles”. What makes his approach so remarkable (aside from his clear, vital writing style) is a simple question-and-answer format that Tolle has drawn out of years of teaching. Tolle presents probing, often argumentative questions raised by his students, and then answers them with eye-opening truths. The book is also notated throughout for moments to stop reading, put it down, and get a feeling of the message that’s been presented. And it’s these moments NOT reading, but allowing yourself to be conscious of what you’ve read, that really opens the ideas for you. “The Power of Now” is so vastly superior to other books of its kind, it is staggering. While I am currently relaxing my way through a third reading, none of the philosophy of “Now” is in any way promotive of obsession or in conflict with ANY religious or spirtual belief, as a previous reviewer seemed to suggest. I will be buying a LOT of these for holiday presents.

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The Truth is in the Power of Now,December 13, 2000

This book is so filled with truth, so powerful, so crystal clear that I was compelled to write this review and share it with other people. THE POWER OF NOW and WORKING ON YOURSELF DOESN’T WORK by Ariel and Shya Kane are the two most powerful and insightful books on self-awareness I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Reading both of these books is like working with Zen masters, compassionate spiritual teachers who can free us from the torture that our minds and our judgments inflict on us constantly. I am not exaggerating when I say that THE POWER OF NOW was like a breath of fresh air. Tolle gets right to the point and explains so much about inner peace and how our minds actually work that I found myself wanting to share what he and the Kanes have discovered. If THE POWER OF NOW is the technical manual for reaching fulfillment (because it is mostly explanations about awareness rather than illustrative examples), then WORKING ON YOURSELF DOESN’T WORK is the practical guide with real world examples and insights that describe exactly how satisfaction is possible in everyday life. You’ll want both of these books. I’ve found what I was looking for thanks to these wonderful authors.

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The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1)

August 2, 2008 at 2:34 am · Filed under Reviews 1000+ ·Tagged , , , , ,

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A very good read,October 19, 2003

I went back and forth about whether I should get this book to read with my 7 year old second grader. I kept telling myself I should wait till she was older, but found the book at a good price, so I bought it. I worried it would be too depressing and scary for her, but it did not turn out that way at all. The book is written from a narrators point of view, so the personal feelings of the characters are never fully exposed and explored. You know that the three orphans are sad about their parents death, but the book doesn’t wallow in their grief and make it painful to read. If you can imagine Vincent Price reading the book, that tends to make it a little more lighthearted. The bad guy of the book, Count Olaf, is an awful brute who is outright cruel to the children at times, but again the book doesn’t have the children suffering without end. Instead it makes them more resilient to foil the Counts plans and triumph over him. My daughter was EAGER to read these books. That was the best thing about it all. We have tried classics, Pippi Longstocking, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Charlottes Web, but as great as they are, they lack The Bad Beginnings level of excitement, mystery and wondering what will happen next. I enjoyed the book myself and will continue to read the rest of the series, in hopes they are as entertaining as this one. I can see if you have a very sensitive child, this would not be the book for them until they are older. Some kids my daughters age are scared of Harry Potter movies, so this book would be too much for them. If your youngster isn’t living in a sheltered world where everything is wonderful and bad things don’t happen, and they can understand the difference between a made up story and a real one, then they just might enjoy this new type of childrens adventure stories.

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Spellbinding, terrific, wonderful, etc.,June 28, 2000

After reading tremendous reviews of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, I purchased them from Amazon.com. Was I impressed? You bet! From the beginning chapters, when the parents of 14-year-old Violet, 12-year-old Klaus, and the newborn Sunny were killed in a monstrous fire, I was enthralled. The orphans were taken to live with the horrendous Count Olaf, who hit them, made them work, and tried to steal their fortune. Among the aspects that amused me was one of Sunny saying a nonsense word which the author described as meaning something relevant, such as “Gack” meaning “Look at that mysterious figure emerging from the fog.” Some parts truly are sad, and some are morbidly funny. Unlike some of the reviewers on this website, I have an imagination and I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its sequels. I am eagerly anticipating the release of #5: The Austere Academy. Read these books and I guarantee that, if you have any sort of imagination, you’ll love them!

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Too delicious!,February 15, 2001

I came to this series as a result of an interview with the author that I read in Publishers Weekly. Intrigued, I ordered the first three books. I loved them. They are purportedly children’s books but the author has a wicked sense of humor, and includes references that only adults would recognize. (For example, two of the three children are named Sunny and Klaus. Gee, that makes me think about some real-life wicked goings-on.)

Aside from everything else, these children actually come alive; they’re inventive, clever and resourceful. They also suffer at the hands of their wonderfully conceived evil uncle Count Olaf.

I’ve passed these books along to a number of children who gobbled them up as avidly as I did–which proves that a good book knows no age barriers. This series is pure pleasure.

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Not you Winnie-the-Pooh!,April 25, 2002

Quoting from the opening of Chapter 7: “There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different. For instance, people who hate stories in which terrible things happen to small children should put this book down immediately.” And they certainly do. The Baudelaire children — fourteen-year-old Violet, twelve-year-old Klaus, and their infant sister, Sunny — are off at the beach one day when Mr. Poe the banker comes to tell them that their loving parents have perished tragically in a fire and that their mansion has been utterly destroyed. They will have to go and live with Count Olaf, their (geographically) nearest relative, until Violet is old enough to inherit. He’s a horrid, dirty, smelly, scheming, dangerous man, and an actor to boot. Their life there is terrible, even with the kind Justice Strauss and her lovely library next door. And then Count Olaf begins making plans to get his hands on their fortune. The author (whose real name is Daniel Handler) is obviously perverse and possibly deranged, and I love his work; it’s hard to tell, sometimes, whether he’s really writing for kids or for weird adults. This is the first of a projected thirteen volumes, and all of them are going on my Edward Gorey shelf.

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Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) – by Stephenie Meyer

August 2, 2008 at 1:25 am · Filed under Reviews 1000+ ·Tagged , , , , ,

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Not just for young adults,September 30, 2005

I am a big vampire genre fan, so when I saw this book in a magazine, it caught my eye. I have to admit, I felt a little funny even thinking of buying it, because it is listed and shelved as a young adult book. Well, I decided to “bite” the bullet, and I purchased it, curled up with it over a weekend, and could not put it down. Don’t let the fact that you have to visit a different section of the book store stop you from reading it, (or of course, purchase it on Amazon, no one will ever know if you don’t want them too). This is a really great book with real emotions all wrapped up in a vampire story, a young woman’s story of having to grow up faster then she maybe should have because of her parents, and yet still dealing with all the issues that growing up brings with it. All in all, a great book, glad I decided to overlook the age description.

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144 positive reviews – and they’re right! ,March 6, 2006

This time the readers got it right. This is a book well worth reading and an absolute MUST for fans of themes revolving around vampires. Buffy fans should be delighted by this one as well.

By the way, don’t be put off by the fact that it was written for the Young Adult crowd. It has plenty to engage any adult reader as well, from romance, bittersweet moments and, of course, the dilemna of vampire meets human, including romance and danger.

THere are also two competing vampire “clans” leading to moments of great suspense.

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Intoxicating and addictive,September 24, 2006

For any potential readers concerned that this might be a retread of twelve combined seasons of Buffy and Angel, set your fears aside. It’s not. That said, now go and buy the book.Buffy and Angel were never set in “our” world – the real world. It was the “Buffy” universe, and/or the “Angel” universe. At first glance, it seems inconceivable that Bella not realize what Edward is. Most of the requisite indicators are evident. You find yourself reading and wondering how Bella could possibly guess “Peter Parker” instead of “vampire”, but then it sinks in. Bella can’t conceive of such a thing because this book is firmly, irrevocably set in our world, and that, indeed, is the magic of this story.

It is a remarkable accomplishment, often attempted, but rarely achieved, and far more rarely executed with such (apparent) ease.

I did not expect to like this book, and started to read it only as a courtesy to the person who gave it to me for my birthday. But twenty pages in, I was hooked. If we want to follow that metaphor to its inevitable conclusion, I was so hooked that by the time I finished it I was in the fisherman’s pail, flopping around as if gasping for air. Instead, I was begging for a sequel. Thankfully, I already knew that the sequel was out.

To quote a character from the book, “W – o – w”. I haven’t sped through something like this since I picked up the first Harry Potter book.

Ms. Meyer handled the developing relationship between Edward and Bella with the mark of a seasoned professional, not a first-time novelist. We need to remember that this is coming-of-age book, or a romance – more a combination of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Pride and Prejudice” than a vampire story. It certainly has far more in common with those two books than “The Vampire Lestat”. (And, of course, Buffy and Angel.)

It is very difficult to write a coming-of-age story. Why? It’s been done a million times, and finding new material to mine becomes more difficult every month. It’s also difficult to write a vampire story. Why? Same reason. Yet those reasons didn’t give Ms. Meyers, it seems, any pause. It would have given me considerable pause. Kudos to her bravery.

Edward Cullen, the vampire, is perfect – and we are reminded of exactly how perfect nearly too often. While reading the book, I found myself frustrated with the never-ending descriptions of his perfect body, perfect hair, model-like looks (maybe I was jealous?) but then I realized that the book wasn’t being written in the third person. It’s a first-person narrative, so we’re getting the story as *Bella* tells it, and how Bella sees it. His burning black eyes, or warm topaz/butterscotch eyes, are magnets to her, as are every single movement he makes. It’s not difficult to step back into high school and remember your first love (or crush) and recall similar feelings. Their eyes never ceased to captivate you; their smile melted you; when they kissed you, you felt faint. And you felt these things every single time you saw that person.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is that we never get a sense for how unique and beautiful Bella is until we start to see her through Edward’s eyes. This being a first-person narrative, it takes a while for the reader to understand how Bella – so awkward that she can trip while walking on a flat surface – could have fascinated such a magnificent…creature. I even questioned it myself while making my way through the book. But again, Ms. Meyer’s deft hand brings the realization of how special Bella is very slowly and deliberately – much the way in which we didn’t find out why Bella moved to Forks until page 50 or so, and why we never knew exactly why Edward had such a powerful, apparently repulsed reaction to Bella when they first came close to each other.

That’s just one thing that makes a writer truly exceptional – the ability to hold back, and tell the story as the story needs to be told. Or to put it another way, to know exactly how the story needs to be told. That might just be the most difficult task a writer has. There are a million ways to tell the story in the writer’s head, but to find the right way is often elusive.

This was such a remarkable and refreshing story. Even when Buffy and Angel similarities started to pop up, they quickly fell away as Ms. Meyer staked an irrevocable claim to this story as absolutely her own. Nothing borrowed, nothing… <kidding>

The representation of the vampires, their unique talents, and the unique way in which they blend into society is marvelous, and provides a firm backbone to the story. While this is a story that is decidedly told in our world, and while I have said that this is more of a coming-of-age story than a vampire story, there are still vampires in it, and the vampires – the fantastical elements of the story – need to be believable. If not, the entire story, no matter how well told, falls apart, and the reader is left wondering why the vampires are even in the story. Her vampires, and their lore, are distinctly drawn.

I wanted to title this review, “My brand of heroin”, from a line in the book, but thought twice seeing as it’s a young adult book and I didn’t want parents or anyone else thinking that I was advocating heroin use, or claiming to be a heroin addict, etc. But this book is absolutely intoxicating and perhaps addictive. Thankfully, the worst side effect of the intoxication is you might suffer a lack of sleep on *one* night (if you have the time, it shouldn’t take much longer), and the addiction – to a book – is harmless. Unless, of course, that book actually contained heroin, and then we’d be talking a bit differently about this one.

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Twilight,August 25, 2007
After hearing praise after praise after praise of this book, I finally caved in and bought it. I know why I waited so long — even though vampires, werewolves, and high school can be mingled oh-so-well, it was still a *shudder* ROMANCE. Yes, I need to grow up sometime in the vague future, but I have a thing with romances.I needn’t have feared. TWILIGHT, while being appropriately sweet and touching and, dare I mention it, romantic, wasn’t irritatingly shallow (a problem some romances have, particularly teen romances) nor did it have an excess of extraordinarily sappy scenes with bad dialogue. It blew me away — I was expecting good, but not THIS good: the book has an indescribable aura of CantPutItDown that sticks even in the non-action scenes. In other words, it’s perfect.

One thing I really liked was that Bella wasn’t fawning over Edward like some mindless obsessive creature. She was just as sarcastically funny toward him as to everyone else, and just as occasionally grumpy. This definitely added a reality to the romance, and a sense of “humanity” — pardon the irony — to Edward.

TWILIGHT is the sort of book you just ENJOY reading. There’s something about it — whether it’s the vampires, the realism, the romance, or some blend of both — that just makes it flawless.

Now, despite myself, I’ve managed to become another abject fan of the Twilight series. I’m scheming out a way to get the second book right — this — minute…

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Twilight by Stephenie Meyer,January 6, 2006
I was totally surprised and knocked off my feet by this book. It was like a bit of classic Christopher Pike to me, an author I devoured in my teens and I loved it. I loved it so much I wanted to turn to page one and start again; which rarely happens. The author managed to take an unlikely premise and make it utterly believable and surprisingly human. This is in my top 10 for the year.Star-crossed lovers rarely have such obstacles to face as these two young lovers, Edward Cullen, 100-year-old vampire who has renounced human prey and 17-year-old Isabella Swann. For Bella is human. Bella can’t stay away from Edward and, despite his best intentions; he can’t stay away from her either. And so the two of them burn for each other, even though by necessity they must remain chaste, for the intensity of their passion could lead Edward to kill her and he agonizes over the danger. But Bella will not part from Edward alive and he will do anything to keep her alive.

Favorite quote: “Softly he brushed my cheek, then held my face between his marble hands. ‘Be very still,’ he whispered, as if I wasn’t already frozen. Slowly, never moving his eyes from mine, he leaned toward me. Then abruptly, but very gently, he rested his cold cheek against the hollow at the base of my throat.

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