The Power of Now

Tolle argues that psychological suffering comes from identification with the mind's continuous commentary, and that the mind constructs a false self from memories of the past and projections of the future. His prescription is to place attention on present experience, which he holds interrupts the identification and dissolves the suffering that depends on it.

His central distinctions are between clock time, which is practical and required for functioning, and psychological time, which is the mental habit of living in past and future; between pain, which is a present event, and what he calls the pain-body, an accumulated residue of past pain that seeks to reproduce the conditions that feed it; and between the observing awareness and the mental activity being observed.

The practical instruction is to notice thinking as it occurs, which he holds creates a gap between awareness and thought, and to place attention on physical sensation, particularly what he calls the inner body, as a means of holding that gap open. He also argues for accepting the present as it is, on the grounds that resistance to what has already happened produces the suffering rather than the event. The book is written as a question and answer dialogue and is repetitive by design.

It contains no evidence and Tolle makes no attempt to provide any. The metaphysical claims about consciousness and being are asserted. His account of his own sudden transformation at twenty-nine is unverifiable and functions as the book's authority. Readers with clinical mental health conditions should note that the book presents attention practice as sufficient for conditions that require treatment. The observation that suffering attaches to thinking about events rather than to events is consistent with cognitive therapy, which is where its practical value sits.