Now

Eckhart Tolle was a depressed graduate student in London in his late twenties when, one night in 1977, something broke. The thought that he couldn't live with himself any longer led, by his account, to the question of who the "I" was that couldn't live with whom, and the whole structure of his suffering collapsed. He spent two years on park benches in a state of peace, and twenty years later wrote The Power of Now, which has sold millions and been handed to a great many people on their worst day.

His teaching is that nearly all human suffering comes from one error: identification with the thinking mind. We believe we are our thoughts, and the thoughts are almost always about the past, which is gone, or the future, which hasn't come. The only place life actually happens is now, and now is the one place the thinking mind can't go, because the moment it describes now, it's already describing the past.

He has a term for the accumulated old pain we carry, the pain-body, which feeds on new pain and wakes up when provoked. You've met it. It's the thing that makes a small slight feel like a wound from childhood, because it is.

The practice is as plain as the title. Come back to now. Feel the breath, the hands, the feet, the sounds in the room. Watch the thinker without becoming the thinker. Tolle says the moment you notice you're not present, you are present. That noticing is the whole practice, and it's the whole chamber.

I hold Tolle's larger metaphysics lightly. The practice I hold tightly, because it has steadied a great many people when nothing else did. The present moment is always survivable. It's the past and the future that aren't.