Yesterday as I drove from Berkeley to San Diego, I listened to the audiobook “The Power of Now”, by Eckhart Tolle.¹ I felt deeply drawn to several aspects of the book, which rang true to me and felt extremely promising as frames to adopt in my life. Here are some notes I took after I had finished the book:

• There is no choice in when to be or what’s here. The only choices are in what to attend to, and how to act, in the present moment. But that’s a glorious, expansive, freeing choice! Why always make it the same way? e.g. why always be focused on your mind’s plan or your memory, when there’s all this other stuff here too?
  • Your posture - Muscle tension and relaxation
  • Physical sensations - you’re having them all the time in every part of your body!
  • Things you hear
  • Anticipations of the very near future
  • Felt senses
  • Impulses you have
  • Thoughts you’re thinking, and what it’s like to think those thoughts
  • Your visual environment
  • Smells / tastes
  • Mental imagery
  • Mental machinery / proprioception
  • Metaphorics of being a way
  • …
• There is no point in rejecting or resisting the present moment; the only sane option is to accept it.
• The present moment contains traces of the past, and in a way also traces of the future.
• There’s no point in rejecting or resisting the present moment.
• Everything that is “there to be interacted with” is contained in the present moment.
• You don’t get a choice about when to be, but you do get a choice about what to attend to, and what to do, right now.
• It can be… Something like a mix of “fun” and “rewarding” to play games with attention / track that it has as much freedom and expansiveness as it in fact does
• Awareness of the present (is the only thing that?) can be the seat of your agency; the place you act from. You don’t have to, and indeed it’s probably undesirable to, let your behavior arise from some zoomed-in small piece of the present, like your “plans” or fears or unconscious self-protective tics / TAPs / tots. At best this is limiting; at worst you aren’t really there at all: Your machine has elided the consciousness.
• I think, at least the way I’m currently factored, it’s very hard to be present while also actively engaged with other people. How can I have an argument while staying conscious? How can I retain my awareness even when… there is someone watching me, who is or might become threatening to me?

I did also feel somewhat repulsed by places where the book sort of “doesn’t take its own advice”. Like, in addition to relying somewhat on pseudoscientific / new-age-mystical ideas like “life energy” and “vibrational frequency” (which I could forgive as sort of a mark of the genre), the author repeatedly claims that he has finally correctly deciphered the meanings of various Christian parables, that awareness alone can stop you from getting diseases and growing old, and that humanity has a collective consciousness that is on the verge of being forced into awakening by the collective suffering of the world. All of this, I feel confident saying, is at least mostly junk. But more than that, it seems to me that it’s all in opposition to the actual core teachings of the book! None of these claims are things that could be learned purely by paying attention to the present moment, observing it without judgement and being present to what is there - they all require the involvement of much more fallible processes.

I talked on the phone with my parents toward the beginning of the drive, and my dad pointed out half-jokingly that it might not be a great idea to try to meditate while driving. I sort of brushed it off since I wasn’t really expecting to experience anything debilitating, or really powerful in any way. But in fact I did find the book highly psychoactive. In retrospect, on the one hand he may have been totally right that this was a little unsafe. On the other hand, driving is the only time I tend to have the right conditions for listening to audiobooks, and I certainly think it was worth some unsafety in this case.