The Power of Now

The Power of Now

One night in 1977, a twenty-nine-year-old man woke up in his small London flat at three in the morning. The dread was unbearable. He had lived with depression for most of his adult life. Anxiety was not an occasional visitor. It was the wallpaper of his existence. He had been pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge, the kind of accomplishment that looks impressive on paper but meant nothing to the emptiness eating him alive from the inside. On this particular night, the darkness was so thick, so total, that a single thought broke through the noise.

"I cannot live with myself any longer."

For most people, that thought would simply feel like despair. But something strange happened in Eckhart Tolle's mind. The thought split open. He noticed it contained two parts. There was an "I." And there was a "self" that this "I" could not live with. Were there two of him? Who was the real one? The question was so startling, so completely disorienting, that his mind stopped. Not slowed down. Stopped. And in the silence that followed, he felt himself pulled into what he later described as a vortex of energy. His body began to tremble. He heard the words "resist nothing" from somewhere within. Then everything went dark.

When he woke the next morning, everything had changed. The room looked the same. His life circumstances were the same. But the filter through which he had been seeing reality was gone. Colors were more vivid. Sounds were sharper. There was a deep, pervasive peace that had no cause, no reason. It was simply there. He walked outside and the world was alive in a way he had never noticed. The trees, the light on the pavement, the sounds of people passing by. Everything was vibrating with a quiet aliveness.