The follow-up to The Power of Now, A New Earth, is an extended riff on the same subject. The past and the future are creations of thought and only the present moment is real and only the present moment matters. Its central message is that the root of our emotional problems is our habit of identifying too much with our minds. There is not very much new about The Power of Now вЂ“ it is Buddhism mixed with mysticism and a few references to Jesus Christ, a sort of New Age re-working of Zen. The book, published by Penguin in 1999, sat at the top of the bestseller lists for years. And then he wrote his first book, The Power of Now. He spent the next two years sitting on park benches 'in a state of the most intense joy'. Who am I? Who is this self that I cannot live with? The answer came on a deeper level. I looked at that sentence: 'I can't live with myself'. Am I one or am I two? And that triggered me like a koan. The 'I', and this 'self' that I cannot live with. 'Suddenly I stepped back from myself, and it seemed to be two of me. The more I was looking on that level, the more unhappy I became.'ДЄnd then, he says, he had an epiphany. I was looking for some kind of answer to the dilemma of life, but I had been looking to the intellect for the answer philosophy, religion and intellectual inspiration. 'I was not trying to become enlightened or anything like that. 'I was unhappy, depressed and anxious,' he said in a rare interview, with the environmentalist website in 2003. After leaving Cambridge, Tolle went into a steep decline, however.

Eckhart tolle review