"The Power of Now" is a guide for daily living and emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and transcending thoughts about the past or the future.
This book represents the essence of my work, as far as it can be conveyed in words, with individuals and small groups of spiritual seekers during the past tenyears, in Europe and in North America. In deep love and appreciation, I would like to thank those exceptional people for their courage, their willingness to embrace inner change, their challenging questions, and their readiness to listen. This book would not have come into existence without them. They belong to what is as yet a small but fortunately growing minority of spiritual pioneers: people who are reaching a point where they become capable of breaking out of inherited collective mind-patterns that have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons. I trust that this book will find its way to those who are ready for such radical inner transformation and so act as a catalyst for it. I also hope that it will reach many others who will find its content worthy of consideration, although they may not be ready to fully live or practice it. It is possible that at a later time, the seed that was sown when reading this book will merge with the seed of enlightenment that each human being carries within, and suddenly that seed will sprout and come alive within them.
On one level, I draw your attention to what is false in you. I speak of the nature of human unconsciousness and dysfunction as well as its most common behavioral manifestations, from conflict in relationships to warfare between tribes or nations. Such knowledge is vital for unless you learn to recognize the false as false -- as not you -- there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of pain. On this level, I also show you how not to make that which is false in you into a self and into a personal problem, for that is how the false perpetuates itself. On another level, I speak of a profound transformation of human consciousness - - not as a distant future possibility, but available now -- no matter who or where you are. You are shown how to free yourself from enslavement to the mind, enter into this enlightened state of consciousness and sustain it in everyday life.
Introduction - (1:15)
Chapter 1 - You are not your mind (16:10)
Chapter 2 - Consciousness: The way out of pain (1:05:40)
Chapter 3 - Moving deeply into the now (1:34:36)
Chapter 4 - Mind strategies for avoiding the now (2:19:38)
Chapter 5 - The state of presence (3:03:37)
Chapter 6 - The inner body (3:31:13)
Chapter 7 - Portals into the unmanifested (4:11:28)
Chapter 8 - Enlightened relationships (4:44:41)
Chapter 9 - Beyond happiness and unhappiness there is peace (5:47:18)
Chapter 10 - The meaning of surrender (6:43:44)