Eckhart Tolle is a man who was very unhappy and then figured out how not to
be. In [The Power of Now][] he writes about the truth that he discovered that
helped him to be that way, and kindly tries to share it with us.

Unfortunately, his understanding is tainted by his lack of understanding of
the brain, the body, and reproductive biology. This means he has to make
things up:

* He claims “bad emotions” (fear, anger, hate) are of the mind and “good
emotions” (joy, love, compassion) are of Being. Convenient, but disprovable
by anybody with an fMRI; [The Emotional Brain][] is a good treatise on this
 subject.

* He talks about a “pain body”, a somewhat interesting anthropomorphization of
the way the amygdala and hippocampal memory interacts with the conscious
mind. Unfortunately, he once again needs energy fields to explain things.

* He’s determined to get you to be “outside of your mind”. He’s making an
important point here. It *is* important not to identify with the narrative
self. However, he has to make up some non-physical realm to explain how this
is possible. The underlying phenomena, and way out, is argued better by Dr.
Susan Blackmore in [The Meme Machine][]; she requires no woo-woo land to
achieve the same effect.

* he claims that “drugs” always leave you feeling bad after they make you feel
good. Anyone with a moderately broad experience of “drugs” knows that drugs
have a variety of effects, and many of them have little to no physiological
aftereffects. [Erowid][] is a good resource for exploring more
information on this subject.

* He joins with many, many others in trying to elevate sexual dimorphism to
mystical truth, particularly in a portion entitled “Why Women are Closer to
Enlightenment”, and continuing on in a section about relationship.

[The Cooperative Gene][] is an excellent book that covers the biological
truths underlying sex and gender, making the interesting and highly
relevatory point that while sex is necessary for beings of greater
complexity, gender is an artifact of the historical adoption of
 mitochondria.

On the personal level, it is a mistake to consider yourself “one half” of
some complete whole, as Tolle affirms, when gender is just a hack and
sex is an elaborate mechanism to induce selfish genes to be a little more
 selfless.

Moreover, it takes only a cursory glance at the set of sexually reproductive
beings to find that the vast majority of them aren’t really very formal
about this whole gender affair, doing everything from swapping genders if
it seems appropriate to punting on the whole tedious buisness of finding a
reproductive partner and just fertilizing themselves.

Finally, the overwhelming majority of life on this earth doesn’t even bother
with sex or gender.

All this conspires to make a claim for some sort of gendered universe or
diety a bit silly.

* He tries to make a psychological or abstract claim about love and the nature
of attraction; the fundamental truth is that attraction is in no small part
a biological process. One excellent example of this is the vomeronasal
organ, also known as [Jacobson’s Organ][], though there are many others.

Some could dismiss my critique as not addressing his main argument about
“living in the now”; frankly, it’s hard to take his (reasonably sane) argument
seriously when it’s tainted by such a thouroughly contrived worldview.

In short, the Power of Now contains nothing spiritual that hasn’t been said
better by other authors, and its ontological understandings stem from
ignorance of the current state of knowledge about the mind, body, and biology.

[The Power of Now]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577311523/mindlace-20
[The Emotional Brain]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684836599/mindlace-20
[The Meme Machine]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019286212X/mindlace-20
[Erowid]: http://erowid.org
[The Cooperative Gene]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743201612/mindlace-20
[Jacobson’s Organ]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452282586/mindlace-20