Insight Editions · No. 405
Beyond the Power of Now
A Guide to, and Beyond, Eckhart Tolle's Teachings
L. Ron Gardner
Presence and surrender are only two of three dimensions; without the descent of the Holy Spirit through Holy Communion, Tolle's teaching stays flat, and his war on the mind, on judgment and on the ego goes too far.
A study guide to Beyond the Power of Now by L. Ron Gardner. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
CORE CLAIM
Tolle teaches presence and surrender but never names the power that makes them work; the true power of Now is the Holy Spirit, which descends through Holy Communion.
SCOPE
Ten chapters that follow The Power of Now title by title in question-and-answer form: the mind, pain, time, presence, the inner body, portals, relationships, happiness and surrender.
KEY FIGURES
Eckhart Tolle, Adi Da, Jesus, the Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Meister Eckhart, Hiroshi Motoyama, David R. Hawkins, Ayn Rand, Ken Wilber.
BEST FOR
Readers of The Power of Now who want a combative, energy-centred second opinion and a study guide that pairs each of Tolle's questions with a counter-answer.
What the book is. Beyond the Power of Now (2012, Vernal Point Publishing) is a chapter-by-chapter reply to Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, the bestseller that became a phenomenon after Oprah Winfrey championed it. L. Ron Gardner keeps Tolle's chapter titles and paraphrases his questions in the same question-and-answer format, so the book doubles as a study guide: each answer weighs what Tolle says against what Gardner believes is missing.
Where he stands. Critics have called Tolle "warmed-over Buddhism" and "dumbed-down Krishnamurti"; Deepak Chopra said "every sentence rings with truth." Gardner sits between. He agrees in principle with Tolle's two practices, conscious presence and surrender, and gives "praise where praise is due," but he rejects much of the detail, often in blunt and mocking language.
The central claim. Tolle is a two-dimensional mystic who teaches presence and letting go but never names the power that makes them fruitful; the true power of Now is the Holy Spirit, Shakti, the Sambhogakaya, which descends when you practise Holy Communion, and only that descent enlightens. Gardner calls his own approach three-dimensional or trinitarian: presence (Siva, voltage), surrender (lower resistance) and the Spirit-current (Shakti, amperage).
Three main critiques. First, Tolle's attack on the mind (Gardner compares it to Kant's, "but more vicious"): the rational mind is man's tool of survival and the faculty of choice. Second, the power of Now is never defined. Third, the "new earth" prophecy is vague about what will replace the egoic world. Along the way he rebuts eight claims: that thought is senior to emotion, that time is an illusion, that psychological time is insane, that the present moment is the Now, that the inner body is the direct link to the Unmanifested, that cells can stop ageing, that women are more spiritually evolved, and that ducks and cats are Zen masters.
The traditions behind him. Gardner draws on Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen, Adi Da's teaching and Christian Hermeticism, plus four decades of practice. He notes that Tolle is silent on diet, sexual energy, kundalini and regular meditation, and recalls Gary Schmad's account in Chasing the Light of Tolle seeming nervous at a retreat.
How the book moves. Chapters 1 to 4 cover the mind, pain, time and the avoidance of the Now; Chapters 5 to 7 cover presence, the inner body and the "portals"; Chapters 8 to 10 apply all of it to relationships, happiness and surrender. The book closes with a spiritual reading list. Throughout, Gardner mixes the mystical argument with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, astrology, libertarian politics and autobiography, and the reader has to sort these strands.
The tone. Gardner writes as a sparring partner rather than a commentator. He mocks Tolle's "fogged-out" utopianism, his ducks and cats, and his seminar prices, and he is just as quick to cite his own credentials: forty years of practice, more than a thousand spiritual books, a decade as a professional gambler in Las Vegas, and long experience as an astrological counsellor. The humour keeps the book readable; it also means some arguments land on Tolle the man rather than on the teaching.
How to read it. The most useful way to use the book is alongside The Power of Now, one chapter at a time: read Tolle's answer, then Gardner's, and ask where each is describing practice and where each is making a claim about the world. On practice the two are often closer than Gardner admits: both want you present, both want you to let go, both point to a state beyond the thinking mind. The real dispute is whether that state is reached by stillness alone or by stillness that opens to a descending power, and whether the thinking mind must be quieted or kept as a partner.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enlightenment and the Mind | Enlightenment is union with God through Holy Communion, not just disidentifying from thought; the mind is an ally |
| 2 | Consciousness and Pain | The pain-body is the self-contraction; the present moment is not the Now; the lamp must be plugged in |
| 3 | Living in the Now | Clock time and psychological time are real and sane; the bliss-current lies under the life situation |
| 4 | The Avoidance of the Now | Becoming cannot produce Being; the power of Now is the Holy Spirit, not kundalini |
| 5 | The Divine State of Presence | Mere presence is not divine presence; four stages lead to "I and the Father are one" |
| 6 | The Etheric Body | The inner body is the pranic sheath, not the link to the Unmanifested; electrical pranayama |
| 7 | Openings into the Absolute | Two portals, charge and discharge; space is not nothing; dying into the white Light |
| 8 | Light on Relationships | Only the Spirit makes you whole; compatibility outweighs presence; a combative view of gender |
| 9 | Happiness and Inner Peace | Good and bad are objective; praise the rational ego; acceptance cannot replace judgment |
| 10 | The Spiritual Meaning of Surrender | True surrender is yielding to the Spirit-current in Communion; the horizontal and vertical cross |
Chapter map
Enlightenment and the Mind
Tolle defines enlightenment as "your natural state of felt oneness with Being." Gardner calls that correct but incomplete. Full enlightenment is connectedness with Being plus conductivity of the Light-energy that streams from it, and the main obstacle is not the mind but the moment-to-moment avoidance of relationship.
The primal obstruction to enlightenment
Two vines of the Divine. Gardner reads "divine" as "two-vine": the supreme Being is at once static transcendental Presence (the timeless Now) and dynamic spiritual Power (the power of Now). Connect fully to the first and the second spontaneously en-Light-ens you. In Christian terms, the connection is Holy Communion (fusion) and the down-flow is the Holy Spirit (infusion).
Energy, not psychology. Contrary to New Age opinion, Gardner insists that enlightenment is "first and foremost, an energetic reality": Light-energy from the Source outshines the mind, and no psychological strategy for "a better you" can remove a darkness whose only cause is ignoring a direct connection to that Source. The Buddha's word, Nirvana, literally means "the end of becoming", and so it is a synonym for permanent oneness with Being.
| Kind | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Conditional | Regular, powerful connections to the Source-Light | Advanced practitioners |
| Unconditional (Self-realized) | Effortless, permanent abiding as the Source-Light | Jesus, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi |
Two kinds of enlightenment
Why "Being" and not "God". The word God carries too many meanings; religions "create God in the image of man", angry and jealous, and those differences have fuelled wars. Being implies an unqualified Existent, names the realization itself (the "feeling of Being"), and, unlike God, has no dualistic implication of a great Object to worship. Tolle is right that Being can be felt but not understood mentally; the yogic formula Sat = Cit-Ananda (Being = Consciousness-Bliss) says the feeling of Being is realizing oneself as Self-aware, Self-radiant Bliss.
Gardner's Zen years. He spent years trying to empty his mind and void each thought. He reached deep states of no-mind, and the kundalini "forcefully ripped through" him, twisting his neck and jerking his head. But he did not awaken and found no peace: he was "constantly in conflict with myself." Through Krishnamurti, Adi Da, Dzogchen and Christian mysticism he found the real obstacle: avoiding relationship. "To be related is to be." Communion and at-one-ment are synonyms; the primal sin is retracting from them.
"If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be filled with Light." Jesus does not say "disidentify from your mind"; he says to focus your full attention on the divine Being. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all else will be added unto you."
Who is using whom
Tolle says the mind "uses you" and has taken you over, but never explains how. Gardner begins with the interplay of conscious and subconscious mind. When we are not thinking deliberately, the mind runs on autopilot, and what surfaces is simply what we programmed into it through experience and value judgments (or, if you accept karma, previous lives). Because we have free will, we can reprogram the subconscious, which is hard but possible.
Can you stop thinking whenever you want? Most people manage a few moments. Following Ayn Rand, Gardner explains why: man is the rational animal, whose chief means of survival is the mind, so it has no "off" button for the same reason breathing has none.
Who is the thinker? Tolle says freedom begins with realizing you are not the thinker, and recommends "watching the thinker." Gardner asks: if you are not the thinker, who is? There cannot be thoughts without a thinker. The thinker cannot be found when you look because consciousness works in one mode at a time: switch from conception to perception and the conceptual "you" vanishes temporarily. Your deepest identity transcends the mind, but as a bodymind you are the thinker.
What "higher consciousness" means. Thoughts are mental concretes that contract consciousness and lower its vibrational frequency ("As a man thinks, so he becomes," says the Buddha). Remove them and consciousness is naturally more intense and faster-vibrating. But watching does this only if the meditator generates enough conscious force to stay thought-free for long periods. Few of the Buddhist mindfulness practitioners Gardner knew ever awakened to the force-flow of Light-energy.
Assume the stance of being whole-bodily present and connected to existence as a whole, then notice five things:
- Unqualified relatedness is the fullest expression of consciousness possible.
- It spontaneously morphs into the feeling of Being.
- Your root egoic tendency is to retract from this position.
- In any moment you can atone simply by re-assuming it.
- Being present includes and transcends watching the thinker, so identification with the mind falls away naturally.
Watching the thinker, by contrast, narrows awareness onto one function, mentation, and is a "head" practice that excludes the feeling-dimension of consciousness. When Communion is full and intense, you are baptized: the Holy Spirit (Hindu Shakti, Mahayana Sambhogakaya) is poured in.
Freedom from the mind
Watching dissolves thoughts, but not for good. Non-judgmental witnessing does dissolve thoughts into stillness, and discovering what perceives that stillness reveals your I Am nature. But recognizing the Self is "a far cry from being able to abide in and as It." Tolle says listening to a thought is the beginning of the end of compulsive thinking; Gardner has never met a practitioner who ended it, and notes that the Buddha himself was beset by vexing thoughts until Nirvana.
The war you cannot win. Watching is a willful act, efforts are spasmodic, and so are results. You lose money in a bad investment, witness the thought, enjoy a gap, and the thought comes back "again... and again." Treat the mind as an enemy to defeat by relentless witnessing and you start "a war with yourself" that Gardner fought for years and lost.
Tolle's laborious path. Ceaselessly watch the mind, create gaps of no-mind, go "more deeply" into them, and disidentify from each thought as it comes.
Gardner's path of Grace. Connect to the divine Source. Its Blessing Power (Shaktipat) "crashes down on you, incinerating your thoughts," and penetrates to the Heart-center, just right of the middle of the chest, where cutting the Heart-knot makes you a Christ-like Self.
No-mind is overrated. If gaps of no-mind lead to oneness with Being, why does deep sleep not awaken everyone? Drugs and hypnosis also still the mind. And "going deeper into no-mind" is incoherent: the void is just a new object, a backdrop for attention. Mahayana is the only tradition that apotheosizes the void. Empty space is a fine meditation object, which Gardner uses himself, but only as a doorway to the presence and power behind it: "until emptiness 'dances'... as the Sambhogakaya," enlightenment is not possible.
Vipassana and Dzogchen. Tolle's alternative, attending closely to each step on the stairs or to the breath, is Vipassana, Theravada mindfulness. Gardner practised it for years and calls it "drudgery", devoted to the mundane and tethered to the ephemeral "now" instead of the eternal Now. Compare Dzogchen, whose essential practice is to be directly present to the Dharmakaya-Sambhogakaya, the Tibetan equivalent of Hindu Siva-Shakti. He recommends Namkhai Norbu's The Cycle of Day and Night. His counter-mantra to Tolle's "learn to disidentify from your mind" is: "Seek ye first the divine Source, or eternal Now, and its radiant Power shall outshine your mind."
Transcending your mind
Biological man and spiritual man. "Biological man" feels separate and threatened, so his mind works almost nonstop to secure his survival. "Spiritual man", connected to the Source, feels full; his mind relaxes and his thoughts, arising within Communion, are wholesome rather than dysfunctional. When spiritual man separates again (the "original sin"), the mind runs amok, but salvation is always available to anyone who "repents" and turns to the Spirit.
Why we are addicted to thinking. Thinking is the means of becoming: each retraction from Being contracts us into a limited mental state, it fails to satisfy, so we seek another, endlessly. That is samsara.
| School | What the ego is | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Causal (Tolle) | A false self made by unconscious identification with the mind | Stop identifying with thought |
| Radical (Adi Da) | The self-contraction made by the act of separating from Being, prior to any identification | Undo the primal act of separation |
| Personal (Rand) | Rational self-interest | Free it from altruism and self-sacrifice |
Three views of the ego
Gardner endorses the radical view for liberation and Rand's view for life: the same motive, rational self-interest, drives both pre-spiritual and spiritual life, and a truly healthy ego would naturally turn to esoteric spirituality as "the epitome of rational, enlightened self-interest."
Is the mind creative? Tolle says the mind "is not at all creative." The mind cannot create something out of nothing, but it combines and integrates what exists into new products, which is creativity in the usual sense. The mind is "a nonpareil tool" for measuring the manifested; Ultimate Reality is the Immeasurable, so in meditation you set mentation aside, since you can use only one tool at a time.
- Hakuin. In Wild Ivy, the Zen master and his monks develop energy disorders from meditation; satori gives no cure and they must turn to Taoism.
- Hadamard's survey. Breakthroughs do come in quiet moments, as Einstein and the physicists Hadamard surveyed reported. That is the subconscious delivering answers to earlier conscious effort, not some mystical place of no-mind.
Emotion: the mind as feeling-energy
Consciousness has two modes: thinking (the "male" mode, via concepts) and feeling (the "female" mode, via emotions). Emotions are charged feeling-reactions that reflect value judgments: the investor feels joy when his stocks rise because he values security. Enlightenment, likewise, is both knowing and feeling that one's nature is Being.
Thought versus emotion. Tolle writes that in a conflict "the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth." Gardner's reply is the bakery: emotion says eat the cookies, reason says your diet is worth more. Health guru Paul Bragg: "Flesh is dumb... It took me years to get the emotions out of my eating." Emotions are not tools of cognition; acknowledge them, then weigh them by reason. They are also subconscious, not unconscious: people avoid topics because they know what feelings will follow.
Tolle's three claims. All emotions are modifications of one primordial emotion, pain; the mind is part of the problem so it can never solve it; and thought and emotion form a vicious circle. Adi Da and David R. Hawkins say the root is not pain but Love, of which emotions mark relative presence or absence ("You cannot shine darkness into an area"). Gardner accepts the pain view but notes that Tolle's own mind found the solution, by steering him to the path.
- Emotions are printouts of value judgments, held implicitly or explicitly.
- Rational premises yield mostly joy; irrational ones yield suffering: "Garbage in, garbage out."
- An emotion is an effect, not a cause. Make emotion the cause and the mind becomes a mere rationalizer, and "the inmates take over the prison."
But it is still a prison. Reason can bring order, but the mind cannot free itself: its grasping encloses consciousness in one state after another, like a prisoner who moves from the "outhouse" cell to the "penthouse" cell. Gurdjieff: "If you are to get out of prison the first thing you must realize is you are in prison."
| Level | What it is |
|---|---|
| Beatitude | Nondual: being Bliss itself, radiating Blessing Power to others |
| Bliss | Receiving Grace as the Holy Spirit pours down in samadhi |
| Joy | Happiness at meaningful achievement; human, involves mind and time |
| Pleasure | Sensory enjoyment shared with animals; no spiritual value |
Christian mysticism's ladder of bliss
Love and peace. Spiritual love is the Blessing Energy of Being, not a human achievement; a true guru is not someone with a rare capacity to love but one through whom the Holy Spirit radiates. Selfish love can turn to hate "in a heartbeat" when the beloved disappoints. Peace alone is not deep: a grazing cow or a tranquillized man is peaceful. On craving, Tolle is right not to fight it: craving is a symptom of separation, so treat the dis-ease by connecting to the Source. "Buddha" comes from budh, "to know."
Gardner reads Tolle's practice as pure disidentification, but Tolle also teaches inner-body awareness and surrender, which Gardner discusses later; the "flat mystic" label is partly a framing choice. His defence of the mind leans on Rand's psychology of emotion, which most psychologists would call too rationalist, and the anecdotal claims (no practitioner has ended compulsive thought, Vipassana is drudgery) come from his own circles, not from studies.
Consciousness and Pain
Tolle locates the creation of pain in denial of the Now. Gardner says this is simply the Eucharist restated in psychological terms: avoidance is a recoil of the whole body from the divine Being, the "pain-body" is the self-contraction, and only the Holy Spirit dissolves it permanently.
Three ways to deal with pain
| Approach | Method | Gardner's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Randian psycho-epistemology | Reprogram the subconscious with rational, life-positive premises | Works, but cannot free you from the prison |
| Classical yogic and Buddhist | Disidentify from the mind and the suffering | Temporary and effortful |
| Radical spiritual | Tap directly into the healing power of Now | The real solution |
Approaches to sorrow and emotional pain
The whole body recoils. Tolle treats avoiding the Now as a matter of mind. For Gardner it is whole-bodily: the seeker has already retracted into abstraction, so he wrongly sees the mind as the problem, when the true problem is "the avoidance of organismic intercourse with the Deity." He finds Tolle, the "refined European gentleman" and ex-Cambridge scholar who borrows from Krishnamurti, too flat and formal for the mystical experience, in which the body presses against "the radiant force field of the divine Being" and the down-pouring Shakti enters the Heart-center.
Time is real. "Time and mind are in fact inseparable," Tolle writes; Gardner calls it "pure mystical poppycock." Time is inseparable from change; mind only measures it. The Earth orbits the Sun whether anyone notices, and migrating birds and squirrels storing nuts implicitly acknowledge time. "The present moment is all you ever have" sounds to him like a '70s hippie manual, and he notes that in 2008 Wayne Dyer was raising donations for Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now, so he could retire in Maui.
The present moment is the passing, temporal "now"; the Now is changeless and eternal. Being present opens the door, but unless you cross the threshold you are only present to arising phenomena. Great artists and athletes live in the moment, and many have monstrous egos.
Gardner does accept Tolle's counsel to let the moment be as it is. Put "more descriptively": let psychic content arise and fall on its own, and be whole-bodily present to, through and beyond it.
The pain-body is the self-contraction
Tolle's "pain-body" is a "negative energy field" of trapped, autonomous life-energy. Gardner found the term only in Tolle, but the concept is old: Daism and Kashmir Shaivism call it self-contraction. Retracting from Being contracts not only consciousness but the naturally happy, expansive feeling nature.
Why it seems to sleep. Busyness, TV, alcohol and drugs make you "comfortably numb," but when distraction fails, the pain-body "is always there to greet you." The tighter the fist, the worse the pain; conventionally happy people grasp less. Can witnessing dissolve it? Yes and no: it dissolves forms temporarily, but will and effort "generate their own forms of contraction." Effort can put you in the right position; only Grace, the Holy Spirit cracking open the Heart-center, sets you free.
The pain-body and the Trinity
| Vajrayana (Trikaya) | Christianity | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Dharmakaya, Truth Body | The Father | Formless, all-pervading Presence: the Now |
| Sambhogakaya, Bliss Body | The Holy Spirit | Radiant Blessing Energy: the power of Now |
| Nirmanakaya, Emanation Body | The Son | The embodied disciple, Christ-like when enlightened |
The three bodies in Buddhism and Christianity
In Ati yoga (Dzogchen) the yogi stays present to the Dharmakaya and lets the Sambhogakaya irradiate his Nirmanakaya. The pain-body cannot belong to the first two, so it is the Nirmanakaya in a state of separation from the Now and its Power. Our naked condition is existential pain, relieved by trickles of Grace as pleasure and joy. When the Holy Spirit, the "Great Physician," pierces the Gordian knot in the Heart, the three are realized as One.
Identification is not the issue. People rarely identify with their pain-body; like a fever, they want it gone but don't know how. Tolle's "ever-alert guardian of your inner space" implies a vigilance no one can keep: "Efforts are spasmodic, and so are the results" (Ramana). Here Tolle first defines the power of Now, as "the power of your conscious presence," and leaves it there: personal or divine? Shakti or the Holy Spirit? He does not say.
Gardner's late mother complained constantly of pain but ignored advice to quit smoking and junk food, exercise and get sunshine. Her problem, he says, was lack of ego, not ego: only someone with self-esteem seeks to end suffering. So ego-deficiency, rather than identification with the pain-body, lies at the root of much misery.
Fear, separation and wholeness
Fear "comes in many forms," and every form has the same structure: a separate self and a threatening object. While the subject-object split remains, fear remains. Fanaticism can override it, as with terrorists, but no rational person would choose cultic brainwashing. The rational cure is yoga, "union of the individual self with the universal Spirit": removing the interval between man and Spirit.
The ego is a "derived sense of self," a derivative of the divine Self made by retracting from the Whole. Feeling estranged, it suffers fear, emptiness and isolation, and craves work, possessions and status to heal them.
Mindful witnessing. A "head" practice; not a full expression of consciousness, so it does not feel complete; "Siva without Shakti," a "male" practice that ignores receiving Grace.
Holy Communion. A whole-bodily mudra; consciousness plus oneness, the fullest form of meditation; it includes witnessing and receives "the whole influx of Blessing Power from above."
"Die before you die," says Tolle, but he gives no specifics. Gardner's analogy: before the light can shine, the lamp (bodymind) must be plugged in (oneness), turned on (awareness), and the current allowed to flow (disidentification). The wholistic yogi disidentifies by letting the current outshine thought-forms as they arise.
Gardner's claim that the term "pain-body" exists only in Tolle rests on a web search; the important point is that the concept parallels self-contraction. His "ego-deficiency" argument draws on one painful family story, and his criticism of "now" teachings via Ram Dass's finances is ad hominem rather than an argument about time. His three-body mapping of Christian and Buddhist doctrine is a Perennialist synthesis that neither tradition's mainstream accepts.
Living in the Now
Enlightenment is not cumulative self-knowledge but an energetic process: channelling greater intensities of Spirit-power until it severs the Heart-knot. Gardner spends this long chapter defending the reality of time, separating the present moment from the Now, and rejecting Tolle's claim that psychological time is "insanity."
The search for self
A questioner feels he must learn much more about his mind before he is ready. "You're wrong," Gardner answers: when the Spirit-power is "sufficiently violent" you recognize yourself as Siva, united with Shakti in an eternal Dance. Tolle says not to seek yourself in the mind but never explains how presence locates the true self. "The devil is in the details," and the details appear once the Divine's power descends. For those, study the great tantric traditions: Vajrayana, Kashmir Shaivism and Daism.
How to disidentify. The key is the Holy Spirit: let its Light-energy outshine thought. First you must be baptized, which happens spontaneously when Communion (presence plus oneness) is "locked-in" and unobstructed. Tolle's key, "ending the delusion of time," Gardner rejects outright.
Tolle advises honouring the present moment and allowing it to be. Gardner's test: if a crazed criminal were about to kill your child, would you allow it? "If I had a gun on me, I'd pull it out and shoot the bastard." Unqualified allowing is "irrational and irresponsible," sometimes immoral.
The reality of time
Time is the measure of change. As long as there is manifest existence there is time, so to deny time is to deny the world. If the world were unreal, time would not be precious. Tolle calls the Now "the only thing" yet also "the only point of access" into Being. Which is it? If a point, what point? Not the present moment, which Tolle himself calls illusory.
The swimmer in the indoor pool. Even if the Now is the context of all change, life also happens in time. A man swims in a building (timelessness) and in a pool (time) at once; Tolle's "exclusive and reductive" view acknowledges the building and denies the pool. Nor is it "obvious" that past and future borrow their reality from the Now; if it were, there would be universal agreement. And Tolle's claim that this "cannot be understood by the mind" fails: all understanding is via the mind, including the gnosis of mystical experience.
| Clock time | Psychological time | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Measure of change against Earth's rotation and orbit | Felt duration, entirely in your head |
| Origin | Began with the universe, inseparable from space | Made by attention and emotion |
| Example | 365 rotations per orbit | An hour of passion feels like twenty minutes; a checkout queue the reverse |
| Gardner's verdict | Real; deny it and you deny the universe | Not an illness; often sane and useful |
Clock time and psychological time
Illusory, not illusion. Calling the universe an illusion is like calling dust on a mirror an illusion because it hides your reflection. The universe is real but illusory in quality: it veils the transcendental. Likewise time masks the eternal Now, which exists outside space and time: Christ's Heaven, Buddha's Nirvana.
Openings, Zen and knowing
Danger is not a spiritual dimension. Life-or-death situations still the "con-fusion" of competing thoughts and give intensified aliveness, which is why people seek dangerous sports. If that were spiritual, Green Berets, Mafia hit men and martial artists would be Buddhas. Openings abound and are "nothing special": you need not join Jack Bauer; be present and ask God to bless you with His Power.
Why mysticism stayed secret. Tolle says the Now's key "seems to have remained a secret" in churches. Gardner's reason: mystics like Tolle blur their terms and reduce the experience to the "ineffable." Tolle never defines "spiritual dimension," and "profound inner transformation" could describe puberty as well as enlightenment.
Zen comes from Chinese Ch'an, from Sanskrit Dhyana, "meditation." Zen literature scarcely mentions the Now; it offers mind-emptying directives and koans. It pays lip service to the Trikaya, but almost no practitioner Gardner met could say what the Sambhogakaya is.
Rumi and Meister Eckhart. Rumi: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire." Spiritual fire cannot burn up existential time, only outshine it, like firelight. Meister Eckhart's "no greater obstacle to God than time" means psychological time; the soul is untouched by time yet lives in it.
Heightened perception. Look at a tree with a silent mind and its colours seem brighter. Meditators report it, and so do users of psychedelics: energy normally spent conceptualizing shifts to perception. Tolle calls this "a different kind of knowing." Gardner: there are only two kinds of knowing, perception and conception. Psychic or yogic perception is a subtler level, not a different kind.
Tolle. Mind-free knowing "does not destroy the sacredness and mystery of life" and awakens "deep love and reverence for all that is."
Gardner. Nothing in the universe is inherently sacred; a wolf pack sees a lost baby as lunch. Bodhidharma's Sacred Doctrine: "That nothing is sacred." Love of life comes from a value system, as with humanists who never emptied their minds; Coomaraswamy notes the early Buddhists' contempt of the world.
Gardner reports profound samadhis yet is "still incapable of 'knowing a tree directly'"; no sage can tell us more about a tree than a certified tree expert.
Presence and the witness
Tolle rightly says a glimpse is not enough; a permanent shift is needed, and he claims self-observation turns into presence. In Gardner's teaching experience it does not. His alternative, plugged-in presence, is whole-body and feeling-based, "essentially the same as Tibetan Dzogchen and mystical Holy Communion." Acts 1:8: "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses": the true witness comes after the Spirit.
What Tolle means about energy. "Observation of the mind withdraws energy from it" really means that dissolving thought-forms stops them reducing consciousness's power. But this does not make the mind "presence." Presence is being present as consciousness; add the channelled Blessing Power and you are Sat-Chit-Ananda.
Psychological time is sane
Tolle calls psychological time "a serious mental illness," blaming future-driven ideologies (communism, national socialism, rigid religion) for mass enslavement and death. Then a Now religion should be the cure. Japan offers the test.
Brian Victoria's Zen at War (reviewed by Josh Baran) documents the Japanese Zen establishment's support for the imperial war machine from the 1880s to 1945. Soto patriarch Sawaki Kodo wrote in 1942: "It is the precept that throws the bomb." The equation: no thinking = no-mind = no-self = no karma, with the victims left out. Colonel Aizawa Saburo, tried for murder in 1935: "I was in an absolute sphere... neither good nor evil."
Gardner concludes that Zen, a "tunnel-vision religion" that disparages mind, never built the ethical foundation of other Buddhist schools. And every industrialized government, Marxist Venezuela or capitalist America, plans for the future; what makes an ideology murderous is totalitarian disregard for individual rights, not time.
Negativity, suffering and time
The future can be better. A man Gardner knows was paralysed in a car accident, lost his wife and 90% of his income, and months later was happier than ever thanks to a new outlook. A new outlook increases joy but cannot give bliss: joy is conditional and mental, bliss is unconditional, from the Spirit. True change is baptism, being "born from above."
Father Time is innocent. "Inspector Tolle" names time as the cause of suffering. The real cause is mindset: one man finds divorce exciting, another devastating; a vegetarian suffers over a Big Mac a child rejoices in. Even the deepest pain is caused by retracting from Being; time is the medium, not the cause.
- Move attention from your life situation (problems) to your life-energy.
- Use the breath, its most tangible form, not with clinical Vipassana watching but whole-bodily present to the breath cycle.
- Optionally touch attention briefly to the hands and the lower centre of the forehead to settle into whole-body presence.
- Communion with the breath intensifies the current until it is felt as a living Force that wants to move.
- Yield, keep the posture, and it pours down the front of the head and body: the awakened power of Now.
Tolle's "use your senses fully... allow the isness of all things" is good for psychosomatic relaxation and a jumping-off point, but real contemplation "must involve conductivity of the Spirit-force." Until Shakti comes, "Being" and "isness" are concepts.
All problems are in your mind
Reality has no problems; an unsecured border is no problem to the migrant, a crashed house price none to the buyer. Problems exist because you have an ego with needs. In meditation they vanish, and on return they can seem worse: from the penthouse back to the outhouse, "being humbled," which goads deeper practice.
Tolle: "All it takes is a simple choice... I will create no more pain for myself." The Buddha needed six years of celibacy, one meal a day and incessant meditation; Jesus fasted forty days. Tolle could have saved them both the trouble. His caveat, that you need the power of Now, comes a quarter into the book with the power still undefined. Rinzai: "If not now, when?"
In emergencies, Tolle says, "something infinitely more powerful takes over." Then why do men in shootouts and battles commit cruel and callous murder? They act on programming: an altruist becomes a humanitarian, a brainwashed terrorist a killing machine.
A quantum leap, or a constitution
Tolle foresees a "quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness" as "our only chance of survival." Gardner calls it "cosmic malarkey" that sells books to New Age utopians, and recalls TM's peace project, whose only visible transformation was "in the organization's bank account." Mysticism already failed as politics, as yoga in India and Zen in Japan; it is esoteric and easy for the powerful to exploit.
| Tolle | Gardner | |
|---|---|---|
| Solution | Critical mass of people living in the Now | The rational, time-bound mind |
| Political form | Unspecified "new earth" | A constitutional republic limited by a constitution |
| Key principle | Transcend psychological time | Individual rights, including property; separation of church, economy and state |
What saves the world, according to each
The bliss of being
The present moment is a portal, not sacred. Giving "your fullest attention" to every moment is impossible: being present means free attention, while focusing narrows awareness. Tolle rightly praises the Bhagavad Gita and karma yoga, action without attachment to fruit. Rooted in Being, you still pursue goals, since each of us has creative karma to express, but becoming "the superficial, mutable content" never binds the context.
Gardner's attack treats Tolle's poetic claims ("time is an illusion") as literal metaphysics; Tolle chiefly means psychological time, which Gardner himself grants is the obstacle in Meister Eckhart. The Zen at War evidence is real and well documented, but generalizing from wartime Japan to Zen as a whole, and from Venezuela to the United States, is a political argument, not a spiritual one, and the constitutional-republic answer reflects his libertarian views.
The Avoidance of the Now
Whether time is real or illusory "doesn't make an iota of difference"; what matters is transcending it. Gardner turns to the discipline of sustaining the Now (plugged-in presence, presence plus oneness), the dark night it provokes, a long rebuttal of Tolle's view of industrial civilization, and at last his own answer to the question the book is named for: what is the power of Now?
Separation from the Now
Everyone has to work at it. Tolle says the shift sometimes happens "once and for all" and most people "have to work at it." Gardner: everyone does. Even Ramana Maharshi, who saw his Self-nature at sixteen, needed intense sadhana before he cut the Heart-knot. Then the event really is final: "Once the knot is cut, one is never bound again" (Sri Ramana Gita).
Discipleship, "in a nutshell," is noticing each retraction and re-assuming the position. Tolle says presence eventually "becomes your predominant state," but as a two-dimensional mystic he omits how: by absorption in the Spirit-current. Effort connects; Grace sustains. Without that down-pouring current, which leads to the Heart and its knot, there are no profound samadhis.
Levels of consciousness
Consciousness "just is"; it seems deep when attention goes to subtler objects (abstruse concepts, repressed feelings, non-physical energies) and deepest when attention is free and consciousness beholds itself as the radiant Subject. Tolle rightly describes ordinary unconsciousness as low-level unease, "a kind of background static." Gardner calls it a symptom of the dis-ease of separation, which society numbs with drugs, sex, alcohol, TV and the Internet. There is no Freudian unconscious; buried content is subconscious, and avoiding it is "deep unconsciousness."
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Purification | The Light exposes and intensifies every fear, regret and hatred: "purgatory," the dark night of the soul |
| Illumination | Baptism by the Holy Spirit bathes the disciple in Light |
| Divine union | Permanent at-one-ment with the divine Being |
The Christian mystical way
When Light-energy awakens, it meets the dense resistance of ordinary and deep unconsciousness and must cut through it to the Heart: "psychic surgery" without anaesthetic, often analogized to crucifixion. That is St. John of the Cross's dark night.
What is civilization seeking?
Tolle calls resistance to the Now a "collective dysfunction" behind "our dehumanized industrial civilization." To Gardner this sounds like "a neo-Marxist pamphlet."
Tolle. Collective dysfunction has made "a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization" threatening all life on the planet.
Gardner. Resistance is individual, and so is overcoming it; Swami Sivananda told serious yogis to avoid ashrams, and the great adepts (Buddha, Jesus, Ramana) went alone. Modern society gives constitutional rights and choice; preindustrial man was "an indentured servant to the tribe."
Tens of thousands of young Americans did drop out into hippie and spiritual communes; Gardner visited some, and a yearly guidebook listed them. By the end of the 1980s almost all had failed and most members had returned to the mainstream. Tolle, who earns millions from books, CDs and DVDs that industry makes possible, offers no alternative, and wears "the mainstream monkey suit."
Gardner quotes Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal: before capitalism, European culture was "tribal down to its roots"; property existed "de facto, but not de jure," and the king could expropriate any estate. If the West is so violent, why do developing nations emulate the U.S., Europe and Japan? Most violence, he argues, comes from places that do not protect individual rights. His advice to Tolle: "Stick to what you know best: pop mysticism and sharp suits and ties."
Irradiating ordinary unconsciousness
You cannot be conscious and unconscious at once, so assume the position of consciousness: direct relationship to, through and beyond the moment. It is arduous, because the root tendency is to retract; will can assume the position, but "only Grace" makes it Spirit-empowered Communion. Gardner finds it "incredible" that a book called The Power of Now never discusses Grace or Shaktipat.
- Siva is conscious Presence; Shaktipat is the descent of divine Power.
- Perfect consciousness requires both, consummated at the Heart-root, just right of the chest's centre.
- In Christian terms, Communion establishes the connection, and the Holy Spirit must empower it.
- Conscious presence is true prayer: present yourself to God and ask, and allow, Him to bless you.
Negativity and resistance
Tolle is "absolutely correct" that negativity is never the best way to deal with a situation. Criticize within a constructive framework; if change is impossible, drop the negativity before it harms you. Buddhism looks negative (life as suffering, monks meditating in cemeteries) but is positive because it offers a way out. Bad vibes are contagious and, by karma, mirrored back. Acknowledging your own negativity is a confession whose "absolution" opens a portal to the Absolute.
How to let it go. See it as mental-emotional garbage and throw it away. Big losses, a death or a breakup, take processing, which meditation speeds. Easiest of all is the Holy Spirit, "the great Healer and Comforter." Sin means "to miss the mark"; when you cannot drop the garbage, "give it to God."
Divine love-bliss is the only wholly positive feeling, and strictly it is not an emotion but the feeling-energy of Being, beyond good-bad polarity.
| Kind | Example | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Appropriate | Anger at the 9/11 attacks, which reflects rational moral values | Accept and deal with it |
| Superficial negative | Upset when the maid steals your jewellery | Let the Spirit-current dissolve it |
| Mutinous | Years of fear and worry after 9/11 | Excise it like a cancer before its roots reach the Heart |
Negative emotions: three kinds
How emotions mutate. By habitual dwelling: "meditating" on negative events plants samskaras whose roots run into the Heart-center. Tolle says that without the power of Now you are "a bundle of conditioned reflexes." Partly correct: you can reprogram your premises, though if they are already rational, why would you? After baptism, experience is recontextualized in the Spirit and you no longer dwell.
A man wets his bed and sees a psychiatrist. Later his friend asks if he is cured. "No, I'm still wetting my bed every night, but now I'm proud of it." Accepting reality means acknowledging it, not accepting problems; the fat man must still cut calories. "I'm okay, you're okay" is "New Age nonsense."
Be totally present
Gardner's practical counsel:
- Be present as the body; it heals the body-mind split.
- Briefly and randomly touch attention to the hands and the "third eye," just below the middle of the forehead.
- Use the enquiry "Avoiding relationship?", learned from Adi Da's early teachings, or one of your own.
- Pray: be whole-bodily present and repeatedly ask God for His Power; true prayer is "saying Grace in its purest form."
Penetrate and be penetrated. Unified presence builds pressure that pulls down Power; then surrender and let the Light-energy enter. Presence is yang and can block flow and create tension, so periodically relax completely, a yin practice of "letting go and letting flow." Without both the Siva and Shakti modes, total presence is impossible.
"No amount of becoming will enable you to be," because Being is always already the case. Practise right behaviour because it is right, not as a means; as a means it generates karma. Mother Teresa served the poor, yet late in life admitted spiritual doubt; for Gardner, she never learned to contact the Deity and channel the Spirit.
The two journeys
Your life has a vertical journey into Being and a horizontal journey into becoming; they are complementary, but becoming divorced from Being leads to suffering. Some yoga schools see the universe as Being-Consciousness involved in matter for sport (lila), evolving back to recognize itself. Sri Aurobindo went further: the goal is to transform the world with divine glory.
Does outer success matter? Life is Darwinian: ten thousand hopefuls, one American Idol. Success is relative: if this book sells ten thousand copies, Gardner will open Dom Perignon, while Tolle might phone Deepak Chopra if his next sells under two million. Huang Po: "Exert your strength in THIS life to attain. Or else incur long aeons of further gain."
What is the power of Now?
Light in a dark room. Turn on the light and darkness vanishes; be radiantly present and the "dark, unconscious past" vanishes too. Changing your conditioning, Republican to Democrat or Orthodox Jew to Jew for Jesus, is reconditioning, never radical.
| Tradition | Name |
|---|---|
| Hinduism | Shakti |
| Christianity | The Holy Spirit |
| Judaism | Ruach HaKodesh |
| Buddhism | The Sambhogakaya |
| Gardner | God's Light-energy, emitted from His Presence like light from the sun |
The power of Now across traditions
God's essence is Presence and His nature is Power; the Light-energy, stepped down, becomes the universe. Tolle's "the power of your presence" is to Gardner "solipsistic idiocy": you are no more the Now "than a drop of water is the ocean." The power of Now created the universe; if Tolle can create one cockroach, Gardner will "kiss not only his feet, but the very ground his personally originated roach crawls on."
- Freeing consciousness from thought moves energy, but it is usually pranashakti, intensified chi in the nadis.
- Even kundalini rising up the Sushumna to the crown is not the Holy Spirit.
- The power of Now descends into the Heart as Shaktipat; when it cuts the knot the yogi awakens as the Self.
- Then the current reverses and radiates out of the Heart as Cit-Shakti, the effulgence the liberated yogi gives to the world.
Know thyself, conditionally too. Gardner, a former professional astrologer, suggests natal chart readings from two astrologers, a top Ayurvedic physician and an iridologist to understand psychic and physical karma, so you can maintain the bodymind as "a fit temple." But do not spend undue time researching the temple's history; what matters will surface by itself.
The chapter's political half (communes, capitalism, Rand's history of Europe, the sources of world violence) argues against claims Tolle makes only in passing and leans on contested generalizations. The practical half is strong and specific. Readers should weigh the health and astrology advice (natal charts, iridology) on its own merits: iridology has no scientific support, and Gardner himself calls astrology "an art and not a science."
The Divine State of Presence
Presence is being whole-bodily present, like an infielder in his stance. When plugged-in presence builds enough "voltage," a current flows; receive it and you are no longer merely present but divinely present. Gardner tests the difference with two experiments, reinterprets the parable of the ten virgins, and lays out the four stages to "I and the Father are one."
Merely present versus divinely present
| Experiment 1 | Experiment 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Posture | Crouch in an infielder's stance | Sit straight, palms on knees |
| Attention | Ready to "catch" the next thought | Rest lightly on the third eye, without concentrating |
| Act | Willful alertness | Say grace: ask God to bless you with His Presence and Power, then wait |
| Result | Thought-free gaps, with an undercurrent of tension | Thought-free gaps, with a sense of peace |
| Tradition | Rinzai Zen | Mystical Christianity |
Two experiments
Rinzai's martial attitude. Rinzai practitioners "don't believe in Grace" and, despite the Trikaya, "don't have a clue what the Sambhogakaya is." So instead of waiting for the Spirit they torture themselves to stay alert: the stick, and koans likened to "trying to smash your fist through a wall." Gardner links that attitude to Zen's long support of Imperial Japan.
Still mind, ticking clock. Tolle says when mental noise returns "you are back in time." But freedom from mind is not freedom from time; the clock keeps ticking. The famous flag koan ("the mind is moving") is to Gardner an indictment of the conceptual faculty: it asserts the primacy of consciousness over existence, making reality conform to mind instead of mind to reality. Tolle is right, though, that being "rooted within yourself" means inhabiting the body fully, the Buddhist "self-possessed."
The spiritual meaning of waiting
Tolle reads Matthew 25 as alert presence: the careless women lack oil (consciousness), miss the bridegroom (the Now) and the wedding feast (enlightenment). "If I were a professor of Biblical Studies at Cambridge and he were my student, I'd flunk him."
| Symbol | Tolle | Gardner |
|---|---|---|
| Oil | Consciousness | The Holy Spirit, the anointing ("unction from the Holy One," per Stanley Horton) |
| Bridegroom | The Now | The Son of Man: the soul in the Heart, awakening to Sonship |
| Feast | Enlightenment | No feast, a wedding: the union of the virgin Spirit and the Son |
| Foolish virgins | Unconscious people | Pure practitioners of presence without Shakti, who cannot keep their lamps lit |
The parable of the ten virgins, two readings
If the bridegroom were the ever-present Now, how could anyone miss him? "You know neither the day nor the hour," because the soul becomes the Son only when the Spirit anoints the Heart. John 4: worship God "in spirit and truth": alert presence is truth; you also need spirit. Tolle's claim that the Gospel writers misunderstood these parables is "the pot calling the kettle black."
Beauty, nature and presence
The real test is the worst environment. Anyone can feel oneness at Yellowstone or a Maui sunset. Would you feel it in a forest fire, a sinking ship, a famine, or a rush-hour traffic jam? Even paradise becomes wallpaper after a few weeks.
Cosmic consciousness. Oneness with nature is a form of savikalpa samadhi, samadhi with form, which can become satori. Rinzai prizes satori, but other schools give little weight to such flashes. Beauty is a portal, but "one man's shrine is another man's sandpit": one of his nephews finds oneness surfing, the other in music. Neither is enlightenment; only the Holy Spirit en-Light-ens.
Tolle says the mind can "neither recognize nor create beauty" and that no civilization "has ever produced so much ugliness." Gardner's satirical call to Walmart: an executive would gladly beautify the stores if someone pays. Urban ugliness comes from money, not mind; in Horseshoe Bay, near Austin, everything is lovely because residents can afford it.
A mind-subordinate culture. Modern trouble comes not from too much mind but too little: schools do not teach rational and logical thinking. Gardner earned a degree at UC San Diego and became an expert in Eastern philosophy, yet learned to think outside "subjectivist boxes" only through Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Who creates paintings, music and literature, if not the mind? Why can't animals? Art is the mind arranging elements, with the subconscious doing much of the work.
Realizing divine consciousness
Tolle: presence is "consciousness becoming conscious of itself." Gardner: presence alone is not Being. The formula Sat = Siva-Shakti means you must unite Presence and Power. Present and channelling the Spirit, you are spiritually present; when presence unites with the Spirit's, you are divinely present, and that is Being. "Any bloke" can be present with an empty mind; only when Shakti "rips you apart and blows holes through all the knots" (the chakras) is it divine.
Does God need us? The reverse: you need God to be whole. The divine has hidden Himself in form, and the goal of every soul is to "locate" God by uniting Siva and Shakti in the Heart-center.
Tolle. "The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity to ever inhabit this planet." Get off the sinking ship.
Gardner. "Hide the women and children. Call out the Marines." The madness comes from the irrational, self-destructive ego. The rational, selfish ego respects rights; Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea and Iran all demanded ego-sacrifice "for the common good."
Gardner contends that "a planet of selfish, time-bound, non-mystic atheists" could make Earth a mundane paradise through limited governments and laissez-faire capitalism with constitutionally guaranteed rights, without anyone living in the Now. The egoic mind is "a unique form of shakti" that measures reality; the real devil is whoever denies its free expression. Tolle's claim that our listening shows "the new consciousness is gaining a foothold" signals only that "his net worth is skyrocketing."
Christ, Self and divine presence
Christ equals Self and Buddha-nature. Tolle says presence means awakened divinity; Gardner says presence only means being present, and divinity sleeps until the Holy Spirit, "the higher Kundalini," initiates you. Not one question in Tolle's book concerns the Holy Spirit or the Trinity, which Gardner calls "dis-Graceful." The "second coming" is the Christ awakening within, but first you must be "born from above" (John 3:3, the correct translation, not "born again").
- Pull down Shakti through intense, one-pointed communion.
- Empty yourself and let the infused Energy reach the Sacred Heart-center.
- Rest in the Heart and realize yourself as the indwelling transcendental Son or Self.
- Let go of that exclusive samadhi; through effortlessness the Spirit severs the Heart-knot and unites with Siva, and you abide as the eternal I AM.
A true guru is a teacher of Dharma, a spiritual potentate who initiates with Shaktipat, and a radiant mirror reflecting the disciple's formless identity. Tolle is right never to "personalize Christ"; study gurus and traditions eclectically.
Groups magnify presence: "Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am." A focused satsang can charge a room with Shakti. But do not depend on it: practise in distasteful conditions too, or you will never know the state of "One Taste."
Gardner's reading of Matthew 25 is itself esoteric, equating the bridegroom with the soul in a Heart-center, a view no mainstream biblical scholarship holds; the Horton quotation supports only the oil. His economic claims (ugliness is purely about money; laissez-faire would end war) are confident assertions without evidence, and the stakes he describes for North Korea and Iran reflect 2012 politics.
The Etheric Body
Tolle's "invisible inner body" is, Gardner says, the yogis' prana-maya-kosha, the etheric or life-force sheath, which every cockroach and rattlesnake also has. Working with it is a fine preliminary, but it is not the doorway into Being. Only the Bliss Body, the Sambhogakaya or Holy Spirit, is.
Being and the limits of words
The body is "the manifest point of contact through which Being is realized"; occupy it consciously and it becomes a living temple. Being is pure conscious existence without grasping thought-forms; the moment you grasp, Being mutates into becoming. Tolle says subject and object "merge into one." Gardner calls that crude: Being is the transcendental Subject behind all objects, which, on awakening, are intuited as its own modifications.
Sin, ignorance or self-contraction. A questioner dislikes the word sin. Then choose another: Buddhist ignorance, or the Daist and Kashmir Shaivist self-contraction. Still feeling judged? "Listen. You're not okay." Telling a man a hundred pounds overweight that he is fat is a fact, not judgment; a doctor diagnosing VD is not condemning you.
Guilt by association. Tolle writes that while run by the egoic mind "you are part of the collective insanity," the race that killed over a hundred million of its own in the twentieth century. Gardner calls this "unconscionable": the killing was done by despots, Stalin, Hitler and Mao, not by rational egoists who uphold everyone's rights.
What the inner body really is
Tolle says the visible body cannot take you into Being but the inner body, at "the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity," can, and you should "never lose touch with it." Gardner turns to Georg Feuerstein's The Yoga Tradition and the five sheaths.
The dimension "through which we partake of the Absolute" is not the life-force sheath but the bliss sheath, and even bliss, experienced apart from Consciousness, is objectified into a sheath that veils nondual realization. The pranic sheath shows up in three forms: the etheric body (the energetic correlate of the astral body), the nadis or meridians, and breathing.
Adi Da's glossary in Santosha Adidam: "Prana is not to be equated with the Divine Spirit-Current... Even in the form of universal life-force, prana is but a conditional modification of the Divine Spirit-Current." If the life-body were the "deeper reality," why do classical models place it below the mind?
Being present to any object, including the inner energy field, stops becoming and gives being, but not divine Being. Cit-Shakti, not prana-shakti, awakens you. Tolle is right that the gross body cannot bring you into Being and wrong that the subtle body can; he implicitly maps the inner body onto the Sambhogakaya, which is "not reducible to your inner bioenergetic field."
Connecting with the inner body and the Bliss Body
The key to both is the same: whole-bodily relationship. Feel yourself as the whole body, and be in direct relationship to the space inside or outside it. This heals the split of a mind "curled upon itself." Three aids:
- Alternate open and closed eyes to dissolve the inner-outer boundary.
- Randomly touch attention to the hands and the third eye, a "triadic" focus.
- Use the enquiry "Avoiding relationship?"
- Assume the asana of relationship, then be in direct relationship to the breath cycle.
- Following Walter Russell's two forces, inhalation charges (voltage, +) and exhalation discharges (flow, -).
- Breathe fully in, down to the navel, and fully out, emptying the lungs and the mind.
- Chen-Chi Chang and Evans-Wentz: every mood has a corresponding prana, and controlling breath controls thought.
How to tell Spirit from prana. "It's very simple: the Baptist Fire literally crashes down on you." Shaktipat rocks the body with kriyas, spontaneous purifying movements. Pranic exercises are yoga you perform; Shaktipat yoga is performed on you by the Deity.
Tolle calls the inner body "formless, limitless, and unfathomable" and says you can go deeper. If formless, how can you go deeper, or even feel "it"? In fact the inner body has a mapped subtle structure, the acupuncture meridians and prana flows, and the Holy Spirit has its own pathway independent of them.
Body: transform it or deny it
Why have religions condemned the body? Tolle: people would not admit they were animals, so they became "fallen angels" instead of risen apes. Gardner adds what Tolle omits: even befriended, the body must be disciplined. Eat small, simple, easily digested meals or the mind "feeds on the food," and cease or drastically limit orgasms or you lack the subtle life-force for Communion.
Tolle cites the Buddha giving up six years of asceticism. He omits that afterwards the Buddha still lived as a hermit, celibate, ate one meal a day and meditated almost nonstop. "By modern standards the only way to describe it would be extreme."
Tolle's claim that only fragments of ancient body teachings survive ignores Hatha yoga, Taoist yoga and Tibetan tantra. Blaming "you are not your body" for seekers' failure ignores the Buddha and Ramana, who succeeded through it. Saying you are your body but not your mind fosters the body-mind split: great mystics either disidentify from both or transform both. And not all teachings are equal "signposts": some point the wrong way.
| System | What to drop | Inner body's status |
|---|---|---|
| Buddhism | The five skandhas: form, feeling, perception, impressions, dualistic consciousness | Part of Rupa, material (Christmas Humphreys) |
| Advaita Vedanta | All five koshas, including the separate bliss body | Its own sheath, still a veil |
| Gardner | Nothing; transform the body | Preparation for Shaktipat, which alone transforms |
Disidentify or transform: the body in three systems
Roots, rock and forgiveness
Rooting in the inner body intensifies your "pranic electricity" and opens you to Shaktipat; after baptism the prana you can command rises sharply. Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga: pranic Shakti is immense but "a lower formulation, a link between the mind and body." When effort fails, as it will, "call on Grace."
Tolle reads the house built on rock (Matthew 7) as the inner body. Gardner: Jesus likens the whole Sermon on the Mount to the rock, and its foundation is twofold, the single eye (one-pointed awareness) and doing the Father's will (surrender): the Eucharist.
The butter knife and the diamond blade. Turning attention inward first meets agitation and tightness in the stomach. A beginner's consciousness is a butter knife stuck in surface resistance; an advanced meditator's is a diamond blade. Be present and let content self-liberate. Tolle's "attention is like a beam of light" describes tantra, but without Grace contracted Siva lacks the power to sustain it.
Forgive, or forget. Grievances, blame and self-pity can fill whole sittings, which is why Jesus said forgive before you enter the temple. Tolle says "the mind cannot forgive"; if it can blame, it can forgive, easily for a child who breaks windows, hardly for the neighbour who shoots your dog. Where you cannot forgive, let it go for your own health.
Spirit is the link to the Unmanifested
Presence is not "pure consciousness" by definition; it is being present, pure or impure. Spiritually pure presence is a mind outshone by "the true Virgin Mother," the Consort of the Father. The inner body is not the link to the Unmanifested; the Holy Spirit is, the "first reflex" of the Source. Attending to any object, however subtle, cannot end subject-object duality; when Shakti reaches the Sacred Heart, attention to objects stops and consciousness stands free. Siva and Shakti are never really separate: attending to Shakti is Siva enjoying "your own radiant, blissful Nature."
Who reclaims consciousness? You seem to; really Siva sees and recognizes Himself. Mystical spirituality is simple: fusion and infusion. "Unmanifested" is just a negative term for Being, the apophatic Buddha's "Unborn" and "Uncompounded."
Ageing, immunity and listening
Tolle says inner-body awareness can "significantly slow down the aging of the physical body." Plausible, Gardner grants, but unproven; vigorous exercise and natural food are proven. Jack LaLanne did two hours of "violent exercise" daily, ate only natural food for eighty years, and died at ninety-six.
| Guru | Age | Guru | Age |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sri Aurobindo | 78 | Swami Muktananda | 74 |
| Sri Chinmoy | 76 | H.W.L. Poonja | 86 |
| Adi Da | 69 | Swami Ramdas | 79 |
| Gurdjieff | 73 | Ramakrishna | 50 |
| J. Krishnamurti | 90 | Suzuki Roshi | 66 |
| Samuel Lewis | 74 | Swami Satchidananda | 87 |
| Osho | 58 | Swami Sivananda | 75 |
| Nisargadatta | 84 | Chogyam Trungpa | 49 |
| Ramana Maharshi | 70 | Swami Vishnudevananda | 65 |
| Yogananda | 59 | Swami Vivekananda | 39 |
Gardner's list: age at death of twenty prominent gurus
The average is 70, "virtually the same as for ordinary men." Tolle's line that you "do not accumulate time anymore... in the cells of the body" is, to Gardner, for people who believe in the 500-year-old Mahavatar Babaji. On immunity, a 2007 NCCAM meta-analysis of 813 meditation studies concluded that therapeutic effects "cannot be established based on the current literature." Tolle's body-scan meditation resembles practices Gardner used in the 1970s; for depth, read Mantak Chia's Awaken Healing Energy Through the Tao and its Microcosmic Orbit.
Breath, creativity, listening. For a restless mind, use conscious breathing: compare electrical pranayama with Tolle's following of the abdomen. Tolle's creativity tip (pause, feel the inner body) contradicts his claim that the mind is not creative; stillness simply lets the subconscious work. On listening, attending to your chi distracts you: an ex-girlfriend could always tell, and "perhaps this is why we are no longer together." The real dynamic is etheric fields meshing or clashing, which Gardner as an astrologer says charts predict. The art is wanting to hear the other person: read Dale Carnegie.
The guru-lifespan list is a small, hand-picked sample, not evidence either way, and Gardner's claim that astrology predicts relationship harmony is unsupported by controlled research. The advice to sharply limit orgasm is a yogic tradition, not a medical recommendation. The NCCAM report predates a large body of later meditation research, so the "no proof" point on health is dated.
Openings into the Absolute
Tolle names many portals into the Unmanifested and says you need only one. Gardner says you need two: a consciousness, or "charge," portal and an energy, or "discharge," portal, as in an electrical circuit. Along the way he rejects "something from nothing," the Heart Sutra, and the idea that space has no existence.
Going deeper into the body
Tolle's seat (a chair, spine erect, not leaning back) is fine; Gardner adds palms on the thighs and the chin slightly tucked.
Tolle. Relax, close the eyes, breathe into the lower abdomen, then feel the entire energy field of the body and merge with it until "there is no inner body anymore."
Gardner. Take deep breaths and let go on each exhalation; close the eyes; feel yourself as the whole body; be in relationship to the space inside the body; let thoughts come and go, and "put yourself in position to receive the Benediction from above."
Merging dissolves duality, Tolle says. "Mystical poppycock": absorbed in oneness you may be oblivious to the distinction between perceiver and perceived, but it remains existentially real, and the etheric body does not vanish. If the inner body were the great link to Nirvana, why is it absent from most Buddhist literature? And the Buddha made clear that absorption in the formless is a temporary state, not Nirvana. Who sees form and the void? The Seer, Siva-Shakti, recognized only when Shaktipat irradiates you.
The nature of chi
Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama: chi is "life-sustaining energy that circulates throughout the physical body," universal bioenergy. Tolle is right that chi links the Unmanifested and the physical universe, but it is not the link to the soul; otherwise millions of Tai Chi practitioners would be sages.
Neither in nor out. Tolle says turn consciousness inward to find the Source. Gardner: the Source is "the Condition of all conditions," no more within than without; inward-seeking implies rejecting the world, a message that "significantly hindered India's emergence as a modern nation." Stay present without seeking and you intuit the all-pervading Source. Tolle also puts feeling before being: "Spiritual feeling follows spiritual being," so you must first commune; the feeling of Being arises after, not before.
| State | Connection to the Source | Can it liberate? |
|---|---|---|
| Waking | Conscious, mostly bound by objects | Only when you consciously merge with the Self |
| Dreaming | Can be lucid | No; Gardner has met no one enlightened by dream yoga |
| Deep sleep | Unconscious plugging in, which recharges the body | No; you cannot recognize the Self unconsciously |
| Turiya, the Fourth | Rest as dreamless, awakened, timeless Awareness | Yes: this is recognizing the Self |
The four states of consciousness
The two main portals
The Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions identify two portals: Consciousness (Presence) and Energy (Power). Spiritual connectedness is like a circuit.
The two formulas Sat = Siva-Shakti and Sat = Cit-Ananda say both portals must be combined. Tolle is right that love is not a portal but "what comes through the portal"; spiritual love is the Spirit shining through you.
Secondary portals. Whatever brings you into the Spirit is a portal: music, images, places. Gardner meditates to Merlin's Magic: Chakra Meditation music. Attending to the gaps between sounds locks you into silent space, ideal for receiving the Benediction. But these are "tributaries that lead to the main river." The test of any secondary portal is whether it deepens your presence and opens you to receive, or simply entertains you. Music that quiets the mind but leaves you passive is relaxation; music that draws you into silent space, where the Benediction can be felt, is a doorway. Gardner's practical advice is to use such aids freely, while never confusing them with the main two: conscious connection and surrender.
Space and nothing
"Every physical object... has come out of nothing... and will eventually return to nothing." That reveals Tolle's "existentialist roots" and is impossible: existents come only from an Existent. The Heart Sutra's "form is emptiness" fails too: you would walk through walls. Presence, not absence, is the essence; emptiness is "the nonappearance of objects... in the context of divine Presence."
- The Big Bang did not expand into space; it began space and time.
- Before it there was only the spaceless Unmanifested, "pregnant with the potential Energy."
- Space is the interval between objects; galaxies separating create more of it.
- No lab can make a perfect vacuum, so things reduce to energy, never nothing. Empty the mind and spiritual energy floods in: the Vacuum-Plenum.
- Space can be measured and curved by gravity, so it exists.
Tolle's reply to "what is this nothing?" is "You cannot ask such a question." Gardner's: absolute nothing cannot exist; "nothing" refers to the process of mind-emptying. Yet space is a superb contemplation object: he teaches students to "gaze into space," a fundamental Dzogchen practice, and after baptism "emptiness 'dances' as bliss-full Light-energy."
Dharmadhatu, the "basic space" of phenomena, is timeless Awareness, the Dharmakaya, which pervades ordinary space without being reducible to it. Empty space leads to Light-energy, which culminates in apprehending the Dharmakaya. Ignoring power while discussing presence and absence is like a physics teacher covering voltage and ohms but not amperage.
Tolle says stillness and vastness "enable the universe to be"; Gardner: God does, and vastness depends on objects. Calling spatial extension "a misperception of infinite depth" implies the senses are invalid, and with them reason.
The death experience
The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives instructions for merging with the clear Source-Light after death. Tolle rightly says that unless you met the Unmanifested in life you will likely miss it.
At death the soul meets a field of light, white at the centre and gold and blue at the edges. Gold draws you to gross, blue to subtle planes, a bardo and rebirth. Stay centred on the white Source-Light and you merge with it. Because grasping continues after death, only someone who practised Communion intensely in life can hold to the Clear Light. Gardner recommends Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying and Stephen Levine's Who Dies?
Gardner's physics serves a metaphysical point and simplifies: the quantum vacuum is not a proof of divine Being, and cosmologists debate whether "before the Big Bang" is even meaningful. His reading of the Heart Sutra treats "emptiness" as nothingness, which Madhyamaka scholars say misreads it as the lack of inherent existence. The two-portal model is his own synthesis of Kashmir Shaivism and Dzogchen.
Light on Relationships
No human partner can make you whole; only union of the soul with absolute Spirit can. Gardner agrees with Tolle on that and on the spiritual purpose of relationships, then parts company on almost everything else: why relationships fail (incompatible energy fields, not lack of presence), whether to accept a partner unconditionally, and whether women are closer to enlightenment. This is the book's most provocative chapter.
Be here now, independent of others
If you depend on another to make you whole, you are "a suffering fragment" alone, and if they leave, "a basket case." If another flawed human could save you, why bother with Holy Communion? Tolle defines salvation in negative Buddhist terms, freedom from fear, lack and clinging; Hindu and Christian yoga define it positively, as union with God. Either way it is found only in the Now: be totally present, seek nothing, and when the pressure of presence is enough, the Spirit divinizes it.
Why relationships fail
Tolle says that without presence "all relationships... are deeply flawed and ultimately dysfunctional," turning into love/hate cycles until they collapse. Gardner's forty years of astrological counselling in spiritual groups taught him that spiritual people have the same problems as everyone else; the collapse of the 1970s communes shows conscious living is "no panacea."
Addiction. Infatuation is chemical, like a drug, which is why breakups bring withdrawal. If you are honest at the crisis point, you see dependence on an "other" as a disease, and the only cure is the Holy One. Down-pouring Shakti is Nectar, ambrosial energy that can override the body's chemicals. It is not a super-opiate but "the inherent bliss of your own Self-nature," first felt as objective Light-energy, finally recognized as your own radiance.
The Advaita teacher Adyashanti, happily married, once said that when his wife told him she no longer needed him, he knew she had "gotten it" spiritually. Moral: love your partner, but take your wholeness from the Spirit. Some advanced practitioners lose interest in sex; others still enjoy "the play between the sexes"; what they share is freedom from addiction.
The secret to enlightened relationships
Tolle: the greatest catalyst is "complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge." Gardner: "utter New Age nonsense." Would you accept Hitler as a partner, or ignore a husband's violence or a wife's fatal drug use? Accepting idiosyncrasies is one thing; accepting destructive behaviour is "irresponsible... stupid and potentially deadly." And deciding to separate "in love" already implies judgment.
- Right understanding: know yourself, your partner and your chemistry. This needs "a mind that is deeply and objectively judgmental," and Gardner's chief aid is serious astrology.
- Right action: act intelligently, which requires freedom from interpersonal addiction, which requires a yogic relationship with the Deity.
- Soul mates: a partner who "reflects your love back" can be a doorway, but you must cross it. Turning eros into agape is the essence of tantra yoga.
Tolle rightly says "true communication is communion." What he omits: human love is a stepped-down fragment of divine love, and becomes divine only through Shaktipat.
Relationships in crisis
Tolle predicts the egoic mode and all its structures are entering "the final stage of collapse." Gardner would be amazed to meet one person whose ego is collapsing, and asks which structures will fall and what replaces them. He agrees with Tolle's practical advice for a difficult relationship you cannot leave: "create space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter," and adds that Grace is the Holy Spirit, which Tolle barely names.
Why now is harder. Relationships are more problematic than ever, Gardner grants, for one reason: the breakdown of traditional roles. That is not wholly bad; it brings "a freer, more open-ended society." His two suggestions: keep friends who are responsible and high-integrity, and limit intimate relationships to people with whom you are astrologically compatible. And if a relationship is to make you "conscious instead of happy," as Tolle says, why not end it if it brings no joy?
Tolle. Stay present, give no judgment, give space; express feelings without blaming; your presence will either draw the partner in or you will "separate like oil and water."
Gardner. Non-reaction makes you a mirror; an open partner drops the pattern, a defensive one may "explode." At some point it is right to hold people accountable, and a partner who is not spiritual can still benefit from a calmer you.
Mars and Venus. Gardner summarizes the sexes crudely: men live in the head and genitals, women in the heart and body. Men suffer from irrational emotion in partners, women from emotional unavailability. Presence helps men become more sensitive and grounds women. But "astral chemistry is more powerful than conscious intent": if you are incompatible, the Light may intensify the conflict until you both choose to part.
Are women closer to enlightenment?
Tolle says a woman finds it easier to "be in her body," so she is "naturally closer to Being." Gardner quotes the Buddha via Coomaraswamy's 1916 Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism: ordaining women would shorten the Dharma from a thousand to five hundred years, along with harsher remarks, which he says modern writers ignore "in deference to feminism."
The Source is neither male nor female but an androgynous Matrix. Receiving divine Power implies the Power is penetrative. Meister Eckhart: "I penetrate God, and God penetrates me." The title Bhagavan, Gardner says, symbolizes union of the two functions. Even Taoist yogis practise yang exercises the Tao Te Ching never mentions, and Krishna tells Arjuna: "Set your mind on me and fight." Dhyana comes from dhi, "to hold on."
| Tolle's claim | Gardner's reply |
|---|---|
| Women feel the body more easily | Enlightenment needs both the yang thrust to connect and the yin opening to receive |
| The collective female pain-body is an opportunity | Then the most oppressed groups would produce the most sages, and they do not |
| More women are nearing full consciousness | More women join the New Age, which is not the same as leading it |
| Menses is one of the best times for awakening | Communion by itself intensifies the pain-body; no biological event is needed |
| Women are a bridge to the Unmanifested | Jesus chose no female apostles; neither he nor the Buddha mentions menses |
Tolle's case for women, and Gardner's replies
Gardner goes further, arguing from testosterone and Glen Wilson's The Great Sex Divide that men show wider variance in intelligence, and that he has never found a profound technical spiritual guide by a woman; the only female genius he names is Ayn Rand, who joked "I'm a male chauvinist." He expects men to lead any real spiritual New Age, and admits the view "is sure to bring me much flak."
Where they agree. Tolle "properly" teaches that the ultimate purpose of male-female relationships is mutual enlightenment: hold "the space of intense presence" between you, and interpersonal communion becomes Holy Communion as the Spirit blesses the union. All relationships are doorways to relationship with the Divine.
Enlightenment and relationships
Does the need for a partner vanish? It depends on karma: the Buddha and Ramana had no interest; Adi Da and Marpa still enjoyed the opposite sex. For most seekers, the need will not vanish "even if we meditate ten hours a day and live on tofu and veggies." Tolle's point stands: an awakened person can feel incomplete on the outer level yet be totally complete within.
On gay seekers. Gardner says the classic texts are silent on homosexuality. He calls it biologically "abnormal" in harsh language, while stating he has "no problem whatsoever" with gay people and supports equal rights. He agrees with Tolle that as outsiders gay people may think "outside the box" and be more open to the spiritual, unless they become egoically caught up in identity.
Tolle: why have a relationship with yourself at all? Splitting into "I" and "myself" is "the root cause of all unnecessary complexity." Gardner calls this absurd: introspection is what makes us human, animals fight over carcasses and territory without minds creating it, and Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Before an ontic relationship with Being you need an epistemic relationship with yourself.
Relationship is the discipline. Gardner ends the chapter with Adi Da's line, "The discipline is relationship." Holy Communion is an ontic relationship with Being Itself, the most radical relationship there is. But you reach it through an epistemic one: before you can recognize your Self you must cognize your self, the "manifest complex of becoming" that you are, and that requires the very subject-object split Tolle calls a curse. A direct, honest relationship with yourself does two things at once: it gives insight into your own patterns, and it puts you "in position to receive the Holy Spirit," a position that turns into empowered Communion once the Spirit touches you. So the chapter's two halves meet: the healthy partner, the healthy self-examiner and the healthy contemplative all depend on relating, not on dissolving every distinction.
This chapter mixes useful advice (accountability, freedom from addiction, the shared purpose of awakening) with claims most readers will find offensive or unsupported: sweeping gender essentialism, the use of the Buddha's recorded misogyny as evidence, a contested reading of sex differences in intelligence, and a pathologizing view of homosexuality. Gardner's repeated reliance on astrological compatibility has no empirical support. Read it as one teacher's opinions, and weigh them against the large body of women teachers and gay practitioners in every tradition.
Happiness and Inner Peace
Tolle says happiness depends on conditions; inner peace does not. Gardner says true happiness, the Bliss-current of the Self, depends on nothing, and inner peace that is not Spirit-filled is merely "self-satisfied." The longest chapter in the book is a sustained attack on Tolle's ethic of "accept what is": on moral relativism, on demonizing the ego and negativity, on the idea that consciousness creates the world, and on the claim that only world-transcenders can improve the world.
The bliss beyond peace and suffering
Accepting reality as it is yields inner peace of a kind, but unless acceptance is unconditional "to the degree of pulling down the Holy Spirit, the Sambhogakaya (or Bliss Body)," it is not truly spiritual.
Positive thinking. Can affirmations attract only positive conditions? Gardner endorses Tolle's question: "Do you have the total picture?" Bad experiences can turn out well and good ones end in disaster; if everything went your way, you would never develop humility. True prayer is to ask to live in accord with "the Truly So," not to petition for egoic outcomes.
But good and bad are objective, given a rational "standard of value," Ayn Rand's term. Tolle's line that in complete acceptance "there is no 'good' or 'bad'... only the higher good" contradicts man's life as the standard: smoking kills, rape violates. The higher good transcends but does not negate good and bad. Gardner adds that David R. Hawkins, who calibrates everything by applied kinesiology in Power vs. Force, rates Tolle "not very high."
Tolle. "You are not pretending anything. You are allowing it to be as it is." Allowing takes you beyond the mind's resistance patterns that create positive and negative. "Do what you have to do. In the meantime, accept what is."
Gardner. If you are mugged, or see a woman attacked, do you allow it? The mind does not create good and bad, it identifies them: it rightly refuses a Jim Jones's cyanide Kool-Aid and rightly accepts an instruction to practise Communion. Needing to ask whether to act shows you have "abdicated a portion of your rational faculty."
Genesis, which Tolle quotes on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, condemns both the discriminating mind and the body, leaving man to worship "an angry and jealous God," and it is itself full of the judgments it condemns. True acceptance, Gardner says, is at-one-ment with what IS: commune first, and mind and body are free to function. "Did Jesus accept what is, the status quo? Hell, no." He drove the money changers from the temple.
Tolle says by holding intense presence you "dissolve discord, heal pain... without doing anything." First, the Holy Spirit does it, not you. Second, holding that frequency requires a very specific doing: Holy Communion. Without enough voltage from your connection, the amperage of the Spirit-current is too weak to rest in, and "doing nothing" just minimizes ohms in an unplugged circuit.
Drama, the ego, and bad things
For Tolle, most bad things are ego-created "drama," and when egos gather, conflict, war, genocide and exploitation follow. Gardner's reply: "Praise the ego." Existentially it is neither good nor bad; it is a tool for creation or destruction. And it will not go away: he has never met a guru who got rid of his, and suggests checking Tolle's "lifestyle, investment portfolio, and seminar price-structuring." He cites Filipino writer Jaime T. Licauco, who found the Indian gurus he met had "bloated egos while preaching love, humility, and spirituality."
| View | What the ego is | Can it go? |
|---|---|---|
| Tolle | "The false self created by unconscious identification with the mind" | Yes; its end is the collective goal |
| Radical (Adi Da, Buddhist) | An activity: moment-to-moment retraction from the Divine, a fist clenching in empty space | Only for the rarest, who cut the Heart-knot, and it re-forms when they retract |
| Biological | Rational self-interest, hardwired in DNA, a life-positive survival mechanism | No, not even in sages |
Three ways of seeing the ego
The goal is therefore not getting rid of the mind but establishing yourself in nondual Being, the divine Context that makes thoughts non-binding. Even a sage who cuts the knot keeps his biological ego, which is why Trungpa, Krishnamurti, Osho and Adi Da were all exposed as "all too human."
Tolle: illness often comes from the ego's resistance blocking energy, and reconnecting with Being ends it. True, says Gardner, but awakened Shakti can itself cause disorders: the body can be "over-amped," and the Tibetans say the "stalk" can wilt or bend. He points to Gopi Krishna's Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening, U.G.'s The Mystique of Enlightenment and Hakuin's Wild Ivy.
No arguments? Tolle: in complete acceptance "nobody can even have an argument with you." Gardner counters with history as he reads it: Indian Buddhists who accepted what is were driven out by Muslim invaders, while Vedic Hindus fought. An argument can be the plain recognition of reality, as against the Flat Earth Society. The sages argue: Jesus with the Sadducees and Pharisees (Mark 12:28), Shankara debating across India, Zen masters in Dharma battles over sudden versus gradual awakening.
Resistance and the cycles of life
Tolle rightly separates pain from suffering and says "all suffering is ego-created and due to resistance." But not all resistance causes suffering: resisting chocolate cake on a diet prevents it. Tolle's "accept what is" descends from J. Krishnamurti's maxim that all effort is avoidance of what is. Gardner, who once attended Krishnamurti groups, finds three problems.
- Hypocrisy. Tolle and Krishnamurti rail at political and religious madness; "please don't push complete acceptance... if you've got a closet full of axes to grind."
- Presence is itself resistance to unconsciousness. Holy practice is a dialectic of effort (presence) and effortlessness (absence), and their union brings Grace.
- Tolle omits the Benediction. Krishnamurti's Notebook returns again and again to the Benediction, the sacred "Other." Nonresistance creates a vacuum for the Plenum; Tolle never speaks of the Plenum.
Tolle says the down cycle is essential for realization; true, but how do you predict cycles? Gardner's answer is astrology: "As above, so below," from the Emerald Tablet. He recommends Robert Hand's Planets in Transit and Alexander Ruperti's Cycles of Becoming.
Warmed-over Buddhism. Tolle repeats that life is suffering but is "inexcusably silent" on how right concentration culminates in samadhi and Nirvana. For the real thing, read F.L. Woodward's Some Sayings of the Buddha.
Happiness and unhappiness are one? Only as modifications of Being, the non-state. Joy is sustained expansive feeling from achieving goals; pleasure is a brief relief from satisfying desire; unhappiness arises when either is frustrated. What separates them is not "the illusion of time" but how tightly thought contracts the field of awareness.
Tolle has humour, Gardner concedes, if he means "the whole advertising industry... would collapse if people became enlightened"; from Osho's ninety-nine Rolls-Royces to Wayne Dyer's Maui mansion, gurus live like rock stars. And joy is not "uncaused": it is caused when you let the Holy Spirit bless you.
- Plug in. The first principle of mysticism is direct contact with Ultimate Reality. Reduced resistance means nothing in an unplugged lamp.
- Feel the pressure. The voltage of plugged-in presence creates palpable pressure.
- Yield. Relinquish resistance, and the pressure becomes the flow of Shakti.
- Balance. The Buddha's string instrument: too tight breaks, too loose is silent. Right Effort is in the Eightfold Path. Otherwise deep sleep and massages would be the keys to Nirvana.
Resistance and negativity
"The big money is in pushing the positive." Joel Osteen did it for Christianity; Tolle does it for the New Age, packaging the ethos with "serious, yet simplified mysticism." Tolle says all negativity is resistance and its only use is to strengthen the ego. Gardner points to contradictions: if happiness and unhappiness are one, why attack the negative? He imagines a Tolle-disciple film critic who writes only positive reviews, gets fired, and so achieves the goal of weakening his ego.
"Negativity is totally unnatural." No, says Gardner: the zodiac has six positive and six negative signs. Expansive Sagittarius sees the forest; analytical, fault-finding Virgo sees the trees and gives humanity its craftsmen. Swami Sivananda, a Virgo, criticized everything yet rested in Being. Your inborn temperament will not change "until your eyeballs pop out"; resisting it adds "another layer of dross." Re-establish yourself in Being and all modifications become transparent.
Tolle's peaceful ducks, who flap their wings after a fight to release energy, are his model of living in the Now. Gardner fed and watched ducks from his lakeside house in Horseshoe Bay, Texas, from 2003 to 2009: fights are frequent, losers are chased into the air, flapping is bravado, grudges persist, and mating is violent. His cats tormented mice and were "fraidy cats," not Zen masters; lions kill a rival's cubs. Tolle's error is conflating pre-rational with trans-rational living, a distinction Gardner credits to Ken Wilber.
Negative emotions as messages. Every emotion carries one message: how you feel about something. To understand it, examine the value judgments that program your reactions, rather than treating it only as "a signal... to be more present." Not to feel negative emotions is to be "less than human." Tolle gives four tried-and-true ways to stop negativity (be present; drop it; feel into it; become transparent to the cause), and Gardner tells serious yogis to try all four, but adds the definitive one: let the Holy Spirit outshine it. No one can will continuous presence; only resting in the Spirit-current sustains it.
The meditator without peace. Tolle: accept your non-peace and it becomes peace. Gardner: un-baptized acceptance gives temporary peace, not "the peace that passeth understanding." Acceptance is also mind-based: you must brainwash yourself, and the harder you try, the more conflict. Tolle's story of Banzan awakening in a butcher shop, where every cut is "the best," would make genocide "hunky-dory."
The essence of compassion
Tolle. You are like a deep lake: rough or calm on the surface with life's cycles, always still in the depths, and "you are the whole lake."
Gardner. Life itself is neither rough nor calm; the surface is the mind. Saying you are the whole lake contradicts "you are not your mind." And "unchanging, timeless, deathless" is bland Advaita; Being is radiant Siva-Shakti.
Wholistic non-attachment, inherent in communion, intensifies connection to others. What you feel in another is not "their radiant Being" but the universal Spirit: "where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am." Tolle's compassion, "awareness of a deep bond," is mind-based and sporadic; Buddhic compassion is the Love-Bliss radiated by a sage. Kashmir Shaivism and Vajrayana rightly see Shakti, the Sambhogakaya, as en-Light-ening rather than as Maya.
Tolle ties compassion to shared mortality: in a few years we will all be "rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all." True, says Gardner, but the Higher Compassion goes beyond recognizing a common fate. It is consciously "shedding the Grace of God on others" by making yourself an open channel for the Divine's power, which lets you see past forms to the Divinity in all beings. Tolle's picture of compassion as sadness and joy merging into "the peace of God" is, again, flat: the world-rejecting Eastern schools he echoes conflate Shakti with Maya, the power that creates illusion, and so lose the energy that actually carries compassion. A reader who never goes beyond The Power of Now, Gardner says, would never learn this.
A different reality
"I am convinced the body doesn't have to die." Gardner would make you "a quadrillion to one underdog." Tolle says the body "exists, or seems to, because you believe in death." Poppycock: animals and people with no concept of death still have bodies. If true nature is "concealed" in the body, where? Crown, heart, pineal gland? "He doesn't know."
| Tolle's claim | Gardner's reply |
|---|---|
| "There is no objective world out there" | Perceiving discrete objects proves an objective world; deny it and all knowledge is invalid |
| Quantum observation shows observer and observed are inseparable | That shows interrelatedness, not non-separation; gaze at a spoon all day and nothing happens; James Randi's prize is unclaimed |
| A different way of looking changes phenomena | Ten years as a Las Vegas gambler: no one controls dice. And full uncertainty means God plays dice, which Einstein rejected |
| Infinite worlds exist, depending on consciousness | Infinite interpretations; "Existence exists" (Peikoff) |
| Collective mind creates our world | That is Kant, whom Rand called the most evil philosopher |
Consciousness and the world
The new earth. Tolle quotes "the lion shall lie down with the lamb"; Gardner notes Isaiah 65:25 says the wolf and the lamb, and that the lion will "eat straw." His cat hissed at the straw and purred at "dust shall be the serpent's meat." Tolle's new world remains "predictably vague."
History, Gardner says, says no. Religions from world-transcending saints brought persecution and war; India's many sages did not end its poverty. The Renaissance and the U.S. Constitution were not the work of mystics in the Now. Tolle claims who you are is a more powerful transformer of the world "than what you say, and more essential even than what you do." Gardner disagrees: words and deeds shape history more than being: The Communist Manifesto, and Jimmy Carter, a big heart whose economics paved the way for Reagan. You can eliminate only your own unconsciousness, so "do not put all your eggs in the single basket of enlightenment."
Charity and capitalism. Indiscriminate giving can undermine independence; Gardner cites a fall in two-parent Black families, which he blames on welfare expansion. Before you can give, you must produce: teach people to fish. And even in a moment of "shared Being" there is still a giver and a receiver. The answer to hunger, "as proven by India, China, and other emerging nations," is capitalism, which for him is first a social system protecting individual rights; read Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Tolle's passive resistance is "a joke" against those intent on destroying you; the two great evils are religious fundamentalism and statism.
Who should teach? Tolle makes teaching enlightenment the student's main purpose. Can the unbaptized teach it? In the 1980s Jean Klein told Gardner not to teach until fully enlightened. He ignored the advice, and admits the gurus disagree.
Gardner's best points here are strong: acceptance cannot replace moral judgment, effort and letting go must be balanced, and the ego is not removable by fiat. But the chapter leans heavily on Ayn Rand's Objectivism as if it settled metaphysics, and on astrology as if it were established science. Its historical and social claims (the fall of Indian Buddhism, welfare and family structure, capitalism ending hunger) are contested simplifications offered without evidence. Readers should separate the spiritual argument from the political one.
The Spiritual Meaning of Surrender
Tolle defines surrender as "yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life," accepting the present moment unconditionally. Gardner defines it as relinquishing resistance to the Spirit-current, the divine Power, felt as pressure once you are plugged into the Presence. The chapter ends with his esoteric account of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, and the "horizontal/vertical way of the cross."
True spiritual acceptance
Surrender, for Tolle, is not passivity or giving up plans; it is relinquishing inner resistance, the "no" said through mental judgment and emotional negativity. Gardner objects twice. The "present moment" is time-space phenomena, not the timeless Now. And dropping judgment means surrendering "the uniquely human capacity to measure reality"; negative emotions are an automatic response to value judgments, not a volitional one.
Tolle's example: stuck in the mud, you do not resign yourself; you narrow attention to the present without labelling it, accept its "isness," then take "positive action" to get out. Gardner: that is a strategy, not surrender. Narrowing attention contracts consciousness, which is resistance. You were driving because of a value judgment; you apply "non-judgment" selectively only once things go wrong. Try non-labelling consistently and "your efforts will be spasmodic."
True surrender is letting go of all effort and seeking to receive Shaktipat: the practice of "poverty" or emptiness. It is contextual: plug into the Presence, feel "the pressure of the Presence wanting to move into and through you," and yield. Random relaxing is healthy; a serious discipline of releasing thoughts can awaken kundalini; but the highest form is effortless reception, which makes you "a Holy Chalice, an empty vessel or great vacuum that literally... sucks down Light-energy from above."
| Kind | What you do | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Random letting go | Relax in daily life | Physical and psychological benefit |
| Disciplined release | Relinquish thoughts moment to moment | Can awaken kundalini |
| Holy surrender | Yield to the felt pressure of the Presence in Communion | En-Light-enment of the whole body and identity with Being |
Three kinds of surrender
Surrendered action. Tolle predicts that as humans awaken "the word work is going to disappear." Gardner: this is just karma yoga, "action for the sake of action" in Swami Satchidananda's words, which never revolutionized work in India despite the Gita. He looks forward to "progressive nonresistance" at the gym. Spiritual practice is as much work as surrender; without the effort to connect there is "no flow of Grace for you to yield to."
Learning from nature
Where does motivation come from if you are fully surrendered? Tolle points to nature and the lilies that "neither toil nor spin." Gardner sees in nature "an impersonal machine," Adi Da's "Klik-Klak": tsunamis, animals torn apart, apes that kill their own (Demonic Males by Peterson and Wrangham). Plants resist wind by rooting deeper and, he claims, shrink from rock music. Jesus was "a pneumatic... not a botanist": even mystics have no special knowledge of manifest existence.
Consciousness is senior to surrender. Tolle finally admits non-resistance to what is differs from surrender to Being: if you can do nothing, use the situation to go deeper into the Now. Gardner: being fully present to a situation is a doorway to the Now, but within that presence you remain free to resist or not, and real intelligence decides. Nor does life always become "helpful and cooperative": awakened Spirit-energy often dredges up difficulties, as saints' lives show.
Transmuting mind energy
How do you let go? Tolle: acknowledge resistance, watch the mind create it, feel the emotion, and by witnessing see "it serves no purpose"; "you cannot be conscious and unhappy."
- Resistance has a purpose. It is a biological warning of possible threat; intelligence judges whether it is warranted.
- Making it conscious is not the end. Warranted resistance returns until the situation is resolved.
- Not all resistance begets suffering; resisting threats prevents much of it.
- Witnessing is not letting go. Focusing on the Now is a willful exercise of holding on, resistance to ordinary chaotic consciousness.
Tolle says your identification with unhappy feelings is unconscious; Gardner says subconscious, rooted in value judgments you formed consciously and can change by adjusting your premises. Total presence dissolving negativity "almost instantly" is "pure hyperbole": relax the effort and the emotions return. Only Grace sustains it, "the Blessing Power from above that meditates you," producing profound samadhis.
Mind energy and the earth. Tolle says spiritual energy does not pollute and only it can save the planet from mind energy. Gardner calls this "Dark Age nonsense." The danger is anti-mind energy: dogmas demanding unquestioning surrender. Rational secular humanists work to make the planet cleaner. Blaming the mind for social problems is like blaming food rather than overeating for obesity. Man is the conceptual animal, and to denigrate that faculty is to throw "the baby (the rational mind) out with the bath water (the irrational mind)." Tolle even denies that the mind is creative, which Gardner calls quasi-nihilistic. On "the meek shall inherit the earth," Jesus, like every man, had "his limitations": two thousand years later the meek have inherited nothing, and Gardner would not bet on the gentle anytime soon. He is "all in favor" of surrender and channelling Shakti, but without man's volitional and creative mind-energy intact, saving the earth is "a pipe dream."
Surrender with other people
Unconditional surrender means openness to the Spirit, not letting people use or manipulate you: "You can be Spirit-full and still tell imposers to get lost." Tolle says only an unconscious person manipulates or can be manipulated. Gardner: many manipulators know exactly what they are doing, and the "consciousness" that protects you is mental judgment, which needs knowledge and reason, the opposite of inner nonresistance.
Tolle. "If you cannot surrender, take action immediately." Observe your attachment to views and "the need to be right." When identification with positions goes, "true communication begins."
Gardner. First weigh your options; you have three, surrender, action or resistance, and sometimes action is resistance, as when you punch a mugger. If someone denies the Holocaust, you say he is wrong. True communication begins with shared allegiance to objective fact.
Ideas and truth. Gardner's point about the Holocaust denier generalizes. A person who does not identify with his positions but believes objective truth is a myth cannot truly communicate with anyone, because each mind then lives in "its own private universe." Detachment from opinions is useful only when both people share an allegiance to facts; without that, calm non-attachment is just politeness.
Physical confrontation. Tolle: "Yield to overcome," as in Eastern martial arts. Gardner, mugged "more than a few times" and trained in judo, says after using the opponent's force you must counter-attack. Tolle praises wu wei and shikantaza as "inner nonresistance and intense alertness," but intense alertness is effort; even a description of shikantaza calls it "a very demanding practice."
The ego, Tolle says, believes strength lies in resistance. Gardner: the ego often helps us overcome fear, like a boy leaping from the high board to prove courage. Most mystics he has met "have bigger egos than you do." Contemplate the Divine and awaken to your Self-nature, which is "pure or perfect Ego, or I Am-ness."
Illness, disaster and miracles
Surrender is not to a condition but to the Unconditioned; fight the illness, but in the context of receiving Divine Help. Gardner fully endorses Tolle here: "If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment... Transmute base metal into gold." Pain contracts consciousness into constricted energy; plugging into the Source expands it.
Tolle cites death-row prisoners who awoke in their last hours. Gardner: hardly a miracle, since they had no alternative, and Grace "is a natural, lawful response of the impersonal Divine." Miracles cannot occur in a karmically lawful universe; if God flouted karma, the cosmos would be chaos. Nor is surrender the "one step" to transmutation: the full formula is Sat = Cit-Ananda, contracted consciousness united with divine Energy.
Crucifixion and resurrection
A stoic's acceptance of pain is only "clinical or objective mental acceptance." True surrender is allowing the Holy Spirit "to invade and possess you." Tolle tells the sufferer: "This is your crucifixion. Let it be your resurrection and ascension." Gardner says he uses the terms without explaining them, and supplies his own esoteric reading.
Surrendering to non-surrender. When pain is deep, Tolle says there is "always a way through": face it, feel it, stay present, bring "the flame of your consciousness." Then he says "full attention is full acceptance, is surrender." Gardner: no, full attention is work, the antipode of surrender. Presence (siva) creates pressure; if you do not yield so it becomes flow (shakti), you get tension. Until baptism, presence lacks the "Fire-Power" to consume your garbage. The power of Now is the Power of the Divine's Presence, not of yours.
The horizontal/vertical way of the cross
Exoterically, the way of the cross means suffering is the way to salvation. Esoterically, it means integrating the horizontal practice of plugged-in presence, which transcends time, with the vertical practice of pulled-down power, which transcends space. Integrating them is "a severe ordeal, and thus a cross to bear." And "pain, not pleasure, is the great motivator."
Tolle: "How can you find that which was never lost?" God-realization "is the most natural thing there is." Then why is it so rare, asks Gardner? The Buddha practised six years. Before Shakti embraces Siva in the Heart she must open the nadis and chakras, "roto-rootering" the Sushumna from spine base to crown. That takes time.
| Stage | Name | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Communion | Holy Communion: plugged-in presence to the divine Presence |
| 2 | Union | Divine Union: Shakti descends, purifies the nadis and opens the chakras |
| 3 | Identity | Nondual Beingness: Siva-Shakti united in the Heart; the Heart-knot cut |
The continuum Tolle skips
Effortlessness alone yields a temporary "being-ness," not divine Being: "You can let go until the universe collapses." Tolle again foresees vast upheavals and the Earth defending herself, citing Revelation; Gardner bets instead on David Hawkins, who calibrated Revelation at 70.
Consciousness and choice
Tolle: without a high degree of consciousness "you have no choice"; until present, you are compelled by conditioning. Gardner: the mind itself is the faculty of volition. You can put this book down now. Conditioning impels but does not compel; the dieter at the party with Häagen-Dazs shows choice needs will, not high consciousness. Women stay with abusive partners for many reasons, low self-esteem, money, good times, not because they are robots. Calling Tolle "Kant on 'roids," he asks: if choice is an illusion, how did you choose to open to the Now?
If the unconscious have no choice, no one is responsible, a conclusion Tolle "conveniently sidesteps." On forgiveness, Tolle says it is impossible unless you live in the Now and unnecessary if you do. Gardner: the mind forgives when it has reason, as when a daughter who wrecks the car apologizes and pays.
How do I realize the Truth beyond time? Tolle: "Presence is the key. The Now is the key." Gardner: connect to the Presence of Being, let Its Power unite with your soul, and you awaken as Siva-Shakti: "Connectedness is the key. Reception is the key. Union is the key." And how can you tell you have surrendered? Tolle: when you no longer need to ask. Gardner: "when all seeking comes to an end and you effortlessly behold the divine Being as your Self-nature."
The best parts of this chapter are the argument that presence is effort and needs a counterpart in letting go, and the insistence that surrender to the Divine is not passivity before abuse. Weaker are the botany (plants and rock music), the "flat earth" claim about Jesus, the flat rejection of miracles alongside acceptance of Shaktipat and astrology, and reliance on Hawkins's kinesiology scores, which have no scientific validation. The esoteric anatomy (the Heart-knot right of centre) comes from Ramana and Adi Da and is a claim of practice, not of evidence.
Master Takeaways
- Presence alone is half a practice. Tolle's conscious presence and surrender are right in principle, but without the descent of the Holy Spirit they stay "two-dimensional."
- The power of Now is the Holy Spirit. Shakti, the Sambhogakaya, the Benediction: Gardner's main correction is to name the power that Tolle's title promises.
- Holy Communion is the core discipline. Plug into the divine Presence directly and immediately, then let its Power pour down.
- The mind is an ally. The rational mind is the faculty of judgment and choice; the problem is its misuse, as overeating, not food, causes obesity.
- Emotion is the mind as feeling. Feelings follow value judgments, so to understand an emotion you examine the judgment behind it.
- The present moment is not the Now. The moment is time-space phenomena; the Now is timeless, spaceless Presence.
- Psychological time is sane. Planning and memory are tools; the trouble is contraction of awareness, not time.
- The pain-body is the self-contraction. Adi Da's fist clenching in space names the same thing, and Communion intensifies it before the Fire burns it away.
- Becoming cannot produce Being. No amount of self-improvement adds up to God-realization; only Grace bridges the gap.
- Mere presence differs from divine presence. Being alert is not the same as being irradiated by the Spirit.
- The inner body is the pranic sheath. It is a real energy body but not the link to the Unmanifested; the Spirit is.
- There are two portals. Every opening into the Absolute is a charge portal (presence) or a discharge portal (surrender); both are needed.
- Space is not nothing. Existents come only from an Existent; emptiness is the non-appearance of objects within Presence.
- Only the Spirit makes you whole. No partner can; dependence on one is an addiction cured by the Holy One.
- Compatibility outweighs presence in relationships. Two conscious people can still fail if their energy fields clash.
- Good and bad are objective. Acceptance cannot replace judgment, and allowing a wrong is not spiritual.
- The ego can be praised. As rational self-interest it is biological and life-positive; even sages keep it.
- Effort and letting go form a dialectic. Alertness is thesis, nonresistance antithesis, the Spirit-current synthesis.
- Surrender is to the Unconditioned. Yield to the Spirit's pressure in Communion, not to whatever condition life presents.
- Grace is lawful, not miraculous. It is the natural response of the Divine to anyone who truly opens.
- Awakening takes time. Shakti must purify the nadis and open the chakras; communion, union and identity form a continuum.
- The cross has two beams. Horizontal presence transcends time; vertical power transcends space.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| The electrical circuit | Presence is voltage, nonresistance lowers ohms, the Holy Spirit is the current | Diagnosing why a practice feels flat or strained |
| The lamp of enlightenment | Plug in (oneness), turn on (awareness), let the current flow (disidentification) | Ordering the steps of meditation |
| Holy Communion | Direct, immediate relation to the divine Presence, opening to its Power | Choosing a single core practice |
| Two portals | Charge (consciousness, Siva) and discharge (energy, Shakti) | Balancing concentration and surrender |
| Three views of the ego | Tolle's false self, the radical self-contraction, the biological self-interest | Deciding what "ending the ego" can mean |
| Ladder of bliss | Pleasure, joy, bliss, beatitude | Telling human happiness from spiritual bliss |
| Five koshas | Physical, pranic, mental, wisdom and bliss sheaths | Locating the "inner body" in subtle anatomy |
| Electrical pranayama | Breathe and feel energy in the context of Communion | Turning body awareness into Spirit-conductivity |
| Four stages to "I and the Father are one" | Steps from separate devotee to identity with the Divine | Reading Christian mysticism as a path |
| The guru's three functions | What a true teacher transmits and models | Assessing a teacher |
| Communion, union, identity | The hierarchical continuum of enlightenment | Testing claims of instant awakening |
| Horizontal/vertical cross | Presence transcends time; pulled-down power transcends space | Integrating stillness and energy practice |
Frameworks and mental models
Gardner closes with a spiritual reading list drawn from the more than a thousand books he has read. For seekers who want to "cut to the chase" he names nine; for beginners, three introductions; for thinkers, Rand.
| Purpose | Books he names |
|---|---|
| Cutting to the chase | The Knee of Listening and Hridaya Rosary (Adi Da); The Cycle of Day and Night (Namkhai Norbu); First and Last Freedom (Krishnamurti); Mysticism (Evelyn Underhill); Meditations on the Tarot (Valentin Tomberg); The Philosophy of Sadhana; Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi; Teachings of Tibetan Yoga (Garma C.C. Chang) |
| Introductory meditation | How to Know God; Open Mind, Open Heart (Thomas Keating); Mindfulness in Plain English (Henepola Gunaratana) |
| The mind and egoism | Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Leonard Peikoff) |
| Best on Zen and on the Buddha | The Zen Teaching of Huang Po (John Blofeld); Some Sayings of the Buddha (F.L. Woodward) |
| Advaita "must" reading | Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi; Sri Ramana Gita, on the Amrita Nadi |
Gardner's shortlist from the reading list
Gardner's core correction is worth taking seriously: a teaching built on presence and acceptance can leave out the experience of Grace that many traditions put at the centre, and "accept what is" can slide into moral passivity. But the book often argues by ridicule rather than reading Tolle charitably, and it presents Gardner's own synthesis of Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen and Adi Da as the standard against which all others fail. It also relies on Objectivism, astrology and Hawkins's kinesiology scores as if they were settled knowledge, and its views on women, gay people and social policy are contentious opinions offered with little evidence. Read it as a sharp companion to Tolle, not as a neutral guide to him.
- AI systems. The circuit model (pressure, lower resistance, flow) is a handy way to think about prompting and tuning: removing friction alone does nothing without a clear signal to carry.
- Enterprise architecture. "Becoming cannot produce Being" warns against endless incremental fixes when a change of foundation is needed; the communion, union, identity continuum resembles staged adoption with clear gates.
- Banking. Gardner's insistence that acceptance must not replace judgment is a good frame for risk culture: stay calm under pressure, but name and act on what is actually wrong.