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What I find simultaneously most fascinating and infuriating about Tolle is his failure to grasp the fundamental contradiction of his book, as well as the New Age movement as a whole: that you cannot discount the role that the mind itself plays in life, even when (maybe especially when) you're claiming to have found a new and exalted level of consciousness or supposed inner meaning. There is no escape from the conscious and especially the subconscious mind; it is always active, and in fact may be heavily influencing Tolle's own sense of his inner being, even when he himself doesn't think so! Also, Tolle's explication of his concept of The Now is absurdly simplistic and out of sync with the realities of modern geopolitical living. Consider that he once replied thusly to an interviewer's question about how he (Tolle) would've handled 9/11 and the response to same: "I don't know what I would do, because I can only know what is right in an actual situation which demands a response. It's very hard when you look at hypotheticals." Ah yes, but the whole concept of preparedness and contingency planning is based on hypotheticals and the ability to step out of Tolle's beloved "Now" so that one can gain the benefit of experiential learning (i.e. the past) and planning for the worst (i.e. the future). So what is Tolle going to do when an emergency blindsides him and he suddenly realizes that--in his perpetual state of Now-ness--he didn't plan for it? It's absurd. This book is manna for the masses--telling people what they want to hear--and as one who has intensively studied the New Age movement, I urge you to pass on it. [...]