Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now has influenced many people. His central claim is that freedom comes when we step out of the mind’s obsessions with past and future and root ourselves in the present. This idea remains one of his most enduring messages.
And yet, for me, it has never been enough.
I’ve struggled with the idea of the “now” for years. I’ve written about it in my book In The Becoming. But the more I explore it, the more another question surfaces:
If the Now is all there is, why do we still experience constant change?
Tolle calls the ‘Now’ a portal to reality. This gets taken as a fixed destination, a static point we’re supposed to “arrive at.” But this idea doesn’t fit my experience. When I try to grasp the ‘Now,’ it slips away.
So I have begun searching beyond it. What I’ve discovered, thanks to Whitehead’s process philosophy, Taoist thought, and even neuroscience, is that reality isn’t a frozen “now” at all. It’s a perpetual becoming. A creative flow that can never be held still, but can only be lived with.
Why the “now” Feels Static
Many people follow Tolle’s practices – slowing down, presence, detaching from mental chatter – and for those people the methods work. They open the door. Maybe the problem is with the metaphor itself. A “now” that can be grasped should, by definition, be static. And nothing about experiencing the moment is static.
I think even Tolle himself hints at this: the ‘Now’ is a portal, not a place. A passage, not a final stop. Which means the present isn’t a frozen point in time, it’s the doorway into the endless movement of reality.
Toward a Deeper Ontology: Becoming, Not Being
This is where I part ways with Tolle. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy gives us language for what I think Tolle was reaching toward but never quite defined. Whitehead saw the universe not as a collection of static things, but as a chain of events, each moment perishing into the next.
Reality, in other words, isn’t being but becoming.
Add Taoism into the mix, and the picture expands: the Tao as the changeless within the changing. The art of Wu Wei (effortless action) teaches us that stillness isn’t the absence of doing. Wu Wei is moving in harmony with the flow.
Even neuroscience tells us the ‘Now’ is a construction, a prediction the brain makes to keep up with a moving world. The present is never static, not even in our perception.
Beyond the Now
So here’s my proposal: instead of “living in the Now,” we must learn to live in the Becoming.
Not a static point, but a spiral, always revisiting, always moving forward.
Not an escape from change, but an attunement to it.
Not an illusion of stillness, but a movement with the flow.
The ‘Now,’ as Tolle describes it, is the doorway. But the deeper reality is this: life isn’t about arriving at stillness. It’s about finding harmony in the perpetual becoming.
That, for me, is the true liberation.