Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Philosophy of Religions--all religions, including,

Yes.., but more importantly, if someone did, how would you validate their experience of the NOW?

How would you describe the now?

One who knows what the now is, is also cognizant of the fact that Tolle's story is not a standard or a blueprint to awakening, but rather an individual experience. The Jesus or Buddha story is nothing like Tolle's.
If you read the dialogues between Krishnamurti and others, you will find he has nothing to say about the now as being anything but normal, nor was any part of his life spent in a cosmic bliss-like experience described by Tolle where one has difficulty integrating ones self with reality. In fact if you discuss the state of Bliss with those that understand it, it goes beyond the senses as they project the glorified experience of the stupor he was in.

What he described as an awakening was contrast to his depression. What he speaks of now as the NOW, is basically his past experience to bring credibility to what his current experience is, which no one seems to have an interest in.

Tolle has become an idol for the depressed, and those who have fallen from their faith in religion.

Most people are like those that Jesus faced during his rise to public awareness. People look for a way out of their life because they don't understand that they made it what it is, and don't know how to unmake what they don't like. So the norm is to seek a way out, with some cosmic experience or somebody to save them from themselves.

So what happens is people like you reverend, read parts of books and articles that stimulate their minds to imagination. Then they imagine what the ideal is, and if they are bold enough, they claim they are free of their demons.
Then they spend the rest of their time seeking validation for their imagined reality from others.

Regarding Tolle:
Everyone wants to assume when someone tells a story that whatever happened to them, is how, or what happens to anyone and everyone when they have a cosmic experience of Yoga.
It's why so many morons project religion onto the story of Jesus or Buddha.. And why the new age movement is so stuck in projecting an image of God and Godliness, while they condemn everything that isn't God or the result of God.
The God the enlightened speak of exists in all of the bad and all that people project upon and blame for their depression and psychosis. If they had a different experience of what they judge, they wouldn't separate anything from God, but rather separate their own ignorance and experience of separation from God, as ignorance.

New Age religionists are idealists. Not that there is anything wrong with idealism. It's good to have a dream. But if you never step out of the dream, then its still a dream and not reality.

Not by reading a book, or listening to a story and imagining how it happens. No doctor ever imagined his way into medicine just by reading a book or listening to a story. Self discovery has nothing to do with comparisons and trying to be someone else. Awakening has nothing to do with taking the mind outward on the senses.

The mind and body are not the source of suffering but rather the result of free will. What the mind absorbs as TRUTH sets the direction for the personal experience. You should know that being that you are familiar with hypnosis.
What you accept as reality sets the stage for the experience.

No one is a puppet really. A person can choose to imagine being one, but that is not the reality of who you are. There is no consciousness outside of yourself manipulating you.
You can hypnotize someone to think they are a dog. But they will not become one and abandon their human being for long other than in the imagination.

Death is usually the reset button for the delusional and the socially hypnotized to begin again and start over.
More likely they will help you discover more questions, IF you had an interest in the first place to give up the idea that you can imagine something you haven't yet become, and then assume to have an opinion about all of it.