10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Chapter 3 Genius or Lunatic?

The man sitting across from me and completely blowing my mind favored a style, both verbal and sartorial, so monochrome that it was as if he wanted to vanish like a chameleon into the barf-colored wallpaper of this hotel room in Toronto. He was elfin, rheumy-eyed, and, as the cameras rolled, droning on in a gentle Teutonic lilt. Superficially, at least, he was the type of person who, if you met him at a cocktail party, you would either ignore or avoid.

And yet he was saying extraordinary things. Life-altering things. He was making points that were forcing me to rethink my whole “price of security” modus operandi. Not just rethink it, but think above it, beyond it—and possibly go beyond thought altogether.

The real mindfuck, though, was this: almost as soon as he said something brilliant, he would say something else that struck me as totally ridiculous. The man was apparently toggling seamlessly between compelling and confusing, incisive and insane.

He would go like this:

Zig: a spot-on diagnosis of the human condition.

Zag: a bizarre, pseudoscientific assertion.

Zig: a profound insight into how we make ourselves miserable.

Zag: a claim that he once lived on park benches for two years in a state of bliss.

He said he had a way for me to be happier, too, and despite the fog of folderol, I half suspected he actually might be right.

Weeks before I first heard the name Eckhart Tolle, I was staring, unhappily, in the mirror of an airplane bathroom. I was on my way home from shooting a Nightline story in Brazil, where we’d spent a week living with an isolated Amazon tribe. It had been amazing. These people still lived exactly as their ancestors had in the Stone Age. They’d barely met any outsiders. They let my producer and me sleep in hammocks in their huts. I returned the favor by entertaining them with my video iPod. Leaning over the metallic counter in this lavatory, I was neither savoring the incredible experience I had just had nor strategizing about how to write my story, which was set to air a few weeks hence. Instead, I had my forelock pushed back and was scrutinizing a hairline that seemed to me about as stable as the Maginot Line.

Bianca had busted me doing this on more than one occasion in our bathroom at home. She pointed out that, other than some thinning in the back and a receding divot near my part, I basically had a full head of hair. But every now and again, a stray glance in a reflective surface would send me down the rabbit hole. Here in this cramped airplane bathroom, I was flashing on a future that looked like this:

Baldness → Unemployment → Flophouse in Duluth

Inevitably, this led to a nasty rejoinder from some other, more reasonable part of my brain:

Get over yourself, Harris.

When I brought the hair thing up with Dr. Brotman, he leaned back in his chair and beamed skepticism at me from across his desk.

“You don’t understand,” I said to him. “If I go bald, my career is screwed.”

“You don’t understand,” he replied, eyeing my hairline. “You’re not going bald.”

By any rational measure, things were otherwise going extremely well in my life. Nearly three years had passed since my panic attacks. I was off the Klonopin and down to seeing Brotman only once a month or so. Occasionally I’d be ambushed by waves of longing for drugs, but the cravings were vastly diminished. (Although I tried to always keep in mind something a friend had once told me: “Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”) At home, the situation was even better: after living together for more than a year, Bianca and I had gotten engaged and were planning a wedding in the Bahamas. At work, my gig anchoring the Sunday edition of World News continued to be a joy. And even though public interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was on the wane, a new opportunity had emerged. The post-Koppel Nightline had moved away from live interviews and more toward lengthy taped stories from all over the world. The producers had allowed me to launch major investigations, such as tracking rhino poachers in Nepal, and posing as a customer in order to expose child slave traders in Haiti. This was a new type of reporting for me. It had a crusading spirit. Corny or not, I found that old journalistic injunction to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” inspiring.

Nevertheless, my worrying over work had grown worse, and the hair issue was just the leading indicator. Increasingly, I was waking up to the fact that the whole industry rested on such an uncertain foundation. In my eight years at the network, I had witnessed seemingly immovable fixtures of broadcast news fade or simply disappear. Among the missing were Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather. When I had arrived at ABC News back in 2000, I was the youngest correspondent on the fourth floor. Suddenly, at age thirty-seven, I was nearly the oldest. All but one of those more senior correspondents had departed, often unceremoniously. These were guys who had given their lives to a profession that could be lavishly kind or capriciously cruel. I’d seen so many careers soar or sour based on seemingly random things, such as changing physical appearance, the personal whim of a specific anchor or executive, or the emergence of a more eye-catching rival. In discussing the unpredictability of my profession with my brother recently, he told me about scientific studies where lab rats were rewarded with food pellets at random, illogical times. Those rats went crazy.

To make matters worse, the country was in the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Bear Stearns had just collapsed, along with Lehman Brothers. The stock market was in free fall. It felt like the world had gone off a cliff no one had seen coming. ABC News went through a wrenching round of layoffs. While my job seemed safe at the moment, I felt bad for my colleagues and fretted about the future. When I thought about alternative careers, I drew a blank. What other marketable skills did I have besides wearing makeup and bellowing into cameras? This was a bit maudlin, but there were a few times where I found myself lying on the couch in my office, staring at a picture on my wall of the ocean, thinking about the word impermanence.

On one such occasion there was a knock on my door. It was David Muir popping by to chat. We had a lot in common. We’d both worked in local news in Boston, arrived at the network before the age of thirty, and loved to travel the planet doing stories. Just a couple months earlier, David had filed some amazing reports from Chernobyl. He had the office down the hall from me and we’d sometimes get together to talk about our latest stories—or just gossip. In the spirit of misery looking for company, I asked him what he would do if the whole TV news business imploded. He shrugged his shoulders with enviable insouciance and said, “Eh, I’d find something else.”

Back in the toilet on the airplane coming home from Brazil, I replayed that scene in my mind as I continued to stare at my faltering hairline.

Easy for you to say, Muir—with your full head of hair.

I’d been in this position in front of the mirror for at least ten minutes. I realized, with a twinge of embarrassment, that there was probably a line outside by now. I let my hair fall back down onto my forehead and returned, sheepishly, to my seat.

About a month later, on a sunny Saturday in September, I was at a block party in New Jersey. There was a cookout, a bounce castle for the kids, and a band with a bassist wearing a do-rag. When the music stopped, a pastor took the mic and declared, with his voice echoing off the brightly colored vinyl siding of the surrounding row houses, “There’s room for everyone at the cross today.”

I was here for a story about Sarah Palin, recently plucked from obscurity to become John McCain’s running mate. A video had just hit the web showing Palin praying for God’s help to get a gas pipeline built in her home state of Alaska. That had sparked a lot of discussion about the fact that she was a Pentecostal, a strain of Christianity sometimes described as “Evangelicalism on steroids.” I wanted to do a piece that would explain to viewers exactly what Pentecostals believed. The closest church was here in Jersey City, and they just happened to be throwing a party.

To be away from the noise, our cameraman, soundman, and producer had set up for the interviews a little farther down the street. The three of them were in the middle of an animated discussion led by Felicia, the producer, a petite, apple-cheeked mother of two with whom I’d worked for many years. She was telling the others about a book she’d just read by someone named Eckhart Tolle. As I approached, she turned toward me: “Have you read him? You might like him. It’s all about controlling your ego.”

The crew burst out laughing. Like me, they took it as a joke about the anchorman’s inevitably inflated sense of self-importance. Felicia, earnest and unfailingly polite, flushed and, speaking rapidly now, assured us that she wasn’t making a joke. Her point was that she had read Tolle’s books and found them personally useful. More than that, Oprah had been heavily promoting his latest volume, and she thought Tolle might make a good story.

Fair enough. I was always looking for stories, and this one—featuring an Oprah-approved self-help swami—sounded like it might include the requisite exotica. So when I got home later that day, I went online and ordered the book.

By the time his book arrived at my apartment a few days later, I had almost forgotten about Eckhart Tolle. I saw the cheesy orange cover shining dully through Amazon’s irrationally excessive bubble wrap. It bore the rather overwrought title A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, as well as the seal of Oprah’s Book Club.

I propped it on my chest that night, an unsuspecting Bianca sleeping to my left, blissfully unaware that her future husband was being sucked into a strange vortex.

At first, the book struck me as irredeemable poppycock. I was put off by the strained stateliness of Tolle’s writing, as well as its nearly indecipherable turgidity. How could Oprah fans stand to drink from a fire hose of jargon like “conditioned mind structures” and “the one indwelling consciousness”? What’s more, the guy was stunningly grandiose. He referred to his book as a “transformational device,” and promised that, as you read, a “shift takes place within you.”

I lay there rolling my eyes, quietly cursing Felicia for inflicting this upon me. But just when I thought I’d been defeated by all the porridge about “inner opening” and the impending “shift in planetary consciousness,” a clearing appeared in the spiritual thicket. Tolle began to unfurl a fascinating thesis, one that made me think he must have somehow spent an enormous amount of time inside my skull.

Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.

Apparently Felicia was right when she got all flustered on that little side street in Jersey City: Tolle wasn’t using the term “ego” the way most of us normally do. He wasn’t referring solely to pride, conceit, or amour propre of the variety often displayed by people who appear on television for a living. Nor was he using it in the Freudian sense, as the psychological mechanism that mediates between our id and our superego, our desires and our morality. He meant something much larger. According to Tolle, the ego is our inner narrator, our sense of “I.”

Certainly Tolle had described my mind to a T. While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.

Per Tolle, even though the voice is the ridgepole of our interior lives, most of us take it completely for granted. He argued that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are—quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head—is the primordial human error. When we are unaware of “the egoic mind” (egoic being a word he appears to have invented), we blindly act out our thoughts, and often the results are not pretty.

I began to recall some of the many brilliant suggestions the voice in my head had made to me over the years.

You should do cocaine.

You’re right to be angry at that producer. Throw your papers in the air!

That Pakistani protestor is way out of line. Even though he’s surrounded by a thousand angry friends, you should have a shouting match with him.

I’d been reading for an hour now, and Tolle had my full attention. As I turned the pages, he began to list some of the ego’s signature moves, many of which seemed to be grabbed directly from my behavioral repertoire.

The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete. Did this not describe my bottomless appetite for airtime—or drugs? Is this what my friend Simon meant when he said I had the “soul of a junkie”?

The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of everyone else. Did this not explain some of my worrying at work?

The ego thrives on drama. It keeps our old resentments and grievances alive through compulsive thought. Is this why I would sometimes come home to Bianca, scowling over some issue at the office?

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.

I was a pro, I realized, at avoiding the present. A ringer. This had been true my whole life. My mom always described me as an impatient kid, rushing through everything. In eighth grade, an ex-girlfriend told me, “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.” Now, as a grown-up in the deadline-dominated world of news, I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion instead of calmly and carefully enjoying the process. The unspoken assumption behind most of my forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better. Only when I reached that ineffable . . . whatever . . . would I be totally satisfied. Some of the only times I could recall being fully present were when I was in a war zone or on drugs. No wonder one begat the other.

It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life—swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained through the ego: chasing the thrill of war without contemplating the consequences, replacing the combat high with coke and ecstasy, reflexively and unfairly judging people of faith, getting carried away with anxiety about work, neglecting Bianca to tryst with my BlackBerry, obsessing about my stupid hair.

It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.

This is where things got confusing, though. Just as I was coming to the conclusion that Tolle was a sage who perhaps held the key to all of my problems, he started saying things that sounded to me like some ludicrous shit. It was no longer his rococo writing style that was throwing me; I was getting used to that. No, now what was sticking in my craw was his penchant for making seemingly wild, pseudoscientific claims. He argued that living in the present moment slowed down the aging process and made the “molecular structure” of the body “less dense.” He asserted that “thoughts have their own range of frequencies, with negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher.” Sometimes in the course of a single sentence, he would say something lucid and compelling, and then seem to veer straight into crazy town. I honestly could not figure out if he was a genius or a lunatic.

Then I learned more about who this guy actually was. After several nights of reading his book well into the wee hours, I padded over to the computer to do a little Googling. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not this: a small, sandy-haired German man who appeared to be at some indeterminate point north of middle age. His presentation style was totally at odds with the voice-of-God tone he affected on the page. In YouTube videos, he spoke softly and slowly, excruciatingly so, as if someone had forced him to ingest a large dose of my leftover Klonopin. His wardrobe appeared to consist solely of sweater-vests and pleated khakis. One observer described him as looking like a “Communist-era librarian.” Another called him a “pale, kindly otter.”

The seminal event of his personal history was an experience he claimed to have had as a severely depressed graduate student at Oxford University. He said he was lying in bed when he was overcome with suicidal thoughts. Suddenly, he felt himself being “sucked into a void.” He heard a voice telling him to “resist nothing.” Then everything went dark. He woke up the next morning and the birds were chirping, the sunlight was a revelation, and his life was a shiny, sparkly thing. It was, quite literally, an overnight panacea. Bingo. Done. Sorted. After that is when he spent two years living on park benches “in a state of the most intense joy.” This was his spiritual awakening, of which he would later say, “The realization of peace is so deep that even if I met the Buddha and the Buddha said you are wrong, I would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting, even the Buddha can be wrong.’ ”

Eventually, he moved to Canada, which had the right “energy field” for his first book “to be born.” That book, The Power of Now, became a celebrity sensation. Meg Ryan gave it to Oprah, who put copies on the nightstands in the guest rooms of all of her homes. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy produced videotaped testimonials (before they broke up). Paris Hilton carried the book through a gauntlet of paparazzi on her way into jail over a driving violation.

When his follow-up, A New Earth, came out, Oprah put on an unprecedented, eleven-part “webinar.” Millions of people tuned in to watch her and Tolle sit at a desk, deconstructing the book, chapter by chapter. Their personal styles were almost comically mismatched: Oprah would whoop and holler as Tolle looked on placidly; Tolle would prattle on about “energy fields” as Oprah mmmed and aahed credulously. At one point she threw up her arms for a double high five, and Tolle, clearly not knowing what such a thing was, awkwardly clasped her hands.

Sitting there in my underwear in front of my computer in the middle of the night, I put my head in my hands. My whole life, I’d prided myself on being a skeptic. I’d spent nearly a decade interviewing spiritual leaders, and none of them had penetrated my defenses. Now this guy—who looked like a character from The Hobbit—was the one who had punched through?

I was looking in the mirror again—this time at an angry red hole, the size of a quarter, smack in the middle of my right cheek.

When the dermatologist first discovered the milky patch on my cheek—basal cell carcinoma, a nonlethal form of skin cancer—I was tempted to just leave it there. Face surgery was an unappetizing prospect for a guy who went on TV for a living. The doctor, however, along with Bianca, argued that inaction was not an option. If I let it spread unchecked, they told me, it could get into my eye socket and blind me. For a nanosecond, I considered whether I might prefer partial blindness to a scar, even though the doctor promised that, if everything went well, said scar would be a small one.

The surgery was Chinese water torture. The surgeon—a crisp young woman—made an initial incision, using a microscopically guided scalpel to remove the cancer. After that first stab, she sent me out to the waiting room as she ran some tests to see if she’d gotten it all. I joined Bianca at a bank of chairs, where I pulled out my copy of A New Earth, which I was now reading for the third time.

After a half hour or so, the doctor called me back and said they needed to dig a little deeper. So I went under the knife again, and then back to the waiting room, where I read more of the book. Another half hour passed, and then the nurse came back and told me they still hadn’t gotten every last teeny bit; they’d need to take a wider slice.

When I arrived back in the procedure room this time, the doctor explained that the cancer was bigger than she had thought—and she still didn’t know how big. I pressed her for worst-case scenarios and she admitted that there was a danger that it might have spread up into the lower part of my eyelid. If that were true, closing the wound would likely involve a scar that permanently pulled down my right eye.

I could feel my heartbeat accelerate as the following movie instantly played out in my mind:

Scar the size of Omar Little’s from The Wire → Fired from ABC News → Seeks career in radio

But then a funny thing happened. After all my reading about the empty nattering of the ego, I realized: These fearful forecasts were just thoughts skittering through my head. They weren’t irrational, but they weren’t necessarily true. It was a momentary glimpse of the wisdom of Tolle’s thesis. It’s not like I’d never been aware of my thoughts before. I’d had plenty of experience with being scared and knowing I was scared. What made this different was that I was able to see my thoughts for what they were: just thoughts, with no concrete reality. It’s not that my worry suddenly ceased, I just wasn’t as taken in by it. I recognized the truth of this situation: I had no idea what was going to happen to my face, and reflexively believing the worst-case scenarios coughed up by ego certainly wasn’t going to help.

The doctor made her third slice, and then sent me back out into the waiting room. Bianca remarked that I was staying surprisingly calm. I didn’t want to give the credit to Tolle, lest she think I was going crazy. She already thought it was weird that I’d been reading this book for so long.

Ultimately, I had to go back in for four facial slices before the tumor was fully removed. They came within a millimeter, but the lower part of my eyelid was spared. Before they sewed me up, the doctor showed me the wound in a mirror and I nearly fainted. I could see well into the side of my cheek—blood, fat, and all. Bianca took out her phone and snapped a picture.

I had done surprisingly well in the crucible of face surgery, but you can’t carry an Eckhart Tolle book around with you everywhere you go.

A couple of weeks later, I was checking TVNewser, an addictive website that tracks the doings of the broadcast news industry, and I came across a list of the anchors and correspondents who would be covering the inauguration of President Barack Obama. My name was not mentioned. I was, to put it mildly, displeased.

Unlike my experience with the surgery, here I was unable to achieve any distance from the angry thoughts caroming through my head. Instead, I took the bait dangled by my ego, which was yammering on in high dudgeon: You’re getting screwed here, dude. I shoved back my chair and started pacing around my office in tight circles, like a Chihuahua doing dressage. Over the next twenty-four hours, I buttonholed every executive I could find and voiced my complaints. Instead of winning me a role in the coverage, however, the whining earned me a reprimand. One of my bosses took me aside and told me that the decision wasn’t personal, and then advised me to stop “bleeding all over the place.”

This was my major beef with Tolle. Setting aside my qualms about his flowery writing, questionable claims, and bizarre backstory, what I truly could not abide was the lack of practical advice for handling situations like this. He delivered an extraordinary diagnosis of the human condition with basically no action plan for combating the ego (never mind for achieving living-on-a-park-bench superbliss).

How do we do a better job of staying in the Now? Tolle’s answer: “Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment.” How do we achieve liberation from the voice in the head? His advice: simply be aware of it. “To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one.” Yes, right. Easy. But if it were this uncomplicated, wouldn’t there be millions of awakened people walking around?

Then there was an even larger question: Even if I had been able to recognize that my umbrage over not being included in inauguration coverage consisted of mere thoughts, should I have simply ignored them? I could see the value of recognizing thoughts for what they are—fleeting, gossamer, unsubstantial—but aren’t some thoughts connected to concrete realities that need to be addressed?

In his books, Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. “There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a mental phantom,” he wrote. But, while I understood the benefit of being in the Now, the future was coming. Didn’t I have to prepare? If I didn’t think through every permutation of every potential problem, how the hell would I survive in a competitive industry? Furthermore, wasn’t the restless ego the source of mankind’s proudest achievements? Sure, it was probably responsible for ills such as war, child abuse, and Pauly Shore movies, but hadn’t human striving also given us the polio vaccine, Caravaggio’s paintings, and the iPhone?

And yet, and yet . . . I was aware, of course, that my chattering mind was not entirely working in my favor. I was pretty sure that staring at my hairline or brooding on my couch was not time well spent. I used to think pressing the bruise kept me on my toes. Now I realized those moments mostly just made me unhappy.

Tolle was forcing me to confront the fact that the thing I’d always thought was my greatest asset—my internal cattle prod—was also perhaps my greatest liability. I was now genuinely questioning my own personal orthodoxy, my “price of security” mantra, which had been my operating thesis since, like, age eight. All of a sudden, I didn’t know: Was it propulsive—or corrosive?

I wanted to excel, yes—but I also wanted to be less stressed in the process. This strange little German man seemed to raise the tantalizing possibility of doing both, but the books were not at all explicit about how to do so—at least not in a way that I understood.

So I decided: I needed to meet this guy.

I ran into Felicia in the hallway at work. “Let’s book Eckhart Tolle for an interview,” I said. “We could do it as a ‘Sunday Profile,’ ” a weekly feature we’d recently decided to launch.

It was as if I’d told her that she’d hit the Powerball, or been chosen for beatification. She was beaming. Unlike me, she did not harbor suspicions that Tolle might be a fruitcake. She was all in.

A couple of days later, she reported back that Tolle, who apparently rarely granted interviews, had said yes. He’d be in Toronto in a few weeks hence, giving a sold-out speech, and we’d been granted a one-hour audience. “They’re being really strict about the time limit,” she said, but she was still giddy.

I flew in from New York on the morning of the interview. When I arrived at the hotel room where we’d be shooting, Felicia was there with the camera crew and a clean-cut young Australian guy named Anthony who appeared to be Tolle’s right-hand man. I’d expected a larger staff, but it was just this one guy.

As we awaited the arrival of the Great Man, Anthony told me his story. He’d read some of Tolle’s books, called him up, and asked for a job. When Tolle said yes, Anthony packed all his stuff and moved from Australia to Vancouver, where Tolle lived. Anthony struck me as reasonably normal, with his neatly gelled blond hair and pressed shirt. He discussed his boss with genuine admiration but not adulation; nothing in his bearing screamed “cult” to me.

Shortly thereafter, there was a knock on the door, and Tolle entered. The first thing I noticed was that he was small. Smaller than me, and I’m about five-foot-nine on days when I’ve used Bianca’s volumizing shampoo. No entourage, just him. He had none of the swagger of a man who’d sold tens of millions of books and had a one-man industry of speaking gigs, CDs, and “inspiration cards.” He walked up and introduced himself with a handshake. He was unassuming, but not shy. Not unfriendly, but not especially warm. Just as he had on Oprah’s webinar, he seemed pleased to be there, but not particularly eager. He was wearing an astoundingly bland, brown blazer over a tan sweater and a pale blue dress shirt. He had a scraggly beard that covered just his chin and neck.

After the exchange of pleasantries, we took our seats for the interview. There were two cameras: one trained on Tolle, the other on me. I was mildly self-conscious about my mottled cheek, but mostly I was just excited. Here I was, finally face-to-face with the man who had come out of nowhere and so thoroughly intrigued and confused me. This was the first interview since I’d started covering spirituality where I actually felt like I had some skin in the game.

“How on earth do you stop thinking?” I began. “How do you stop the voice in your head?”

I had a momentary surge of optimism as he shifted in his chair in clear preparation to give the practical advice I’d been yearning for.

“You create little spaces in your daily life where you are aware but not thinking,” he said. “For example, you take one conscious breath.”

Un-break my heart, Eckhart. That’s all you’ve got?

“But,” I said, “I can hear the cynics in the audience saying, ‘This guy’s saying I can awaken by taking a deep breath. What is he talking about?’ ”

“Yes—that’s the mind talking. Of course, many people will have their mind commenting on what I’m saying—and saying, ‘That is useless.’ ”

In fact, that was exactly what my mind was saying: That is useless.

My mind started saying things that were even less charitable as he rolled out his second, allegedly practical suggestion. “Another very powerful thing is to become aware of the inner energy field of your being.”

Aware that I had a camera aimed at me, I hammed it up, again using that old journalistic trick of channeling a third-party “cynic,” who could really be no one other than me.

“ ‘Energy field.’ Those are two words that, when put together, will fire off cynics’ antennae very, very quickly.”

“Yes, now those are people who are very much in their mind. So they are not even willing to try out something new.”

I mentioned that my efforts to stay in the Now had been frustrating, adding another layer of guilt on top of the normal churn of my mind. “Because I’m thinking all the time,” I said, “I can’t be in touch with the Now, so now I’m feeling guilty about not being in touch with the Now.”

“Yes, as you rightly put it, that’s another layer of thinking—and that layer of thinking says, ‘You see, it doesn’t work. I can’t be free of thinking.’ Which is more thinking,” he said, laughing gently.

“So how do you break out of that?”

“You simply observe that it’s another thought. And by knowing that it’s another thought, you’re not totally identified with the thought.”

This made my head hurt. Clearly this line of questioning was going nowhere. Keenly aware that Tolle’s assistant, Anthony, had his eye on the clock, I decided to move on—which is when we came to the part of the interview where Tolle made what I considered to be his most ludicrous claim yet.

“Don’t you ever get pissed off, annoyed, irritated, sad—anything negative?”

“No, I accept what is. And that’s why life has become so simple.”

“Well, what if somebody cuts you off in your car?”

“It’s fine. It’s like a sudden gust of wind. I don’t personalize a gust of wind, and so it’s simply what is.”

“And you’re able to enjoy every moment, even if I start asking you a ton of annoying questions?”

“Yes. That would be fine.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Here he let out a real laugh—from the diaphragm, leaning forward in his chair, eyes almost closed. He recovered and picked right up: “It’s becoming friendly just with the is-ness of this moment.”

The is-ness of this moment? Who was this guy kidding? Was he really saying that he was never in a bad mood? That nothing ever bothered him? How could he sit there on camera and claim that? It sounded great, of course. But so did learning how to fly.

“I don’t fully understand that, because I sometimes think about change—either innovation or social activism—like that little bit of sand in an oyster that creates the pearl.”

“Yes, well . . .”

“Is it a clam or an oyster? I can’t remember. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.”

Laughing again, he continued. “The most powerful change comes actually out of that different state of consciousness. This is why people so admire what Gandhi did, because he was bringing about change from a state of consciousness that was already at peace. And people sometimes believe that if you’re already at peace you’re never going to do anything. But that’s not the case. Very powerful actions come out of that.”

“So, you’re not saying sit around, let everything wash over you, let people cut you off in your car. You’re saying understand that it is what it is right now—”

“And then do what you need to do,” he said, interrupting me this time, and speaking with uncharacteristic brio. “Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”

Okay, now this made a ton of sense to me. For example, in the case of inauguration coverage, I could have accepted that my exclusion was already a reality, and then simply had a series of calm conversations with my bosses about whether it was possible to change things—instead of firing off a spray of footbullets.

Sitting with Tolle was like watching the movie version of his books. Both in person and on the page, he moved with total ease between tremendously useful insights, and head-scratching, grandiose claims about perfect imperturbability.

By this point, the interview had run long. Felicia was visibly anxious. She apologetically explained to Tolle and Anthony that we really needed a “walking shot”—a picture of me and Tolle walking down the street or something. Everyone agreed this request could be accommodated.

We took the elevator down to the lobby, where I chatted with Tolle while Felicia and the crew went outside to find a suitable spot for the shot. Sometimes, after an interview, people are warmer; they’re relieved it’s over and they feel they’ve gotten to know their interviewer a bit. Tolle’s affect, however, was utterly unchanged. He exuded the same pleasant unflappability. Making small talk, I asked him his age, and he told me he was sixty-two. When I remarked that he looked much younger than that, he told me matter-of-factly that he basically hadn’t aged since he’d had his spiritual awakening, which happened when he was twenty-nine. Yet another sharp left turn into crazy town, I thought.

The story aired a few weeks later on both Sunday World News and Nightline. The reactions from my colleagues were interesting. A few of them wrote Tolle off as a whack-job. Several others said they found him oddly compelling. My friend Jeanmarie, for example, described him as being like a Yule log—initially boring, but ultimately mesmerizing.

Personally, the encounter had left me in a funny spot. I definitely didn’t think Tolle was a fraud. I’d interviewed hucksters—prosperity preachers, child slave dealers, Saddam Hussein flunkies who vowed to turn back the U.S.-led invasion—but this guy didn’t give off the I’m-full-of-shit-and-I-know-it vibe at all. Maybe he was simply deluded? Impossible for me to tell.

Essentially, I was right back where I was the first time I peered into the pages of his strange little book: fascinated yet frustrated. Tolle had opened something up for me—a window into the enfeebling clamor of the ego. But he had not answered my most pressing questions. How do you tame the voice in your head? How do you stay in the Now? Was it really possible to defeat the gray Stalinism of self-absorption without ending up on a park bench? I was not about to let this drop. It was as if I’d met a man who’d told me my hair was on fire, and then refused to offer me a fire extinguisher.