By Chuck Hustmyre
(Continued)
Walsh said that information contained in the recent emails between Brianna and her father indicated that at the time she disappeared Brianna may have been planning to travel to Hawaii to meet her father.
The problem, Walsh said, is that Brianna walked away from her home in Montana on a freezing cold morning and started her journey with only the clothes she had on, with no identification, and carrying only a bottle of water and approximately $200 in cash.
One possible explanation for Brianna's seemingly poor planning and preparation for such a long journey may have been her recent fascination with a popular self-help book by German-born writer Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.
Walsh, who claims to have read the book 35 times, said that in the first chapter Tolle describes how he initially tried to find a state of enlightenment—something the author calls living in the "now"—by sleeping on a park bench for two years. Walsh said she knows of many people who have been turned off by the book because after reading that first chapter they mistakenly believe that the author espouses the view that only through an austere, homeless existence, devoid of all material possessions, can a person achieve true enlightenment.
Although The Power of Now is in part the story of how Eckhart Tolle found the enlightenment he sought, Walsh said that in later chapters of the book the author explains that people do not have to undertake a physical journey or shed themselves of their belongings to achieve that enlightenment.
Walsh said that during an eight-hour drive that she and Brianna made from Las Vegas to Livingston, Mont. a week before her daughter disappeared, Brianna listened to an audio recording of Tolle's book. "That's what transformed her life that last week—those tapes, that book," Walsh added.
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