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It is a Monday night and I am attempting to “step out of my egoic consciousness” with some 700,000 other people from around the world.

In the interest of “awakening” my “life's purpose,” I've signed up for a series of 10 free Internet lectures featuring German-born, Vancouver-based New Age spiritualist Eckhart Tolle and presented by the ultimate awakener, Oprah.

Mr. Tolle's bestselling new book, A New Earth, chosen by Oprah for her book club, has been flying out of stores, mainly in the hands of middle-class women looking for another dimension to their lives.

Oprah refers to Mr. Tolle as “the father of Now.” He's a soft-spoken, sweater-clad munchkin of a man whose teachings blend elements of Zen Buddhism and other eastern religions. His main message is that we must rid ourselves of ego, turn off the endless chatter in our brains, find inner “stillness” and live in the present moment; only then will we find out what life wants from us.

To log on to the Tolle class, I chose the password “seeker.” Well, why not? I may embody two of Mr. Tolle's ultimate no-nos: I'm too cerebral (it's a bad thing to live in your brain, according to Mr. Tolle, and I live in my brain so much it feels like an over-decorated condo) and I'm just a tad judgmental (you could say that's my job).

But on the positive side, I am open to a spiritual journey, especially one that promises a new way of living in the world, filled with inner joy and peace, and available by Internet, only a click away.

Each video class lasts about 90 minutes and consists of a searching conversation between Oprah and Mr. Tolle, interspersed with video, e-mail and phone questions from viewers (some of whom, given the different time zones, are evidently up in the middle of the night wearing nice jewellery).

In the first class, many viewers want to know how to reconcile traditional religion with spirituality. Oprah, who believes that the new spirituality is a force that “cannot be contained in a church,” says she has taken “God out of the box.” Mr. Tolle adds we have to awaken now because we've destroyed so much on the planet.

There is a homework assignment: “Every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement … even your breathing. Be totally present.”

And a declaration that worries me: “I've felt the shift,” says Oprah about her personal reaction to Mr. Tolle's teachings. “I've had ‘aha' moment after ‘aha' moment.”

What if I don't feel the shift? Will it mean, as Mr. Tolle suggests in his book, that I'm not ready to be awakened?

Trouble is, I can't understand some of his concepts. Like this statement on page 28 of the book that Oprah refers to in the second class: “By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal chords or the thought of ‘I' in your mind and whatever the ‘I' has identified with.”

It reminds me of something my Grade 10 English teacher wrote on one of my essays: “This is either utter nonsense or a major critical breakthrough.”

To my relief, much of the book is more understandable, although certainly not warm and fuzzy – maybe that's Oprah's job: “I'm lovin' ya on the message boards,” she says in one shout-out.

In the second class, we attempt something that has “never been done on television” – silence, as Mr. Tolle asks Oprah and the rest of us to stare intently at one of our hands, to really feel it, to determine if we are still breathing. This will lead us to “a sense of the miraculous.”

Oprah seems excited and even sweetly nervous about her Web classes, wrinkling her brow at some of Mr. Tolle's more obscure pronouncements, all the while enthusing that it's “pretty cool” that people in Afghanistan and Denmark and Africa are logging on together to explore a higher meaning to their lives.

But by the third class, I'm a little tired of the questions, like the one from a woman in Germany who says she is worried about her need to eat French fries. Mr. Tolle listens thoughtfully, finally urging her to slow down, meditate on each fry and enjoy them. Oprah confesses, “For me, too, it's all about food.”

Not so much for me, I'm afraid. Spirituality has to be about more than dieting. But I realize through these first classes that spirituality has become enmeshed with self-help.

Yet it is so much more than that – new studies are showing that kids do better with some kind of spirituality in their lives and that spirituality has become a potent force in the environmental movement.

Back online, there are more workbook exercises to do. We're also invited to “hang out with classmates after class” in chat groups. But after almost 90 minutes of listening to the sometimes impenetrable Mr. Tolle, the exuberant Oprah and those adoring questioners, I am too spent.

I go to bed guiltily thinking of not going back to class, yet still curious about when I will begin to feel “awakened.”

Mr. Tolle, in the final chapter of A New Earth, promises that once we get rid of our egos, we will have sustained enthusiasm and joy. I'd like to click to that.

But when an e-mail arrives from Oprah.com – “Will your breakthrough happen tonight?” – I suddenly realize I can't take the pressure any more: I'm about to become a spiritual dropout.

There is no button to click on to say, “Thanks for the ride, but I'm getting off here.”