All he has really done, he says, is rediscover their essence. A refreshing liberation from doctrine, or dangerous stuff? Evangelicals, Tolle concedes, are among his harshest critics. He calls it a throwback to the bloody Crusades of medieval times. The Anglican Church in Canada, for example, has lost half its membership in the past 50 years.
Tolle and his ilk fill a hunger for a kind of replacement secular spirituality, a subject explored in Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia , a recent book of essays edited by Todd on the unchurched spirituality of the Pacific Northwest. Civil religion, Todd calls it.
But enough with the theological heavy lifting. Eckhart Tolle is hotter than Hades the existence of which can be debated another day. The two foundational books of his teachings, The Power of Now , initially published in Vancouver in with a press run of 3,, and its follow-up, A New Earth , have North American sales alone of three million and five million copies respectively, and are sold globally in 33 languages.
Total number of times the series has been accessed from her website: more than 35 million. Consider the company Tolle kept at the recent Vancouver Peace Summit—an event top-heavy with five Nobel laureates among a stellar cast. Tolle was on stage Sept. Two days later, he was on a panel, Educating the Heart , again with the Dalai Lama, and Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel in physics, among others—an A-list event that can only enhance his spiritual credentials.
It is an unusual collaboration featuring the Zenlike thoughts of Tolle, illustrated by the colour cartoons of Patrick McDonnell, the New Jersey-based creator of the syndicated Mutts cartoon strip. We rise above it. But beneath the surface is one diving into the deep end, or the shallows? People used to regularly sit like this in his living room discussing the big questions of life, but that was before the Power of Now went stratospheric, and definitely pre-Oprah.
Meeting with a reporter now, apart from those from a handful of sympathetic New Age journals, is a rarity. And yet he has invited the reporter to his home. He is warm and unguarded and alone, save for the uplifting presence of Maya, his King Charles spaniel.
He is dressed in beige pants and a beige sweater vest. But for a crisp blue shirt, he is at risk of vanishing into his beige couch. His walls are a pale taupe. Later, for a walk in the forest behind his condominium tower, he dons a windbreaker.
It is beige. Maybe in such neutral colours is a quest for anonymity, a treasured friend he lost to fame. The Vancouver-born Eng is slim, dark-haired and attractive.
Later, hearing her speak on his website, there is a striking similarity in their speech patterns: soft and soothing and slow.
In that moment, Tolle let go, and he found the peace of simply being in the world, not inside the mind; he found the peace of presence. By cultivating this presence, turning his mind away from obsessive thoughts of the self -- expectations and dissapointments, desires and losses -- toward the purpose of being in the now, the purpose that connects us spiritually to all existence.
As Tolle began to embody that purpose, he experienced the greatest joy and fulfillment, when for so long, he had endured the deepest anxiety and emptiness. Through this solitary journey, he prepared to share the gift of purposeful presence with the world. He turned a deeply personal epiphany into a widely practicable philosophy that would help millions overcome the difficulties of a world overrun by ego-based values and behaviors. Other critics discounted his work as just another new-age self-help book dabbling in religion and psychology.
He continually adapts the form of his teachings to make them as widely accessible as possible: webinars in partnership with Oprah , video products, speeches, workshops, retreats, conferences, any means of teaching that puts spiritual gain over profit.
For all this commercial success, Tolle remains true to the roots of his vision by creating a community of people with a shared purpose, rather than a corporation with a central organization.
His influence comes from his deep understanding of the pains that make us all human. He reaches people because he makes his knowledge and experience accessible, transforming spirituality into something that his readers and students can practice independently in their own lives. We often get so hung up on memories of the past and fantasies of the future, but these are only images.
We only have power now. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment - a means to an end.
Surrender to what is. Say 'yes' to life - and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.
They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. And that triggered me like a koan [a Zen statement that appeals to intuition rather than ration]. It happened to me spontaneously. I looked at that sentence: 'I can't live with myself'. I had no intellectual answer.
Who am I? Who is this self that I cannot live with? The answer came on a deeper level. I realised who I was. He spent the next two years sitting on park benches "in a state of the most intense joy". And then he wrote his first book, The Power of Now. The book, published by Penguin in , sat at the top of the bestseller lists for years.
Its central message is that the root of our emotional problems is our habit of identifying too much with our minds.
The past and the future are creations of thought and only the present moment is real and only the present moment matters. It aims to "provide a spiritual framework for people to move beyond themselves in order to make this world a better, more spiritually evolved place to live". The encapsulating idea, again, is that by abandoning your ego, you become "Present" in the immortal "Being".
William Bloom is a former professor at the London School of Economics, and one of the UK's most experienced teachers, healers and authors in the field of holistic development. He believes that Tolle's work provides a valuable perspective on Western culture. And that has always been the major assertion of Eastern religion: that thinking is not the core of who you are.
The core of who you really are is that part of you that can watch yourself thinking — that's very Buddhist, very Eastern, very attuned to the whole field of transpersonal psychology.
Tolle's approach is very body aware. He's done it in a nice accessible way for people. Which is just what's needed. Tolle's fans regard him as a sort of other-worldly sage; he is often described as "mystical" and "elfin-like"; his blondish hair is always parted on the far left of his head and he sports a beard, but no moustache. He tends to wear corduroy trousers, waistcoats and shirts buttoned to the top, without a tie. Tolle has his own fan site at inner-growth.
At Tolle's own website, there is access to the all-important online store, where fans can purchase all his published works. There is also a dizzying range of accompanying spiritual-guidance material. There are also DVD recordings of Tolle explaining the essence of his theories with lectures such as "What is Meditation?
And if you still can't get enough of the great man, there is a range of music — not, perhaps thankfully, composed by Tolle himself — recommended to aid your meditative pursuits and journey to enlightenment. Tolle's detractors, aside from the Church, dismiss him as New Age rubbish of the worst kind, popular only because he has managed to get the attention of Oprah Winfrey.
Indeed, it is difficult sometimes to know what sense to make of Tolle's convoluted discursive style. Try this one, for example: "Something suddenly was there that actually had always been there but had been obscured continuously by identification with the heavy mind structure.
Despite this — or perhaps because of it — Tolle does have fans in academic, even Christian, circles. Andrew Ryder, a theologian at All Hallows College, Dublin, wrote in praise of Tolle in The Way, the modern Christian spirituality magazine: "Tolle's writing is based on his own experience and personal reflection.
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