(Note from Rowland: I’ve listened to Tolle’s reading of his book The Power of Now, twice, and was helped by *some* of it. This article helps understand my caveat):

Pushing for the power of now

July 13, 2008

Lose the ego. Make peace with the present. Awaken. Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual teachings are appealing to millions. But what’s all this stuff about a new earth? Thornton McCamish examines the man pushing for the power of … now.

ECKHART TOLLE doesn’t want to be your next guru. We know this because Oprah Winfrey said so. At the start of her 10-week course of live “interactive webinars” about Tolle’s latest best-selling book, webcast online in March and April, she said so not once but several times. Tolle just nodded amiably in agreement, which is something he does a lot.

Tolle may not want to be a guru — strictly speaking, he doesn’t want anything, because wanting is suffering; more on this later — but he is anyway. Cher is on record saying that the Canadian author and spiritual teacher “has changed my life”. It was the actress Meg Ryan, another devotee, who first put Oprah on to Tolle’s breakout book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.

Tolle’s message? We must let go of the incessant mental chuntering that fills our heads, make peace with the present moment, and lose our egos. Tolle’s insights into the cruel oppression of unconsciousness help him explain everything from PMT to road rage, bad parenting and strife in the Middle East.

This humble spiritualist teaching might still be passing by word of mouth around New Age circles if The Power of Now had not been weaponised for mass consumption by the Power of Oprah. Tolle’s first book had an initial print run of 3000; when Oprah declared it one of her favourite things in 2002 it went platinum — it has now sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Tolle’s latest, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, was published in 2005; Oprah made it her book club pick this January, at which point it duly joined The Power of Now at the top of the bestseller lists in the US.

Australians tend to be much less excitable about religion and spirituality than Americans, but even here Tolle’s books have sold about 202,000 copies, raking in more than $4.8 million.

There’s clearly more going on here than a dream publicity run. Tolle’s instructions on how to live a calmer and less agonised existence seem to be the news that an enormous number of people need to hear. Unlike many self-help bestsellers, Tolle’s books are serious, thoughtful and quite dense (“Are you having a difficult time reading A New Earth? Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Oprah’s website advised online students. “Even Oprah only reads five pages at a time!”) and offer no quick fixes of the soul to those who make it to the end. The half-million people who preregistered for Oprah’s webinar course had not only read Tolle’s new book but wanted to study it too, more than 15 hours of webcast classes that have since been streamed or downloaded 27 million times.

In his writings, Tolle disdains TV. “Television is basically unconsciousness,” he says, which is a grave Tollean put-down. But he’s practical enough to see that it’s a great way to reach people. And if you’re part of an urgently necessary global shift in human consciousness, as Tolle believes he is, then you can’t afford to be shy.

ULLRICH TOLLE was born in Germany in 1948, and spent his teenage years in Spain. He disliked school and stopped going at 13, preferring to stay home and read. At 19, he moved to England and ended up at Cambridge, studying philosophy and literature. In his 20s he suffered increasingly debilitating episodes of depression; he was 29 when he woke in the middle of one terrible night feeling that he couldn’t live with himself any longer. At that moment of despair he suddenly heard the words “resist nothing”, “as if spoken inside my chest”. His personal spiritual awakening had begun.

Then followed Tolle’s years in the wilderness in the 1980s, a period about which little has been revealed except that it was mostly spent in various London parks. He dwelt, he wrote in The Power of Now, “in states of such indescribable bliss and sacredness … A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane … I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.”

Around this time Tolle changed his name to Eckhart, in honour of the 13th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. It was so fulfilling and so blissful simply to be, he explained later, “that I lost all interest in doing or interacting”.

When he started talking to people again he began to develop a reputation as a spiritual teacher. Then, in 1995 — and sceptics should brace themselves for this bit — Life (or the Totality, or God) told Tolle to move from England to Vancouver because, he only realised later, the West Coast energy field was right for the composing of The Power of Now, which duly appeared in 1997.

Tolle still lives in Vancouver. A small, calm figure, he sports a wispy ginger goatee, favours peaceable knits and looks about 15 years younger than his 60 years. (He hasn’t aged much since his awakening, he says.)

He seems humbly at home in the archived webinars on Oprah.com, nodding warmly, speaking in his oddly robotic voice, and generally looking pleased to be able to help.

To his many critics, Tolle is just the latest celebrity swami to strike it rich with a congenial porridge of Buddhism lite and fuzzy nostrums magpied from all over. Tolle couldn’t care less. Anyone who isn’t awakened by his teaching simply isn’t ready to be awakened yet. His books are rarely reviewed in mainstream press, but that’s OK too; A New Earth is really a “transformational device”, and as such impervious to critical analysis or understanding in the normal sense.

Here goes nothing, then.

Tolle draws on various traditions including Taoism, Vedanta Hinduism and Christianity, but his ideas could be loosely described as neo-Buddhist. He teaches disidentification from the ego and acceptance of the present moment as paths out of the pain and anxiety of living in the past and future. Finding the Being beyond the world of material forms is the path to indescribable peacefulness.

This joyful oneness with all creation, Tolle writes, can only be experienced, not understood. Consider one of his favourite teachings, from the Sufi master Hafiz: “I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through. Listen to this music.” You could spend hours just trying to visualise that, let alone feel whatever truth it might contain. Which is probably the point.

It should be noted that Tolle is not hung up on the word God. You could also call God Consciousness, or Being, the Totality, or even The Force, as Luke Skywalker does. Tolle thinks that doctrinal differences between religions merely obscure the ultimate sacred truth, “because if you go deep enough into your religion, then we all get to the same place”.

This belief in the unified divinity of all existence, or “monism”, has always been popular in New Age spiritualism generally, perhaps because it seems to welcome all god-inclined humans in a warm and fuzzy interfaith embrace.

Too fuzzy for some, though. Monash University’s Professor Emeritus Gary Bouma, author of Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century, argues that to find “the same place” among mainstream traditions you’d have to go so deep you’d end up “denaturing them, and making them inoperable as spiritual practice”.

Tolle’s assertion, for instance, that Christ’s promised “Second Coming” is simply a “transformation of human consciousness; a shift from thinking to pure consciousness” is, as far as many Christians are concerned, heretical tosh.

Other potential awakeners seem more concerned with the lifestyle implications of Tolle’s teaching than quibbles about doctrine. One posted a question to Tolle’s website: “If you only live in the now, what would stop someone who is in a relationship or marriage from resisting the temptation to have sex with anyone who is attractive … After all, if you are in the now … you want to have sex with them now?”

Tolle won’t have the Now misused like this. “Does living in the Now mean giving in to every impulse that arises?” he replied. “Then all those people who chase one sexual partner after another must be enlightened.” That’d be a no to compulsive shagging, then. And one seeker who will have to find a more accommodating guru. Or perhaps pick up Tolle’s Freedom From the World DVD ($US99.95, $A104) from the website (eckharttolle.com) to bring on the awakening a little.

And that’s the earthly context of Tolle’s teaching, of course: the restless search among seekers for more meaning. Seeking may be “the antithesis of happiness”, but Tolle’s teachings take their place in a vast self-help industry which feeds a growing, and apparently insatiable, hunger for inner peace.

Oprah’s show, which increasingly resembles a kind of spiritualists’ shopping channel, is just part of it. “These non-traditional religious quests are conducted in the context of market capitalism,” points out Dr Carole Cusack, chairwoman of the department of studies in religion at the University of Sydney. “So seekers are encouraged to keep seeking.”

Oprah called the unprecedented webinar series with Tolle “a global conversation about consciousness”, which it was; it was also a chapter-by-chapter advertisement for A New Earth, for Oprah’s radio show, and for various sponsors, including Post-It Flags and the software Skype, a techno marvel that excited Oprah so much she whooped about it several times.

To be fair, Tolle never says we must divest ourselves of material possessions to experience Being. He himself faces wealth and fame with the same contented equanimity as he did poverty. And he does seem sincerely uninterested in the sort of self-actualisation that promises to deliver what you crave, whether it’s a new Beemer or a non-smoking vegetarian who enjoys travel. There are no blandishments about empowerment in Tolle’s writing, no chow-line helpings of self-esteem. Awakening is all. As long as we’re unawakened, we’re all victims of our neurotic egos, unconsciously addicted to resentment and anger, the pain of wanting.

TOLLE’s appeal is not so much what it promises to give you, but what it as well as physical — resentment, anger, jealousy, shame, dissatisfaction. And from the horrors of the “pain-body”, a person’s accumulated miseries, losses, fears that want to sabotage their relationships and peace.

To the unconscious reader — me, for instance — Tolle’s accounts of the “pain-body” sound like science fiction. But I suspect that most of us would recognise the ego as Tolle describes it. The ego, Tolle teaches, is the unobserved mind. It survives by falsely identifying with our things, our stories, opinions and thoughts. And it causes untold petty miseries inside and between humans.

Here, you think, Tolle has locked on to the Zeitgeist. Egotism feels like a very modern epidemic, as we all stride about self-actualising in each others’ faces. But people have always been hard to get along with. Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, rather dismally, that in ordinary social situations “three-quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit”. And that was 100 years ago.

Tolle can explain that. The ego, which has been with us for eons, “always wants something from other people or situations”, he writes. “There is always a hidden agenda.” The ego needs to identify itself in opposition to “other”, which might be your boyfriend, someone with different coloured skin, or that dickhead in the white van who just cut in on you and gave you the finger. The ego thrives on being right and making others wrong.

Tolle offers several rather therapeutic suggestions for dealing with ego-created social miseries. I tried a few — non-resistance to criticism; yielding to the reality of a parking ticket without escalating to self-pitying rage. I think they helped.

Ultimately, though, suffering is what it is. Accept it. Like some talking therapies, Tolle places a premium on calm and truthful acknowledgement of what is as a means of avoiding irrational misery and negative self-talk, which is just the ego — that “psychic parasite” — nattering on. Observing one’s thoughts, Tolle teaches, is the beginning of consciousness: “Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.”

Pain can be useful in any case. “Suffering drives you deeper.” The idea that adversity can be strengthening, or even revelatory, is hardly new, but the implications, for Tolle, are profound, because nation states and races have egos, too. And the more strife these global egos produce the better, because suffering is what triggers awakening. What’s coming, you may be alarmed to learn, is a spiritual End of History, a flowering of consciousness that will end the era of religions and ideologies and creeds and all other belief structures. The strife-torn state of the globe today is a sign that this process is already under way.

So saith Tolle.

What struck me about the whole webinar experience, as I sat watching seekers Skyping in on their webcams from tidy bedrooms in Wyoming, Germany, San Francisco, was how lonely it all looked. The focus was firmly on inner transformation. The outer will presumably look after itself.

Tolle’s publishers pitch A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose as “a book for people who want to make a difference in the world”.

Yet a close reading of the book reveals that your life’s purpose is not to sell more policies than the person in the next cubicle, or to reform local aged-care services, keep bees, or even to be happy. It is (spoiler alert) to awaken; that is, to bring the light of consciousness into this world. Awakening one by one, the human race will bring to an end the “ego-created earth-drama”. The peace of Being which replaces it is the new earth.

This was, I confess, an anticlimax. A New Earth sounds like it’s going to address our ecological crisis moment; but in it Tolle discusses the environment even less than he does in The Power of Now, which is to say, hardly at all. There’s quite a bit about flowers and the spiritual properties of nature, but nothing about ecology, just a certainty that universal awakening will lead to a gentler and humbler tenancy of our planet. As the old joke about Buddhist surrender goes: Don’t just do something, sit there!

Tolle is simply not interested in politics. At the end of the last online class with Tolle, Oprah exhorts everyone to go out, “as Gandhi said”, and “be the change we want to see”. But it’s not entirely clear what earthly change Tolle would like to see.

It was Gandhi’s example that prompted George Orwell to conclude that higher spiritual purpose and progressive humanism were probably incompatible. Orwell admired Gandhi, but detected something fishily inhuman about his perfect detachment. “The essence of being human,” he wrote, “is that … one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

For Tolle, “love” as we know it from heartbreak, or Donne’s sonnets, or greeting cards, is but a neurotic shadow of the real thing, a “possessiveness and addictive clinging”. The thinking mind “will say you are uncaring, distant, have no compassion, are not relating”, he writes. But conscious people relate to one another at a much deeper level. Which, naturally, can only be experienced.

Perhaps the hardest thing to warm to in Tolle’s teaching is the absence of desire at its centre. It could be that the only thing more alarming than a world of reckless over-consumption is a world without any wanting in it at all. What would a world unplugged from the energy of human dissatisfaction even look like?

Well, never mind all that. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance, says Tolle. Whatever you do, don’t think about it.

This story was found at:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/07/12/1215658200031.html