Eckhart Tolle

Who they were

Eckhart Tolle (born Ulrich Leonard Tölle, 1948), German-born, Canadian-resident, and by any commercial measure the most successful spiritual teacher of the last thirty years. The Power of Now (1997) and A New Earth (2005) have sold in the tens of millions and been translated into more than fifty languages.

Where they came from

By his own account: a childhood in Germany marked by his parents' conflict, adolescence in Spain, university in London and postgraduate work at Cambridge, and a long period of depression and anxiety that reached the point of suicidal despair.

At twenty-nine, he describes a night in which the thought I cannot live with myself any longer resolved into a question — who is the "I" and who is the "self" it cannot live with? — and something in the structure of his identification with his own thinking gave way. He reports waking the next morning to ordinary things appearing extraordinarily vivid, and the depression gone permanently.

He then spent roughly two years, on his account, largely without occupation or fixed address, sitting on park benches in a state of continuous contentment, before beginning to teach informally. He is explicit that he had no teacher, no tradition, no lineage and no practice at the time.

The Power of Now was published by a small Canadian press and spread by word of mouth. Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, and a ten-part webcast on A New Earth in 2008 that drew audiences in the millions, made him a global figure.

What they taught

A compressed and deliberately untechnical form of non-dualism:

• The present moment is all there ever is. Past and future are mental constructions; life occurs only now.
• The ego is identification with thought. Suffering is produced by the compulsive stream of thinking and by the identity built from it.
• The "pain-body" — his own coinage — is accumulated emotional pain that operates as a semi-autonomous entity, seeking situations that will feed it.
• Presence is the awareness beneath thought, available immediately, requiring no belief, no practice sequence and no teacher.
• Acceptance of what is, as the prerequisite for any effective action.

He uses vocabulary from Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, Christian mysticism, Sufism and Zen, and cites Meister Eckhart, from whom he took his name, and Krishnamurti, whose influence is the most visible.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the teaching is not new and does not claim to be. It is non-dualism in ordinary English — recognisably the position of Advaita and of some Buddhist schools, with the technical apparatus, the ethical framework and the long training removed. Whether that is translation or reduction is the substantive argument about him.

We can say the critique from within the traditions is specific. Advaita and Buddhist teachers have objected that his presentation omits what makes the insight stable: sustained practice, ethical discipline, community, a teacher who can correct you, and the traditional warnings about mistaking an experience for realisation. The concern is not that he is wrong but that a reader who understands the words may conclude they have arrived. It is the same structural objection made about secularised mindfulness.

We can say his account of his own awakening is unverifiable and is unusually consistent. He has told it the same way for twenty-five years, has not elaborated it, claims no powers, and has never made a supernatural claim of any kind. Spontaneous non-dual shifts of the kind he describes are documented in the literature on spiritual experience — Krishnamurti, Suzanne Segal, Bernadette Roberts, U.G. Krishnamurti — and appear to be a real, rare, poorly understood phenomenon.

We can say the psychological content overlaps substantially with therapies that have evidence. Defusion from thought — observing thinking rather than being carried by it — is central to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and acceptance is central to both ACT and dialectical behaviour therapy. Those approaches have trial support. Tolle's version is not that, and it is pointing at the same thing.

We can say the harm risk is spiritual bypassing, and that this is the honest concern. A teaching that emphasises acceptance and the unreality of past and future can be used to avoid grief, to dismiss anger at real injustice, or to postpone treating a psychiatric illness. Tolle addresses this occasionally and lightly. Depression and anxiety do not generally resolve on a park bench, and a reader in serious difficulty needs more than presence.

And we can say he is, by the standards of this section, unusually clean. He has not built a high-demand organisation. There are no abuse allegations. He does not claim to be a guru, does not accept disciples, and directs people away from himself with some consistency. His enterprise is commercially large — books, a subscription platform, retreats — and the marketplace questions apply, but the structure is publishing rather than membership, and leaving costs nothing.

We cannot say what happened on that night in 1977. What we can say is that a man with no tradition described something the traditions have described for two millennia, in language a very large number of people could follow, and that both the reach and the loss involved in that are real.

Further reading

• The Power of Now (1997).
• Jiddu Krishnamurti's talks, for the clearest antecedent.
• Robert Forman's or Jeffrey Kripal's academic treatments of contemporary awakening accounts.