A Comment on Eckhart Tolle

As this fun site gets rolling, we're juggling a version of it both here and in a Facebook group, so we're still searching for a way to have all of the insightful comments there show up here and vice versa. That said, here's one from Otto Van Wachter, commenting on the "Oprah, Eckhart Tolle and Spiritual Transformation" post.

I read "A New Earth" recently on the suggestion of a career counselor/coach (of all people… it was not place where I was expecting to get spiritual input). I was impressed by the insights of Eckhart Tolle, they seem to me to be true and useful. The ego or "egoic mind" that is a central theme of this book strikes me as not too different from the egoic self that are talked about by Jesus, and Paul. Paul calls it the old self and contrasts it with the new self in Ephesians and Colossians. Eckhart Tolle's theology may be wrong (although I suspect he is too enlightened to have a theology), but I feel we can learn a lot from him about the ego, which many Christians know very little about.

Have any of you read Tolle? (I'm neither encouraging nor discouraging reading him; just curious.) What did you think? Clearly he's striking a nerve, with Oprah's publicizing being a big help.

For the most part, I'm with Otto. I read a Christian reviewer who said that Tolle had no concept of sin. It struck me as just the reverse: he's using the phrase "egoic mind" as his stand-in for sin. It's that part of ourselves that we need to transcend. With Otto, on that note, I found Tolle really insightful.

It struck me that, if there's a downside to Tolle, it's that--as effectively a Buddhist (perhaps I'm misreading him, but that's my take)--it's all on us to accomplish all these wise things he's telling us to do. I talked to a friend recently who'd read Tolle's previous book in the middle of a heavily New Age season of her life. She said something like, "What Tolle said--like the things said by almost all the teachers I was reading at the time--is largely full of good things. But in my experience what he and all the others lacked was any connection to the power that could accomplish these changes. It's all on us...and so very few people I knew who took him seriously did make the changes he described. They couldn't. They didn't have the power."

There are a few more things that seem striking. (As per: does he have a sense of a larger mission apart from transcending our egoic mind? To me, that seems like a starting place, not a destination.) But, disciplining myself, I'll stop now.