Meditations on Eckhart Tolle
As I have said before I began my journey with Eckhart Tolle a sceptic. I was advised to read him by my therapist. His teachings are clad in Californian, self-help, New Age garb. I mean this literally - when Tolle is often photographed it’s usually dressed in pale beige linen - but also figuratively - he has been promoted by Oprah; his books have titles like A New Earth: Awaken You Life’s Purpose and The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment; their covers have backgrounds of photoshop gradients transitioning to two colours that don’t quite complement each other - an aesthetic that smacks of small run, spiritual publishing houses. It all seemed very suspect.
If Tolle had heard my attitude, he would say this prejudice was an intrusion of my ego, its toxic demand to have an opinion without the openness and presence to accept teachings as they arrived in the moment. If I had heard this at the time I would have discounted Tolle’s response as pseudo-psychological babble - an attempt to fuse concepts like ego with spiritualism of mindfulness. I also would have been dead wrong.
When I eventually came to read A New Earth at the end of last year I felt something leaden and fundamental fall into place. The lessons laid bare the machinery of my consciousness - things that I had known instinctively to be true but had never heard articulated. Take ego as an example. To Tolle the ego consumes attention, distracting an individual from experiencing the present moment with thoughts on past ills or future gratifications. This is why he defines the ego as “a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.” It is a destructive agent - because emotions, events, beautiful minutiae of life are never fully experienced. Advocating presentness is not a new thing in the spiritual world - it’s a synonym for the now ubiquitous mindfulness. What Tolle offers that is new, for me anyway, was a description of the addictive personality of the ego. It has an appetite that it pathologically pursues.
Tolle does not stop there. The ego is not something that just haunts and sabotages individuals. Society as a whole is suffering from collective insanity. The appetite scaled up has lead to the world’s ills of the moment - war & environmental destruction are just consequences of the ego in control. This is not as hyperbolic as it sounds.
In my work on climate change and humanity’s inability to act on it effectively, it has become clear that it is the result of a system of infinite growth economics, something we all instinctively understand to be impossible within a finite system. We all participate in this system as consumers and most of us understand our actions are bringing us to the brink of disaster. We could all live happily and still consume less yet it is our greed and laziness that prevents us from acting in a way according to what we know to be true. Denial of the scientific facts and the demand that “opinion” apply to scientific reality is another egoic reaction. It is ego in both cases that intervenes and prevents us from acting rationally. What else can this be called than what Tolle terms “collective insanity”.
Another insight offered by Tolle is that of the pain body. The pain body is a historical bank in which all fear, anguish and physical and emotional pain felt by an individual causes them to act in ways that hijack their presentness. It’s the pain body that causes you to lash out when you’re mad, it’s the baggage you bring to new relationships based on past hurt. Again Tolle’s characterisation of the pain body as a separate parasitic agent within one’s consciousness is strange but rings true for me. Like the ego it demands to be satisfied but the pain body, once satisfied, slumbers until it needs to feed again. What makes the pain body authentic to my experience is the sense that it takes over the controls - it’s the explosion of emotion that you act on in ways that will make you embarrassed when you come back to earth. Who was that? If I was in my right mind I would never have acted like that. This seems consistent with the concept of trauma albeit to a milder degree.
Again Tolle’s pain body can be applied in aggregate. Races and genders have collective bodies depending on how traumatic their history is. Slavery, war and persecution all cause pain bodies to grow. Humanity as a whole has a pain body in which all the hurt from all the violence is stored. Women have a pain body based on their persecution throughout history. It is at this point that Tolle’s explanation delves into quackery. He explains that menstruation for women and their emotional volatility during PMS is an expression of this pain body. This was a bridge too far for me. Tolle has descended here from a credible exploration of collective psychological trauma to pseudo-scientific nonsense.
This is not the only case where he indulges in fantasy. In one anecdote in A New Earth Tolle treats a lady that has a cathartic moment in a room and exorcises her pain body. She leaves and another person comes in to feel the aura of the evacuated pain body repulsive and demands to leave. These sort of claims really threaten to undermine the rest of Tolle’s work. It is unfortunate they were included. I had a brief moment of despair when I came across them as they forced me to question his insights that had arrived to me as profound.
Tolle analysis is profound but what is skimmed over is how the reader is supposed to reach the enlightenment promised by the author. He has interpreted so many religious teachings throughout Christianity and Buddhism. These pieces are particularly brilliant theologically - Tolle can draw in lessons from a corner of the bible and make them utterly resonate with his teachings on living in the present moment. His deep understanding of various religions makes it strange that he does not actively promote one of their key rituals - that of meditation. For Tolle it is not deep and extended meditation that allows an individual to escape the prison of never-ending thought - it is simply awareness. He also has small tricks to escape the ego - simply reciting “I am” or listening to silence between sounds - and these work if only for a moment. They could also be considered meditations in their own right but they are not the inside lane to enlightenment Tolle claims them to be. I can recite “I am” and then quickly return to egoic thoughts.
It is not clear why Tolle is not a stauncher advocate of meditation - although he certainly does not discourage a practice. For my journey Tolle’s work has been a sublime companion to meditation because it has provided a guide to the tenacity of thought and the most convincing argument to why we should consider the mind a tool within consciousness rather than consciousness itself. I have recommended his books to many of my friends on the proviso that they look past the covers, the title and some of the more bizarre claims about auras. What they will find inside is potentially life-changing insights and that in itself warrants reading and re-reading Tolle.