For Whom The Eckhart Tolle(s)

Damn it, why is this post so hard to write? I’ve been umming and ahhing over it for the last week – all the previous incarnations have either been to long-winded and boring, or too glib. A word of warning, I will be quoting extensively from the book I’m writing about, because sometimes the author does a better job than I could of hanging himself. Let’s begin.

The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification.

This cryptic sentence comes from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, a self-help book published in 1999, which has been enjoying a surge in popularity because of Tolle’s endorsement from that queen of spiritual window shopping, Oprah. It is typical of the loop-the-loop style of Tolle’s writing, but more of that later.

I thought, when I borrowed this book from the library, that I would be angered by Tolle’s writing. I was expecting him to have written things that I could pounce on as being dangerous. There were a few flashes of anger as I read, but mostly, I found 191 pages of badly written half-baked philosophical meandering.  

The “Publishers Preface” sets up grand expectations:

Perhaps once in a decade, or even once in a generation, a book like The Power of Now comes along. It is more than a book; there is living energy in it, one that you can probably feel as you hold it… From the first page of his writing, it is clear that Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary master.

Tolle obviously believes those grand statements, as he writes in his introduction:

The pause symbol (S) after certain passages is a suggestion that you may want to stop reading for a moment, become still, and feel and experience the truth of what has just been said.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start with the first bit of writing in the book – a quotation facing the copyright page:

You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!

Not the pithiest thing I’ve ever read… but who wrote these words? Jesus? the Buddha? Plato? No! Eckhart Tolle starts his book with a crap quotation from: himself!

It would be too easy (and a little tedious) to nitpick every page in the book, so I’m going to pull out a few themes around which the book is built.

Theme #1: Science, BAD. But scientists are now proving that prayer works/’higher dimensions’ exist/quantum teleportation is the same as magic.
This is a common theme with spiritual/religious folk, who disparage science and at the same time try to couch their claims in scientific language to make them seem more legitimate. When creationists felt they could no longer influence the public school system with arguments based purely on faith, they came up with Intelligent Design, which is creationism shrouded in scientific-sounding language. The person who wrote the Foreword to The Power of Now (Russell E. Dicarlo, if that means something to you) is disdainful of science:

Materialistically bound, traditional science assumes that anything that cannot be measured, tested in a laboratory, or probed by the five senses or their technological extensions simply doesn’t exist. It’s “not real”…Spiritual, or what I call nonphysical, dimensions of reality have been run out of town.

Not run out of town fast enough, which is why this book exists. But I digress. Dicarlo then says that despite the pooh-poohing of ‘traditional’ scientists, science is starting to show that there is something ‘out there’, as spiritualists have always claimed:

Interestingly enough, [an] extended, multidimensional model of reality is suggested by quantum theorists such as Jack Scarfetti who describes superluminal travel… Or consider the work of the legendary physicist, David Bohm, with his explicate (physical) and implicate (non-physical) multidimensional model of reality.

Who the hell is Jack Scarfetti? I’m pretty sure he means Jack SARFATTI – the same Sarfatti who once professed to be impressed by Uri Geller’s ‘telekinetic’ ability, and was one of the founders of the Physics Consciousness Research Group. Go have a look at their website, while I duck to avoid the accusations of using an ad hominem argument. Seriously, go look at it. You’ll learn something. Mainly, you’ll learn all about how not to design a website.

I’m still not sure whether the Scarfetti-Sarfatti thing was a typo (pretty big one), or whether Dicarlo was hoping that people would take his impressive-sounding words at face value without doing further research (well, if he names his reference, it must be true). It’s bad form, regardless.

Theme #2: Thinking, BAD.

Thinking has become a disease

Tolle says that all our problems exist because we identify too much with our minds. The quotation above is only the most succinct of the anti-intellectual statements in The Power of Now.

Tolle calls the thinking mind the ‘egoic mind’. This egoic mind is where all our thoughts and emotions occur, and because thoughts and emotions often relate to memory of the past or anticipation of the future, Tolle says we are never able to truly exist in the present (or the ‘Now’) if we identify with it.

This is not a new idea. The obvious connection is with Buddhism, and more recently, some varieties of existentialism. Schopenhauer wrote about existence and the nature of time in his essay, The Emptiness of Existence:

What has been exists no more; and exists just as little as that which has never been. But everything that exists has been in the next moment. Hence something belonging to the present, however unimportant it may be, is superior to something important belonging to the past; this is because the former is a reality and related to the latter as something is to nothing.

Tolle knows that he is borrowing piecemeal from different philosophies, and using their terminology in an idiosyncratic manner. He defends himself by being patronising:

The mind always wants to categorize and compare, but this book will work better for you if you do not attempt to compare its terminology with that of other teachings; otherwise, you will probably become confused.

Aw, thanks for the warning Eckhart. So if we don’t understand something, it’s because we aren’t trying hard enough?

You haven’t yet grasped the essence of what I am saying because you are trying to understand it mentally. The mind cannot understand this. Only you can. Please just listen.

That’s just a wordier version of the old cop-out, “‘Cos I said so. Ner.”

Theme #3: The body, and whether it is a good thing (the jury’s still out on that one)
Tolle writes that the way to happiness/enlightenment/insert another grand word here is to be present in one’s body. To be present in your body requires you to watch yourself, and be conscious of your breathing, your thoughts, and your emotions. There’s nothing wrong with this sentiment, I think, apart from the ‘enlightenment’ part. There is a calmness which comes with being introverted for a moment and observing yourself.

It seems Tolle is not a spiritualist of the common body-hating variety. He doesn’t buy into the whole body-spirit dichotomy. That’s a good thing. But just as you are starting to empathise with him, he reveals that he does buy into the old, completely erroneous, human-animal dichotomy:

On the level of the body, humans are very close to animals.

Say what?

All the basic bodily functions – pleasure, pain, breathing, eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, the drive to find a mate and procreate, and of course birth and death – we share with the animals.

You know what I said about him not being body-hating? Scratch that:

When you become identified more with the inner body than with the outer body… you do not accumulate time any more in your psyche and in the cells of your body… So if you inhabit the inner body, the outer body will grow old at a much slower rate.

Is there any scientific evidence for this?

Try it out and you will be the evidence.

Yeah, um. ‘K.

I said at the start of this post that Tolle’s writings caused a few flashes of anger. The quotations above made me cringe, but I still wasn’t feeling real anger. Then, this happened:

Generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to feel and be in her body.

and:

To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, [the qualities needed are] surrender, nonjudgement, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the loving embrace of your knowing. All these qualities are much more closely related to the female principle.

I can see Oprah and her fans eating this ‘female principle’ crap right up. But these ideas are not new, not original, not revelations of Tolle’s. The whole male-mind, female-body association has been around for, like, EVER. I’m amazed to see people buying into it in the 21st Century.

But buy they do. Tolle’s books used to be reading material for ex- and wannabe hippies. Now, thanks to Oprah and her goddamn bookclub, his works are being displayed prominently in mainstream bookstores, reaching people who might need real help but will be content, at least for some time, to try out his easy answers and make him rich. 3.5 million copies of Tolle’s latest book, A New Earth, were sold in the month following Oprah’s announcement of its inclusion in her Bookclub. 

Getting back to the body and women’s bodies in particular, Tolle has this to say (it’s a long one, but I promise it’s worth it):

The pain-body usually has a collective as well as personal aspect. The personal aspect is the accumulated residue of emotional pain suffered in one’s past. The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness, and so on… Apart from her personal pain-body, every woman has her share in what could be described as the collective female pain-body… The emotional or physical pain that for many women precedes and coincides with the menstrual flow is the pain-body in its collective aspect that awakens from its dormancy at that time… it restricts the free flow of life energy through the body, of which menstruation is a physical expression.

Oh, menstruation is the flow of life energy through the body! Pesky biology teachers forgot to mention! And another question – how does the collective pain-body of men, with all the years of war, famine, disease, etc., manifest itself? Or can it be that Tolle has latched on to something he knows nothing about, and is making completely baseless proclamations? Can it ever. Grr. I have to admit I was suffering from a particularly nasty bout of PMS while I read this book, but I promise my collective pain-body has nothing to do with my disdain for it.

Theme #4: There is nothing more important than personal enlightenment.
Tolle says that the minutiae of day-to-day life like paying bills, going to work, eating and sleeping are meaningless if you are not present in the ‘Now’. This is a clever tactic, although once again, not unique to Tolle – the established religions have been using it for yonks. People don’t want to feel that their lives, or the lives of those they love, are meaningless. So true believers will do all they can to promote Tolle’s philosophies (and books, CDs, etc) to their families and friends. It’s the same as devout but misguided Christians preaching to their friends because they don’t want them to go to hell.

For all his talk of peace and happiness, Tolle also offers an ‘out’ for those people who might be feeling guilty about being self-obessesed and not actually doing anything to help make the world a more peaceful place:

Empathy with someone else’s pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain… This also applies if you are supporting a movement designed to stop deeply unconscious humans from destroying themselves.

Tolle apparently thinks there are no such things as innocent victims. They are ‘unconscious’ and ‘destroying themselves’, which makes it ok to ignore them in the quest for your own enlightenment.

Remember: Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so you cannot fight unconsciousness. If you try to do so, the polar opposites will become strengthened and more deeply entrenched… you will create an “enemy”, and so be drawn into unconsciousness yourself. Raise awareness by disseminating information, or at the most, practise passive resistance.

Weak. Unimpressive.

I have probably been in the target demographic for this kind of self-help book in the last few months: middle-class, frustrated at my job, wanting to do something meaningful with my life, and although I wish this wasn’t a factor, female. Even in this somewhat vulnerable state, I found Tolle to be unconvincing. He gives no real answers – he just skims other people’s ideas and regurgitates superficial thought-bytes.

Oprah must be a really confused person, to fall for this. 

I will be reading A New Earth when I finally get my hands on it, and will report back. It’s an indication of how many people Tolle is reaching that I’m 23th on the waiting list for it at my library.

Here’s hoping most of them find his work as uninspired as I do.