Early Life

Eckhart Tolle was born Ulrich Tolle, in Germany in a town near Dortmund, to a matter-of-fact mother and an eccentric, head-in-the-clouds father; they fought, then divorced, and his father left the country for Spain.

At the age of 13, he abruptly refused to go to school - "I hated having to study things that were not compatible with my inner being" he said later.

His exasperated mother eventually sent him to live with his father in Spain. "My father said: 'Do you want to go to school here?' I said, of course, 'No.' Then he said: 'Well then, don't. Do what you like. Read.'" Tolle credits his unconventional upbringing with broadening his mind. "Spain at that time was very different than Germany, almost medieval. So I didn't get totally conditioned by one culture. If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it. My conditioning got completely broken, so there was an opening to other world views.

He did not attend formal schooling after age 13, but rather took language and other courses. Later, he attended night colleges to obtain the necessary entrance requirements for studying in a university in England.

In his early 20s he moved to England to study there at the University of London.

Spiritual Transformation

In 1979, at the age of 29, he was a near-suicidal graduate student living in Belsize Park in London, England.

Tolle had just completed a degree in languages and history at the University of London, graduating with a first, yet he was anything but happy.

He said about that:

I'd done well because I was motivated by fear of not being good enough, so I worked very hard.

With no plans for his future, he grew more depressed until, as he puts it:

I couldn't live with myself any longer.

And then he describes being stopped dead by the implications of this sentence:

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real. I was so stunned by this realization that my mind stopped. I was conscious, but there were no more thoughts.

At that point he experienced a dramatic spiritual transformation and blanked out.

By the following morning, he was flooded with a sense of "uninterrupted deep peace and bliss" that has never left him since. That morning, he writes:

I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born.

From this point, things were different: he no longer identified with the "voice in my head" that was doing the thinking. Instead, he could observe his thoughts, as if from a distance. He could see that they somehow weren't real: that the real him was the consciousness watching the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. "There was a wonderful sense of peace," he recalled later. "Not a desensitised peace - you can experience that if you take enough drugs, or drink enough. But a peace that was joyful, and alive, and very alert."

After Transformation

The transformation marked the beginning of intense inward journey. Since he had no spiritual background and knowledge before the experience, he began to read and inquire in various spiritul scripts in order to understand his new state.

In parallel, soon after and despite the transformation, Tolle decided to continue his studies and embark on a doctorate in Latin American literature at Cambridge University. But it felt meaningless; he dropped out after a year. He spent the next two years in London, sleeping on friends' sofas, and spending the days on park benches in Russell Square, or sheltering in the British Library. When money ran out, he took a temporary job of doing office admin for the Kennel Club.

He said about that period:

Externally, one would have said 'this person is completely lost', My mother was very upset, because in her view, I had thrown everything away. And from a logical point of view, that looked quite correct.

Starting to teach & The Power of Now

At that point, his father helped him pay for a flat, and he began to run small group teaching sessions in friends' living-rooms. This marked the beginning of his function as a counselor and spiritual teacher.

But there were many more years to come of what looked, from the outside, like drifting - including a long period on the west coast of the United States, where he started to write The Power of Now. It was first published in 1997, with a print run of 3,000 copies.

The name change from Ulrich to Eckhart is a reference to the 13th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart. The name change was to mark his spiritual transformation.

Tolle now lives a simple life in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with his partner since 2000, a Canadian woman named Kim Eng, who often teaches alongside him. They have no children.

He gives satsangs and lectures around the world.