Tag: Eckhart Tolle

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.

Meister Eckhart was a German theologian, philosopher and one of the great Christian mystics, born near Erfurt, in Thuringia.

Meister is German for "Master", referring to the academic title Magister in theologia he obtained in Paris. He became a Parisian Professor of Theology and took a leading pastoral and organizational role in the Dominican Order.

Coming into prominence during the decadent Avignon Papacy and a time of increased tensions between the Franciscans and Eckhart's Dominican Order of Preacher Friars, he was brought up on charges later in life before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition. Tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII, his "Defence" is famous for his reasoned arguments to all challenged articles of his writing and his refutation of heretical intent.

He purportedly died before his verdict was received, although no record of his death or burial site has ever been discovered.

Meister Eckhart has gained a large following in recent years. The depth and universality of Eckhart's teaching has drawn seekers of truth, Christian and non-Christian alike. His radical and penetrating insight makes him a natural point of reference for a genuinely spiritual understanding.

Since 1980 steps have been taken by the Dominican Order, supported by lay people and friends, to seek an official declaration from the Pope in order to acknowledge "the exemplary character of Eckhart's activity and preaching and to recommend his writings (particularly the spiritual works, treatises and sermons) as an expression of authentic Christian mysticism and as trustworthy guides to the Christian life according to the spirit of the gospel".

Meister Eckhart has influenced profoundly the contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle who changed his first name as a reference to this great mystic.

Oprah Winfrey is an American media personality, actress, television producer, literary critic and magazine publisher, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.

She is considered a prominent spiritual icon and an influential New Age promoter. She has had numerous famous spiritual and self help authors and personalities on her show, she also speaks openly about her own beliefs and spirituality.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.

Emerging as a spiritual icon

During the late 90's Winfrey emerged as an influential spiritual leader. Since 1994, when she abandoned traditional talk-show fare for more edifying content, and 1998, when she began 'Change Your Life TV', Oprah's most significant role has become that of spiritual leader.

To her audience of more than 22 million mostly female viewers, she has become a postmodern priestess — an icon of church-free spirituality. On the season premier of Winfrey's 13th season Roseanne Barr told Winfrey "you're the African Mother Goddess of us all" inspiring much enthusiasm from the studio audience. The animated series Futurama alluded to her spiritual influence by suggesting that "Oprahism" is a mainstream religion in 3000 AD.

In 2008 Winfrey endorsed author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose", which sold several million copies after being selected for her book club. During a Webinar class, in which she promoted the book, Winfrey stated "God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience…then that's not truly God." Frank Pastore, a Christian radio talk show host on KKLA, was among the many Christian leaders who criticized Winfrey's views, saying "if she's a Christian, she's an ignorant one, because Christianity is incompatible with New Age thought."