Why eckhart tolle is an idiot

Look over all your posts here and try to observe how you have used this image for egoic purposes. Try to use this instance as a pointer for yourself. Every moment has the potential for spiritual awareness. Lots have said that but Tolle made me remember it. If I am That has not allowed you to go deeper, then discard it because it seems like you have tied yourself to it for egoic reasons. Most spiritual seekers will not read Nisargadatta but they will read Tolle. The more teachers the merrier!!!

Spiritual messages ought to be disseminated! If you feel the reality of that inner depth, you will want to shout it from the rooftops, not criticize those who are shouting it! What I mean is that you have become enamored with the words but have missed what the words point to. Nisargadatta seems not to have allowed you to take that next step. What he has become is a sort of philosophical keystone for you — something against which to compare other spiritual teachings negatively.

Who knows what might take you deeper…maybe if you are willing to listen openly it could be Tolle, maybe Osho, maybe a sunset, maybe a musical piece, maybe a miture session where you just sit silently. Your mind is your master right now instead of your servant. Anyway, I have my own personal guru.

I shared your comments with him. He laughed and said that you came off as if you were preaching to a puppet in your imagination in order to inflate your own sense of self-importance, and you had no idea who or what I am. I actually came across your comments initially on that website.

Philosophy stays at the level of the mind. Secondly, its counter-intuitive! Imagine if you read a passage in the Bible where Jesus says something to his disciples that just knocks you off your feet. From that moment forward you simply cannot see life the same way — you just awaken to reality in a way you never thought possible.

But then, some scholar proves scientifically that the historical Jesus never existed. If you depend for your spiritual awareness on the behaviour of your humble guru, what will you do if he wins the lottery tomorrow and starts to live the high life?

Is your spiritual awareness so fragile that it depends on something so tenuous, so subject to change? Your ego is what insists that you judge spiritual teachers based on their lifestyles. The seemingly most humble spiritual teacher in the world can also be the most egoic if their sense of self is dependent on this behavioral trait. What part of you is asking that and why is it so important? Obviously, beyond the level of thought, there is no such distinction.

Maybe try to observe that part of you that is so concerned with these labels. At least let me illustrate one of my original points above about quoting spirituality out of context:.

Of course, it would be just as disingenuous. Not really. Even that quote has some built in context that clearly indicates that the kind of suffering he refers to is mental, and a kind of clinging. Nisargadatta, as you probably know, died of a very painful throat cancer. I said he is my favorite of the gurus. He makes a clear division between mental suffering, which has to do with attitude, identification, clinging, and so on, and other kinds of suffering which one might not be able to endure, even if one is enlightened.

That is a more realistic perspective, which some may not like, because they fear something terrible might happen to them, and convince themselves that it will not if they have the proper attitude. Maharaj does not cater to the weakness of the ego, but your Tolle and Osho do, because it sells better.

And what he said seemed true in relation to my own insights, reason, and entheogenic-engendered mystical experiences. You obviously have no real understanding of philosophy if you think it is just about abstract ideas. Unless those ideas are a means to an end that is outside of language structure they are meaningless.

Many philosophers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have talked about the limitations of reason. Do you so flatter your own self that you dismiss all philosophers as not being spiritual? Do you honestly believe that you are more spiritual than Socrates? We can logically understand that there is that which the human mind can never encapsulate, and many philosophers have discussed the value of seeking just that which can not be apprehended my reason or the mind.

You do a terrible disservice both to philosophy and to yourself in characterizing it as merely cerebral conjecturing. As I said before, Tolle is just mouthing Maharaj and Advaita, watering it down, sugar-coating it, and selling it to a contemporary audience who are not looking for real spirituality or transcendence not really , but rather a placebo or anodyne to make life less scary or difficult for them. Tolle and Osho sell fantasies. With Maharaj you can alleviate self-imposed mental suffering, possibly, by overcoming identification with a limited and vulnerable separate self in a seemingly hostile universe.

However, you cannot overcome physical laws, or protect yourself from unexpected catastrophe. People take this very literally, suddenly THINK they now know they are enlightened, and then go around the internet parading their new status. They CLING TO NOTIONS that enlightenment is not different from quotidian existence, in which case, the only real difference between their enlightened selves and those they preach to, or their own previous lives, is the newfound false conviction that they are enlightened, which they absolutely are not.

Frequently, not surprisingly, practitioners of watered-down Advaita become enlightened after smoking weed. Really, they are just high and contemplating spiritual ideas at the same time. He was a fraud. Yes, a very good wat to evaluate people is by how they treat others.

Amassing ridiculous wealth while your own kind just outside the gates of your ashram lead desperate and poor lives shows no real appreciation of life or the core shared beingness of all people. No, it is not a good thing if the ideas of this or that fraud or deluded and possibly megalomaniacal individual help others to delude themselves into thinking they are already enlightened, when their presumptuous and condescending behavior shows they are anything but.

The reason people who have used Advaita to delude themselves that they are enlightened parade around the internet preaching is that they need other people to also believe they are enlightened a sure sign that they are NOT.

You have preached a lot to me, and talked down to me, telling me that I completely miss the point of spirituality. This is you claiming to be more spiritual than me. Quite a claim, indeed. It is the height of arrogance and presumptuousness to present yourself to someone else as their spiritual superior.

Ask yourself why you talked down to me in comment after comment on my blog, without even looking at my art. Admit your arrogance. He seemed so incorruptible and I remember a few years ago joking with my friend what it would be like it discover a darker side to Tolle, seeing him sneaking out the back after a talk about presence and simplicity with a wheel-spinning Ferrari into the night. Are you aware what model Jaguar he is now apparently driving?

I ask because I am aware they have a line of ordinary inexpensive sedans. I see you create visual art, I look forward to looking at more of it soon. Reading your comments I was interested to note some of the words coming up that I used in a recent song of mine. Hi Warren. But I just come back to my own life and struggling with this or that problem, and I think someone who is enlightened should be as content as I am — much more so in fact — with as much as I have.

What does a guru need with a luxury sedan? Eckhart repackaged Maharaj, and has even acknowledged his indebtedness. Maharaj gave ONLY free lectures in his home until nearly the day of his death, and lived very, very humbly. The first sign of a fake enlightened person is that he or she has made a business out of ostensibly being enlightened. Hi Eric. Thank you for your reply. I am enjoying the book. I am currently exploring if awakening can be fostered via awareness focused group work being in deliberately conscious small groups I suspect enhances our capacity to snap out of our illusions.

I run relational groups and use a lot of the Gestalt toolkit to help people tune in to present experience while in group process and mutual witnessing.

The world just is there. As soon as I see, I strain, I pierce, and do all kind of things except having a world. Interested to hear your thoughts on this. Back to Tolle, I wonder if buying the Jaguar presuming it is a sensible sedan and not a horsepower ego trip! The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way.

I can only imagine what I might do in his position, and I can see a lot of decisions coming from practicality or just not knowing any better or caring either way rather than ego seeking opulence. For instance, in his position in the craved modern world , giving talks away for free might even be dangerous he might get swamped in public places etc, have too many people overwhelm him with their constant nagging requests so having a management team might just be the best available option he ever came across or that presented itself to him.

I write songs that nobody has yet wanted to pay me money for, nor yet much for my group facilitating work , but if all of a sudden everyone wanted a piece of my work and I had constant calls from people wanting me to be in a million places at once, I guess to save my sanity I would also hire a manager or a secretary, and just accept the world I live in and where it takes me to from there be it imperfect in so many ways.

If I were more busy running groups, I might buy a newer car to save more time for pursuing the activities that seem to bring myself and others the greater consciousness, compassion, connection etc. Rather than willfully turning a blind eye, perhaps he really is like a naive child when it comes to the horrors of the wider commercial world he never had to raise small children recently for instance. My questions are how would an enlightened person survive in a modern consumer world of millions of spiritually starving socially isolated outward projecting lost souls willing to jump into sycophancy to hear just a glimpse of your pedestalled wisdom.

Jesus or Buddha would have had it easier with just a handful of rag tag in-the-flesh followers. No reality TV mass online media idolization groping narcissistic culture to misappropriate their words to newer levels of low.

Perhaps Eckhart is more a product of the modern medium than his intelligence has the capacity to stretch to understand. But I could be entirely wrong here! For myself, I think the more enlightened I become, the more I WANT to challenge and oppose wrongdoing and neglect and rampant commercialisation. The more I want to make schools more community focused and loving and open and exciting, and less humdrum, market driven, bureaucratic little fear prisons. The more I want to oppose corporations running sweatshops in Bangladesh.

The more I want to do something to reduce poverty and war. Living more humbly and lovingly? Buying less iphones and instead connecting with people in their communities more?

Jet traveling less? Singing in a local choir rather than spending thousands of dollars on attending stadium sport? Buying hatchbacks or small motorcycles instead of giant ego stroking SUVs? Has watching his videos and reading his books over the years helped me develop more resolve to live a more compassionate life. Yes I believe so.

May he have at the same time helped others feel less guilty about working in careers that perpetuate profoundly harmful institutions? Great comment! The Buddha and Jesus are both reported to have spent weeks alone, Jesus fasting and the Buddha meditating, before achieving realization, so to speak.

My best guess is that quieting the mind and in particular escaping language is the key. The mind continually projects onto reality and weaves a narrative over it with language. Back to Eckhart.

It sounds like you are trying to make plausible excuses for him. However, I have the same objection to your line of reasoning about him not thinking about various important issues, or being innocent of them, as I do when this is applied to politicians ex.

If you or I can do it in our free time, without any compensation, they can do it with years or decades dedicated to it. And why are so many of them, like OSHO with his 90 Rolls Royces , obsessed with ostentatious opulence, and being worshiped as a god? Why are there so many scandals, such as around Sai Baba, who used his fame and power to molest boys? Ah, but then he could make his videos available online for free, so that everyone could follow his teachings as long as they could get access to the internet.

Last I checked, his materials were pricy. So, in short, the world needs humanitarians, humanists, artists, musicians, doctor, writers, builders… Real people doing real work with their lives. I especially enjoyed your last two paragraphs about being the best people we can. For the act of deliberately thinking of and acting toward what is best in the widest and most conscious and compassionate sense for others is the act of seeing value creating value in consciousness and awakening beyond that experienced through our own singular form, thus taking us away from identification with our singular form.

I appreciate your thoughts on Tolle, and pointing out how he could obviously make his online teachings free. My weak crumbling! But this places him in more of a helpless infantile position than his words indicate he has the potential to at least rise above of. Especially because it takes me from owning my own capacities and experiences, and so from stretching the muscles of my own response-ability. Mark Fairfield alludes to this possibility in an interesting article where he writes:.

Certainly mindfulness can help us to stay engaged with environments that trouble us, but our attitudes about social engagement continue to constrain our interest in relying on mind- fulness to that end. Instead, we are using meditation to insulate ourselves from each other. The neurobiological evidence, however, demon- strates how our emotions are regulated and revised in relationship.

Neuroscientists Lewis, Amini and Lannon describe how mutual resonance serves to keep human beings well supported through a process they call limbic regulation where the first person regulates the physiology of the second, even as he himself is regulated. Neither is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only some- body else can complete.

Together they create a stable, properly balanced pair of organisms. And the two trade their complementary data through the open channel their limbic connection provides. Here is the full article if you are interested. I think I need a balance between both. Thanks for the rare thoughtful and constructive dialogue, in which mutual parties are reasonably well understood.

You proposed that overcoming selfishness and concerning ourselves with the big picture of all of humanity and the environment may be the best route to enlightenment, or may be enlightenment itself. I doubt the good people in Greenpeace, for example, think of themselves as enlightened. Enlightenment, I think, means a dissolution of the personal ego, or more likely identification with it because you need an egoic nexus from which to operate , and this is not required for humanitarian action.

You can have an ego and still do the right thing for the right reasons, even selflessly. If the goal is to fix our planet and make life closer to the living paradise it could be for most people, probably what we need is to overcome corruption, selfishness, and greed which are all so intimately related they are basically one thing. We can overcome it in ourselves, but we need to also overcome rule by the selfish when such rule is hastening our own extinction via anthropogenic global warming, and taking everything else down with us.

Theoretically an enlightened person is not corrupt and not capable of it, however, a lot of spirituality is used as a way to justify corruption as something inevitable, or if it issues from the guru himself or herself , as actually a good which is unfathomable by the unenlightened.

People pose as enlightened in order to give themselves a kind of absolute authority on the highest issues, and they must love the god-like status they accrue to themselves. It just needs unselfish adult people who have some humility and are basically decent. It sounds like group work was very useful for you, but I do think that stepping out of yourself momentarily may or should be a normal part of being a functioning, ordinary person.

Seflishness and self-centeredness are the antithesis of enlightenment, so any progress on the continuum away from selfishness and towards compassion and cooperation is good, however it is achieved. You need not bother about fixing the world or saving the rain forests, they say, but rather you should accept their destruction without attachment or mourning.

You should, they say, not be attracted or repelled by any eventuality, because form their universal perspective the perspective of the infinite universe , none of that really signifies anyway. How many people do you imagine are really enlightened today?

Can you think of even one person who claims to be that you can have real faith in? So it seems much more practical to just see people as they are, and measure them by their behavior and actions, without attributing any super-status to anyone.

If there is no enlightenment, why strive after something unachievable when there are real world achievable goals that will make life better for all of us. There are however thousands of people claiming to be enlightened, especially online, and I find them insufferably condescending. I guess a lot of people want to see themselves as special, and to have followers who see them in that light.

It all kind of reminds me of books on how to be a success, wherein the success of the author lies in selling books on how to be a success. On the other hand, it is possible to have spiritual experiences, learn from them, and apply that knowledge to bettering the world. I am beginning to see it more as temporary or recurring expanded states of consciousness, but that yes, I increasingly believe that the most important thing is how we live our lives and how much we nurture one another to become the best we can be.

I agree that we are effecting our planet and health negatively globally , however I do not see evidence that the mechanism of damage are via anthropogenic global warming i. Who are you going to believe, a global consensus of scientists, or a handful of quacks?

There is no real controversy. I repeat, there is no real controversy. Time Ball has been roundly repudiated. Why do you believe this guy as opposed to say, NASA? Do you really think NASA is stupid? Do you value the scientific method at all? You might as well be on the Titanic arguing that the iceberg is an illusion. Hope you can be open-minded enough to get on the right side of the fence on this issue. All spiritual victim-blaming ever does is cause people to feel guilty about their emotions.

Hello there,.. I can comprehend why people feel this way about victim blaming and spirituality and I also feel the term or word ego is overly used.. I need to elaborate personally what i think and feel and what i have experienced so far in my lifetime as a 39 yr young woman.

I experienced a man exposing himself when i was about 5. I experienced sexual abuse at the age of I also experienced domestic violence of a mental nature and in hindsight…i can see how religion had formed most of the domestic abuse by the way the person spoke to me…. For the purpose of explaining why im saying that…. I do not agree with it…and want nothing to do with it…. We arent just egos.. We deal with people who arent conscious of how theyre behaviour affects other people.

This is just my experience…Im just going to leave that one message for informations sake and I dont want to be replying further as Im generally not a person to post on public forums but i get a deep feeling that many more people share my sentiments…. Like Liked by 1 person. Good points. There is definitely such thing as undeserved, unanticipated tragedy. Who is the angry white phony mystic, and who is the spiritual giant? And why are you talking about spirituality in one breath, and insisting on biological determinism, and using racism in the next?

Perhaps you are punching yourself in the face. The world may never know, or care. Hi Eric! I hope you are doing well! I just wanted to sort of make a point about interpretation. If we run a thought experiment where I have had the most wonderful day of my life with the one and only love of my life and now I go out and tell people about it, my words will not capture the experience that I have encountered. It is not possible because they will have to be me to experience it. Now if I talk about Tolle, maybe its just me and I guess and you would know more since you have more research on it than I do, but I did not interpret him that way at all when I listened to some of his videos.

He separates them into I think pain body, the ego and just pure being. External situation is heavily important as it determines how one will be conditioned in life but there are practices which can be used to step out of these conditional ways of existing thoughts and emotions.

So I think when he talks about all of that he is attempting to distinguish concepts from a human beings perspective which heavily involves emotions from literal situations in the world. If you actually think about it, the situation itself occurs and there are many situations that are horrible, horrifying, amazing, excruciating, exciting, etc. So that eventually we can help people who are in true suffering like you presented due to pure situational circumstances.

So we can maybe dissolve the separation and sense of strong need to defend things that we identify with. It matters enormously if Tolle is enlightened or not. I lost faith and interest in all the popular Western spiritual teachers. Look him up. All of these new gurus, with their expensive retreats and workshops for the wealthy, borrow their philosophy from Hindu Advaita, and usually openly admit it at some point or another. One might as well just go to the source if one wants to understand non-duality, and Advaita, and to do so is cheaper, better, and more authentic.

Tolle just makes it more palatable and accessible to the modern consumer, and he is most questionable when he tries to extrapolate on his own and apply Advaita to contemporary problems.

One can also read all the Ramana Maharshi one wants for free, but I prefer Maharaj. Maharaj gave all his talks for free from his humble home, but Tolle charges exorbitant amounts for his materials, including exclusive retreats at island resorts.

They charge you money for it. Also, these days, honestly, I question all the gurus. What have they done with their lives other than, at best, preach their gospel? Why are none of them great writers, artists, or musicians? What do I get from Eckhart? Watered down, sugar-coated Maharaj, and a bill. I might prefere Stoicism for a more practical philosphy where one has to work and commute and deal with stuff rather than just find peace on a park bench.

So, you could say I just soured on Tolle. At one point I found some of his articulations helpful, but really, only because they helped me keep in mind what Maharaj said better. For that I need something else. Utterly exhausting.

But they are there for a reason and to be respected and listened too. And great post! Glad my post and the comments were helpful. In the end, we may each have to find our own individual paths, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to how to live in all circumstances. And as you figured out, some people get overly enthusiastic about this or that set of pre-existing beliefs that they adopt wholesale, and they think they have all the answers, and they can also proselytize about their new-found clarity of purpose.

I only know that Tolle represents some solutions and practices that work in some situations. Useful, but not a complete cure all.

You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. It is in this sense of the word that I am labeling Tolle as a charlatan.

His nostrums as laid out in The Power of Now are worthless and do not deliver on the promises made for them. I will demonstrate this conclusively over the course of this series. Rather than getting these two parts of himself to have a conversation so that he can find out where the fear is coming from, he immediately decides one of them is not real.

This is the gross error and singular point of departure after which every concept which follows becomes meaningless. You tell me: has this approach worked? This is not how the human psyche functions.

You can repress parts of your personality, but you can never eliminate them. What Tolle has done is to repress what Carl Jung would have called the shadow self. You must fully face and acknowledge it, and come to terms with it through therapy.

It goes extremely deep. All the way back to our primal origins and down through the ages where we survived through mortal combat with the forces of nature, animals, and each other. Civilization is such a recent development that only the thinnest of psychological veneers separates us from our evolutionary legacy of primal fear and rage. These are archaic beliefs. Not a single reputable scientist today would accept that there is any identity absent the neural correlates of consciousness.

After his two-year stint in the park, he decided he would become a spiritual teacher. Tolle uses several devices in the introduction to rhetorically inoculate his readers against questioning. The first is a little curly-cue symbol which is sprinkled throughout the book. Tolle is not used to being questioned. They will probably be answered later in the book, or they may turn out to be irrelevant as you go more deeply into the teaching—and into yourself.

Every good con man butters up his mark as he enlists their cooperation. Tolle is no exception as he pretends to the role of humble facilitator:. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten. Living knowledge, ancient and yet ever new, is then activated and released from within every cell of your body.

They are only stepping stones, to be left behind as quickly as possible. This guy is practically self-refuting. Last time I checked, credibility, accuracy, and evidence were important features in order for something to qualify as knowledge. But as with all atheist critiques of religion, I can only hope this will find its way to some receptive minds which have begun to question their former dogmas, and may be open to eventually realizing that Emperor Tolle has no clothes.

While there is a lot of truth in Tolle's books, it's hard buy that 'enlightenment' visited him while he was deep in the darkness, and in ignorance of spiritual teachings. Wasn't he a college professor? I've watched him on stage as well; he appears to be hunched over, sometimes obsequious, and even unsure of himself. Contrast that to the persona of J.

Krishnamurti, or Guy Finley. I know about being hoaxed, as well. Was a true believer of Carlos Castaneda at one time. Osho was also a very eloquent writer, and conveyed many truths, but his personal life ended in disaster. Be cautious where Tolle is concerned, lest you become disillusioned which is not necessarily a bad thing. I was given Tolle's book "Power of now" by a 52 year old New Ager who has a borderline personality disorder.

She told me that it would explain her fully. She has been cutting herself for 40 years, is sexually traumatized because of childhood abuse, believes that she's going to die during her 68th year because some guru told her so when she was in her 20s, feels no compassion or empathy for anyone or anything, has chronic feelings of emptiness and suicidal thoughts, and avoids confronting the causes of all of the above. The chapters on Pain-Body she avoided. Tolle is worthless against the sever mental illness of such a person.

Just pure spiritual nonsense. Incredible people actually follow this nonsense. Great critique and I absolutely agree with it. Everybody was waiting for U to give the good example… but U failed. The experience Tolle says he had looks like one Ramana Maharshi had when he was sixteen. Soon after that experience he left home, ended in Tiruvannamalai, and wandered from temple basement to mango grove to a cave in the hill nearby. People who saw him provided food for him, beleieving that he was a young swami.

He did not preach or advice for many years. Eventually in answer to questions asked of him by a persistent visitor he wrote anwers in Tamil to questions; they were subsequently published as 14 questions and answers as "Who am I? He died in He wrote a few devotional hymns in Tamil , he translated some Hindu religious classics, and his collected works prose, hymns, translations add up to about pages.

Now I have stumbled upon this page after listening to some tube supposed alien cacaphony. I searched this character on wiki and then to his website. The free trial button finally concluded my thoughts. These type of writings are not to be done for cash, usually for higher meanigful gain to wake and uplift humanity to create and sustain life in cosmic order.

The fact that the media accepts, makes me not really want to read it as we all know the state of garbage flying out of the screen these days. His work sounds very Zionisty to me as the here and now is atypical selfish disregard to heritage and future generations.

And he appeared on Oparah, I rest my case. So I searched Eckhart lies and found your lovely page. The breathing exercises he's giving on his youtube channel seemed to make logical sense.

But then, I saw a vid of him with Deepak Chopra, which brought me to this website. It take a charlatan to recognise one lol. I studied Buddhism for 38 years and have read hundreds of books on consciousness. For my taste, Eckart is the best. He makes consciousness simple and accessible. What is all this hoopla on here? This little man is simply teaching a new group of people to get out of their distorted senses of future and past in favor of being in the now. He's telling us to breath consciously and to detach from all the drama.

He's saying that the peace that arises from these simple practices can make all the difference in a life…and he's right. As for his credentials, who cares? I tell myself to calm down, take some deep yogic breaths and think about what Eckhart might say….

What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

An unassuming man shuffles on towards the staged chair, welcomed by respectfully rapturous applause and, once seated, the room again descends into an expectant lull. When he does speak I am transported back to the summer months I spent last year listening to his audio books. There is a sweet, comforting and almost nostalgic feeling to hearing that voice live, accompanied by that odd feeling you get when you meet someone famous; that feeling where you think you know them quite well, when in reality you only really know their public image.

I have no idea what his favourite colour is or how he takes his tea, and he is completely unaware of my existence despite playing a pivotal role in my life. In his books, Tolle teaches about stepping away from the analytical mind and becoming a witness to the voice in our head rather than being driven by it.

He has come to understand the importance of living in the present moment and all of his books essentially draw back to this concept. Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have.

Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. However, for the time being we will have to leave the present moment, and return to the events leading up to one my many yoga crimes… walking out on Eckhart Tolle.

It quickly became apparent that Eckhart Tolle had always been his own guide from the beginning. As we all experience at some point in our lives, he found himself going in a downward spiral, but unlike most of us he had a sudden realisation that turned his life around.