Eckhart Tolle: America's Guru Of The Moment
San Francisco: Earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey looked into a camera and announced to the world that she was about to do the "most exciting thing I've ever done." Addressing an Internet audience, Winfrey said: "I am most proud of the fact that all of you have joined us in this global community to talk about what I believe is one of the most important subjects. And presented by one of the most important books of our times."
Sitting across from her was the book's author, a somewhat mysterious man named Eckhart Tolle. And if you haven't heard of him, you haven't spent much time in the self-help section of a bookstore in the last decade or so.
Tolle, 60, is the German-born spiritual speaker and author of "The Power of Now." With a seemingly limitless pool of middle-class discontent to tap into - and a major push from Winfrey - he has become the most popular spiritual author in the United States. His books hold the top two spots on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback advice books. Since March 3, he has been host to a weekly online seminar series alongside Winfrey in support of his 2005 book, "A New Earth," which is her latest book club selection and No. 1 on the list.
His secret, according to fans, publishing industry experts and booksellers, is packing thousands of years of teaching - from Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare and even the Rolling Stones - into what one of his publishers, Constance Kellough, called "a clean contemporary bottle."
"He's essentially taken some of the wisdom of the ages and said, 'Let me make this easier for you,' " said Vivien Jennings, a major independent bookseller in Fairway, Kansas.
Tolle, who declined to be interviewed for this article, describes his message as both simple to learn and potentially world changing. In short, he believes that followers should turn off the mind's chatter, embrace the present and drop the ego, which he sees as a manipulative and divisive force. "The ego always wants something from other people or situations," Tolle writes. "There is always a hidden agenda, always a sense of 'not enough yet,' of insufficiency."
It is a message that resonates with baby boomers like Rachelle Quimby, 54, of San Anselmo, California, who attended two sold-out speeches by Tolle in Marin County in early March. Quimby, who said she belonged to two Eckhart Tolle groups devoted to meditation and watching his videos, said she worried about the world as much as she fretted about the ride home. "There's a lot of things wrong with the world: war, conflict, road rage," she said. "He's taught me to be more present. And if you're present with yourself, how can you scream at somebody on the road or bomb another country?"
Tolle suggests that by living in the moment and in touch with what he calls "the totality," good things may start happening to you.
For all his fame, many details of Tolle's personal history are murky. A biography provided by his American paperback publisher, Plume, offered few hints beyond his educational background, including a stint at Cambridge and his current hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives with his business partner and girlfriend, Kim Eng. A spokesman for the university confirmed Tolle began work on a doctorate degree there in 1977, but did not finish.
Tolle's own representatives had fewer details. "We don't have a lot of knowledge about Eckhart Tolle as a person," said a woman who answered the phone last week at the Vancouver office of Eckhart Teachings, and who asked not to be identified.
According to past interviews and various published accounts, however, Tolle was born as Ullrich Tolle in Lünen, Germany, in 1948. Tolle says his family left Germany when he was 13 and he subsequently studied at the University of London. (The spokesman for the university could not divulge information without Tolle's permission.)
In the introduction to "The Power of Now," Tolle said he suffered from "a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression" until he was 29, when he had a personal epiphany. "I heard the words 'resist nothing' as if spoken inside my chest," he writes, saying he felt he was falling into a void. "Suddenly, there was no more fear."
But what happened for the next 15 years is unclear; Tolle writes that he spent time wandering and sitting in London's parks, with "no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity," but a sense of "intense joy." At some point, he changed his name to Eckhart in deference to the 13th-century German theologian, Meister Eckhart, and started teaching around England as a spiritual coach.
In Vancouver in the mid-1990s, Tolle met Kellough, a marketing executive who held casual meditation sessions in her office waiting area. Shortly after, Kellough published "The Power of Now" on her start-up imprint, Namaste, in 1997. Two years later, the book was picked up by New World Library, a larger New Age publisher in Novato, California. A year after that, Winfrey made a small mention of the book in an early issue of O: The Oprah Magazine. In 2002, Winfrey told her television audience that the book was "essential spiritual teaching." The book has sold about 5 million copies worldwide, according to New World Library.
Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said that Tolle was just part of a surging market that includes "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne and "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, two other spiritually minded, mass-appeal best sellers backed by Winfrey.
"The books are really all the same," Nelson said. "The message is how to be happier, how to live the life you want, how to be at peace, how to be a more successful human. The genre never goes away, it just slightly changes its form. But it's doing amazingly well right now."
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Source: Jesse McKinley on March 25th, 2008 in the International Herald Tribune - http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/arts/tolle.php?page=1
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