ebruary 27, 2022

Eckhart Tolle and the Fallacies of Borrowed Buddhism

By Deborah C. Tyler
Eckhart Tolle is the most prolific public psychotherapist in the English-speaking
world. Jordan Peterson is comparably famous, but Peterson is not primarily a
psychotherapist; he provides mass-audience, values-driven counseling, especially
for young people.

Although the terms "counseling" and "psychotherapy" are often used interchangeably,
they are fundamentally different methods of advancing human well-being.
Psychological counseling refers to helping people make good choices and improved
adjustments to life. Psychotherapy is a process of reconditioning, re-educating,
and changing mental response patterns including emotion, cognition, and beliefs in
order to relieve mental distress and disorder. The methodology of psychotherapy is
inherently morally neutral and independent of and agnostic toward religion or
spiritual premise. Psychotherapy can be applied to the aims of a particular
religion or belief system, but if that belief system is fallacious in the first
place, the psychotherapy will create as much trouble as it solves.

Eckhart Tolle's psychotherapeutic method aims to bring about mental peace and
fulfillment through bringing about the end, or at least the suspension, of the
"egoic mind." In Tolle's model, the conditioned egoic mind or egoic reaction is
the culprit that causes harmful thinking, labeling, and judging, each of which in
turn prevents entering a state of "the isness of now," or full engagement with the
present moment. When people suspend the egoic mind through awareness-shifting
practices such as contemplating nature and heightening perception, they enter a
"transcendent dimension" or "essence identity" and find peace that Tolle has called
by different words, and now calls "Presence."

Tolle's model is a meditation practice almost identical to the psychotherapeutic

movement called mindfulness. However, Tolle doesn't like that word because he is
after the Buddhistic emptied mind, not a full one.

Eckhart Tolle offers a useful self-help model of psychotherapy. I play his

webinars as ambient music because his childlike monotonal speech is relaxing. And
his basic advice, to take your mind off all the chicken poop and contemplate how
beautiful what is is, is undeniably practical and true. But two main fallacies
limit the good Tolle can bring to the world. One is intellectual, the other
spiritual.

Tolle does not know what the ego is. He does not understand the indispensable
purpose the ego serves in enabling true valuation and navigating life. More
importantly, Tolle does not know that the illusions of egoism cannot be eliminated
by shifting awareness, because redirecting awareness from worries to a daffodil is
in itself an ego-directed response. The problem of egoism or selfishness is not a
problem of misdirected awareness; it is a problem of lack of love. Tolle does not
know that the only power that destroys egoism is love, and the only source of that
power of love is God.

Tolle almost never uses the word "love." The deculturated Buddhism that is the
philosophical matrix of Tolle's model of emptying the mind lost moral and
evaluative dimensions as it was imported to the sophisticated, post-Christian West
to fill Westerners' spiritual, moral, and values vacuums. The secularized Eastern
philosophy that is the basis of Tolle's psychotherapy is an imputation of
spirituality that can momentarily comfort the feverish imagination but cannot
engender goodness or take a stand against organized evil because it arrived in the
West stripped of the power of divine love.
Tolle is an engaging psychotherapist. He possesses the enthusiasm and naturalness
that come to therapists who are teaching a simple method from direct personal
experience. At the age of 29 in 1977, he received a glimpse "into a state of deep
bliss," which released him from the severe depression he had suffered for years.

After receiving this glimpse, Tolle changed his first name and discontinued his
formal education. He adopted the lifestyle of the wandering sannyasin of the
"isness of now," couch-surfing at friends' homes, entering a Buddhist monastery,
and eventually moving to the British New Age Center of Glastonbury. After writing
a bestseller popularized by Oprah Winfrey, he became the opposite of a begging bowl
jockey — a mega-millionaire who sells webinars, workshops, retreats, and millions
of books. Good for Eckie! But he is mistakenly recognized as a world-leading
spiritual teacher rather than what he is: a psychotherapist.

The most comprehensive explanation of the necessity of the ego for the journey of
the soul is found in Discourses by Meher Baba, in the sections on The Nature of the
Ego and Its Termination: "The ego emerges as an explicit and unfailing
accompaniment to all the happenings of mental life in order to fulfill a certain
need. The part played by the ego in human life may be compared to the function of
ballast in a ship. The ballast in a ship keeps it from oscillating too much."

This is why it is necessary to have a strong ego in order to live a productive

life, and people of the greatest achievement tend to have very strong egos. The
problems that Tolle mistakenly believes are caused by the "egoic mind" are actually
caused by egoism, or the tendency of the ego to solve mental conflicts through
false valuation.

The ego attempts to solve its inner conflicts through false valuation and wrong
choice. It is characteristic of the ego that it takes all that is unimportant as
important and all that is important as unimportant. Thus power, fame, worldly
attainments and accomplishments are really unimportant, but the ego takes delight
in these possessions and clings to them as "mine."

—Discourses

The problem of false valuation by the ego is not solved by distracting awareness
from the "egoic mind" as Tolle suggests. The problem of false valuation is solved
by practice of intelligent and firm true valuation in all matters of life. In
summary, Tolle incorrectly concludes that "[e]go is the unobserved mind." He
teaches that all that is necessary to remove ego and access Presence is to alter
awareness and observation. But the Presence Tolle chases through management of
mental awareness is itself a projection of the mind.

The only experience which makes for the slimming down of the ego is the experience
of love, and the only aspiration which makes for the alleviation of separateness is
the longing to become one with the Beloved.

—Discourses

Because Eckhart Tolle does not recognize that love alone diminishes egoism and
engenders peace and happiness, his work is morally neutral and oblivious to the
challenge of true valuation in everyday life. He automatically and unconsciously
endorses the left-wing, anti-freedom magisteria obsession with "gender" (sic) and
race as pre-eminent categories of human identity. The deadening preoccupation with
racial categorization weighs down the content of some of his recent webinars. When
he shares Eckhart's favorite things, they are not raindrops on roses or warm woolen
mittens; it's Google. Eckhart loves him some Google, which he describes as a
"conscious corporation." Nuff said about making the world a better place.
Eckhart Tolle is not a spiritual guide. He does offer a simple method to pause in
your day, smell the Mozart, and listen to the blueberry muffin. If that helps you
focus on unchanging truth within us all, that's good.

Image: Eckhart Tolle via YouTube.

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Robin Leigh
5 months ago
A lot of words to describe a godless, new age, modern day quack. Most of Oprah
Winfey's celebrity creations fit this description and her audience figured it out
around 2009.
Stephen Daly
5 months ago
Any one here to buy snake oil.

Tolle has completed no formal education, never had to show he understood classical
psychotherapy, never had to demonstrate to a PhD professor that he wasn't goofy.
He's not a licensed therapist in any State in the U.S.
The majority of his book, A New Earth, explicitly destroys any self identity or
personal character in the reader. He trashes what he sees as any shred of toxic
male masculinity.
Now we know the true meaning of brain washing: you have to wipe the brain
completely of any existing ideas before it will accept the illogical.