My wife, Barbara, and I live about forty miles northeast of at Atlanta in Flowery Branch, Georgia. (You say you have never heard of Flowery Branch? Well, we have our own NFL football team.) Anyway, I was looking online for tickets to a play being preformed at a venue nearby. As I browsed the ticket venders I ran an across an ad for a program to be presented in June of this year at Atlanta’s Fabulous Fox Theater. It is a lecture by a New Age guru named Eckhart Tolle. He is the author of several best selling New Age books including The Power of Now (1997), A New Earth (2005), and Stillness Speaks (2003). He has also appeared Oprah Winfrey’s and other TV shows over the past two decades. Winfrey promoted Tolle’s books for years.
So just who is Eckhart Tolle? He is a 72 year old German born self-help guru who now lives in Canada. Tolle claims that when he was 29 years old he had a deep transformational spiritual experience that cured him of his depression and gave him a joyful life of bliss. He then developed his spiritual methods, eventually began giving lectures, and started his writing career.
Basically, Tolle’s metaphysical method involves learning how to dissociate one’s subjective thoughts from one’s objective mental perception. That is, a person can objectively observe and analyze one’s own thoughts while thinking them. You have to sort of step outside of yourself and look back at your mind. Needless to say, this philosophy is in total contradiction to a Theistic and Christian worldview. It is something of a hybrid of Far Eastern Thought and Naturalistic pop psychology.
Now I don’t question Tolle’s right to write his books or speak at the Fox Theater or anywhere else for that matter. What I don’t get is this: Why would anyone pay 345 dollars for a seat to hear an hour lecture by a man who, if you have ever heard him speak, utters what seems to me to be incomprehensible. My guess is that once people hear Tolle’s talks, they will need to buy his books to try and really understand what he said. In any case, his lectures are available free online. Nevertheless, like most New Age gurus and spiritual charlatans (and many of them are “Christian”), Tolle has accumulated a fortune selling books, tapes, and tickets, and conducting expensive retreats. If you are a Christian I hope you have more discernment than to waste your time and money on this or any other New Age practice.
By the way, my tickets to the play cost $20 each.