In November, 2015 I made a presentation about Waking Up by Sam Harris and my own spiritual
journey at Open Circle. Afterwards several people wanted to talk with me. One lady asked me if
I had heard of Eckhart Tolle. I had. She asked me if I had read his book A New Earth. I had not.
Then she said with great intensity that that book saved her life and she walked away. I would no
longer recognize that lady but I will long remember the very powerful connection I felt with her at
that moment.
Soon afterward I bought and read A New Earth, a very different book than Waking Up. At that time I thought Eckhart Tolle could possibly become a spiritual guide to me. However, his videos did not hold my interest and I had some growing concerns about him.
I do think that Eckhart has things of interest and of value to say.
As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival… Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness.
We do not know and we cannot know the history of the development of human consciousness nor the history of the development of our subjective appreciation of beauty. But it is interesting to speculate as Eckhart does. It seems to me that the appreciation of the True, the Beautiful and the Good are important elements of spirituality.
Why did Eckhart Tolle write this book?
This book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness, that is to say, to awaken. In that sense, this book is not “interesting.” Interesting means you can keep your distance, play around with ideas and concepts in your mind, agree or disagree. This book is about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will be meaningless.
I am intrigued by the ideas of awakening, of enlightenment and of altered states of consciousness. For me, spirituality is about transformation and transcendence. But A New Earth did not change the state of my consciousness nor do I consider the book to be meaningless.
Eckhart correctly describes aspects of the human condition. Fears and desires drive human behavior and the result is much misery. Understanding ourselves, understanding our own fears and desires and how they influence our egos and drive our own behaviors seems to me to be very useful information.
But I have a fundamental point of disagreement with Eckhart.
Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness… You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
If I believed Eckhart, it would leave me profoundly pessimistic. It would mean that human progress would only be possible if humans reached a new and better state of consciousness. It would mean that, individually, progress would be possible only if we each change the state of our consciousness.
In my opinion, progress has been made by human societies by people trying to do good in every field of human endeavor. Individually, many people do good in many ways and do not seem to have a different state of consciousness. A spiritual path, a path I am trying to follow, is not the only path to individual or societal progress.
I do not think that I have within me an essential nature that includes goodness that somehow needs to be allowed to emerge. However, I also think that if someone believes they have such a nature and have taken actions to facilitate that nature emerging, it is possible that this will be manifested with good behaviors. A belief that there has been some significant shift in consciousness may have good results even if it is not really truely what happened.
... the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.
The idea that the feeling that I am something living inside my head is an illusion seems reasonable to me. I have never had the experience of puncturing this illusion but I can accept that others have. Others may have had a feeling that they have an essential self that is different than the “I” that is the thinker of thoughts. But I am left wondering if that feeling of an essential self is just another illusion, albeit a very different illusion than our sense of self.
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think “I” but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self.
Again I have a fundamental point of disagreement with Eckhart although I think he is half right. When I speak it is always I who speaks. But I can accept that I am a mental construct and that that is not all that I am.
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure… The unconscious compulsion to enhance one’s identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind. One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification… One of the most basic levels of identification is with things… Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more.
Now I think Tolle is expressing thoughts worth considering.
The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself.
What Tolle says about our egos is interesting. It seems to me that as a result of evolutionary processes humans have a strong drive to survive. As humans developed minds, those minds are likely to be shaped by survival needs.
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position— a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.
A New Earth has helped me become more aware of my desire to be right. I have been highly opinionated since my teen years but only now am I beginning to see the connection between defending my opinions and my sense of self. I am now trying harder to understand the opinions of others without any need to prove them wrong.
...it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane than the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.
The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.
Intuitively, it seems to me that Eckhart Tolle has more than a little wisdom.