c. 2008 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) In a self-help age, it should not surprise us that self-improvement guru Oprah Winfrey would find a spiritual guru obsessively attentive to the self.
Eckhart Tolles is a slightly built, quiet, self-described recluse. His best-selling “The Power of Now” caught Oprah’s attention, and the two discuss his newest title, “A New World,” chapter by chapter in a weekly “Satellite University.”
Though he’s reticent to discuss the details of his spiritual journey, this is what we know about Tolles: He was born in Germany and spent his teenage years living in Spain with his father. He rejected formal education because he found schools to be a “hostile environment.” He moved to England where he graduated from the University of London and took additional courses in philosophy at Cambridge.
Prone to severe depression, one night during a dream he heard himself say, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” He concluded that he must be “two selves” _ a detestable self that his real, purer self could not live with.
Tolles devotes considerable time to dissecting the evils of the ego (bad self), the self you cannot live with. Ego has an insatiable appetite for more: more stuff, more fame, more money _ more of everything that will not satisfy you. Ego is the unawakened you that keeps you from awakening to the essential consciousness that is the real you.
Ego’s biggest ally is “thinking,” and religion has entrapped us in dogma. Your dense mind structure, combined with materiality (body), are encumbrances that keep you from connecting to the underlying one-life consciousness that is your true divine life essence.
Tolles believes ego is what the New Testament describes as sin, pointing out that sin means to “miss the mark” and that the greatest sin is to “miss the point of human existence.” He claims Jesus’ call to “deny ourselves” is a reference to rejecting the bad ego in favor of the inner divine life consciousness.
In Tolles’ view, the planet is weighed down by our collective delusions and has reached a crisis stage where we have two choices: evolve to a higher consciousness or die. Only by reaching a collective consciousness can we bring the new heaven (aka a transformed human consciousness) and new earth (reflected in the human realm) promised in the New Testament.
For the student of world religions, Tolles is playing familiar tunes. He reminds me of the editor who, in considering a book proposal, said, “Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good!”
I am clearly in the minority. Millions of people are drawn to Tolles’ repackaged Eastern thought blended to Western tastes and likings. Why?
Tolles is tapping into a widespread dissatisfaction with our daily lives. “Is That All There Is?” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” play well in a consumeristic age that offers everything and delivers nothing but stuff.
Tolles connects our well-documented spiritual hunger to our dissatisfaction with status-quo religion. He breaks away from the stale orthodoxy of a right-brained Western Christianity and elevates mystical experience. “Spirituality has nothing to do with what you believe,” he tells us, “it has to do with your state of consciousness.”
All these themes play well with Oprah, who was once described by Christianity Today as a post-modern priestess, an icon of church-free spirituality.
Ironically, by splitting essential human nature into two selves, Tolles offers a self-help age a way of obsessing with the self and denying the self, while at the same time creating an explanation for why self-help generally fails. If, after devouring a bazillion self-help books your self is not improving, blame it on your bad self, which is obviously suppressing your good inner self.
My mind was drawn to what Jesus once said: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?”
Jesus did call us to self-denial _ not as a path to discovering our better self, but as a first step in acknowledging our need for the living God in whose image we are created as thinking, relational, creative, moral and spiritual beings.
(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)
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