(Ulrich Leonard Tolle)
An enlightened master without a tradition
Place of birth: the small town of Lünen near Dortmund, Germany
Main place of work and residence:
Canada, Vancouver, British Columbia
Eckhart Tolle was born on February 16, 1948, in Germany. Today he is one of the contemporary spiritual teachers. He is the author of the bestseller The Power of Now (in Russian, “The Power of the Ever-Continuous NOW” or “The Power of the Present Moment”). The book was first published in 1990 in a small print run of 3,000 copies, and by 1996 it had already been published in huge numbers all over the world. Since then it has grown ever more popular; by 2010 it had been translated into 33 languages, and for 9 years now it has topped the bestseller list of The New York Times.
Eckhart Tolle lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife Kim Eng.
Since all of Tolle’s works carry a deep esoteric meaning, it is not always possible to give an unambiguous translation. More than one translator will face the difficulties of translating them. And when 3–5 versions of the translation of his works into Russian appear, it will be possible to say that Eckhart Tolle’s “book” has come to Russia.
Eckhart Tolle was born in the small town of Lünen, near Dortmund, Germany. He changed his name from Ulrich to Eckhart out of his boundlessly deep reverence for the German spiritual philosopher Meister Eckhart. In one of his interviews he speaks of his unhappy early childhood, spent in Germany up to the age of 13, describing the conflict-ridden situation at home and the unpleasant, hostile atmosphere at the school where he attended the primary grades. At 13 he moved to live with his father in Spain, where his father offered him the choice of either going to school with everyone else or having teachers come to the house. Tolle chose home schooling and did not attend an ordinary school until the age of 22. Instead, he approached learning in his own way, devoting himself to the study of philosophy, the foundations of the creative principle, literature, astronomy and languages. At 19 he moved to England, where for three years he taught German and Spanish to businesspeople at a London language school. Towards the end of this period, suffering from severe depression, anxiety and fear, “he began to seek answers by turning to life itself.” In an interview with the Telegraph magazine he said:
At the age of 22 and 23… I became interested in the capabilities of the human intellect. My thoughts were becoming ever more active. I was looking for the answer within my own thoughts, through philosophy, psychology and literature, believing that the answer must be found in the labyrinths of philosophical reflection. This was during the period when I was preparing to enter university and was attending evening classes.
After graduating from the University of London, he went on to Cambridge in 1977, where he began his work as a postgraduate student.
A deep inner transformation of consciousness
“One night in 1977, at the age of 29, after a long period of depression bordering on suicidal tendencies, he went through a deep inner transformation of his own personality and of everything with which he had previously identified himself. It changed the whole of his subsequent life.” “Until my thirtieth year I lived in a state of anxiety and unease that almost never left me, interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. Now I perceive it as if I were speaking of a past life of mine, or even of a life that was not mine at all.”
“Early one morning, shortly after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up with a feeling of eerie, absolute dread. This had happened to me before: I used to wake up with a similar feeling now and then, but this time it was stronger than ever. The hush of the night, the blurred outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything seemed somehow alien, hostile and so devoid of meaning that it stirred in me a deep revulsion towards the world. And the most repulsive thing of all was the fact of my own existence. What was the point of going on with life under the burden of such suffering? Why keep up this unending struggle? I felt that a deep, passionate longing for release, a yearning for non-existence, was now becoming far stronger than the instinctive desire to live.
– I can no longer bear to live with myself. This thought kept repeating itself insistently in my mind. And then, quite suddenly, I realized how unusual and peculiar this thought was.
– Am I one, or are there two of me? If I cannot bear to live with myself, then there must be two of me: the “I” and that very “self” with which I can no longer live. And what if only one of us is real? – I thought.
I was so shaken by this strange realization that my mind seemed to freeze. I remained fully conscious, yet I did not have a single thought, not even a tiny one. Then I felt as if I were being drawn into something like an energy vortex. At first the movement was slow, then it gradually sped up. A terrible fear seized me, and my body began to shake. I heard the words “do not resist”, as if they were coming from within my chest. I felt that I was being sucked into a void. It felt as though this void was inside me rather than outside. Suddenly the fear vanished, and I felt myself in this void. I remember nothing more. I do not remember what happened next.
I was woken by the singing of a bird outside the window. Never before had I heard such a sound. My eyes were still closed, but my imagination painted the image of a precious diamond. Yes, of course – if a diamond could make a sound, this is exactly what it would have to be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was seeping through the curtains. I still had no thoughts at all, and I felt – I knew for certain – that there is something I have yet to come to know, something infinitely greater than we imagine. That soft glow streaming through the curtains was love itself. Tears welled up in my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized it, yet now I understood that I had never before seen this room in its true light. Everything was fresh and untouched, as if it had only just come into being. I picked things up – a pencil, an empty bottle – marveling at their beauty and at how full of life they were.
That day I wandered around the city utterly amazed by the miracle of life on earth, as if I myself had just been born into the world.
For the next five months I lived in a state of deep peace and unbroken bliss. Then the intensity of this state lessened somewhat – or perhaps it only seemed so to me, because this state had become natural for me. I still kept the ability to act in this world, though I understood that whatever I did would most likely add nothing to what I already had.
Of course, I understood that something extremely important, deep and significant had happened to me, but I had no idea at all what exactly it was. This went on for several more years, until I learned from spiritual writings and from spiritual teachers that what had happened to me was precisely what they had all been striving for.
I came to realize that the intense pressure of the suffering I went through that night must have pushed my consciousness to break away from its identification with the unhappy and immeasurably frightened “me”, which, in the end, is nothing other than a fiction created by the mind. This break must have been so complete that this false, suffering “I” immediately shrank, the way an inflatable toy does when its plug is pulled out. What remained then was my true, eternal essence of I Am – consciousness in its pure form, as it had been before its identification with form.
Later, while remaining fully conscious, I learned to enter this inner realm of timelessness and deathlessness, which at first I had felt and perceived as a void. I abided in a state of such indescribable bliss and sacredness that even the initial experience I have just described pales in comparison. When, on the physical plane, I was left for a while with nothing, I had time. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially conditioned identity. I spent almost two years on park benches, living in a state of dazzlingly bright and deep joy.
But even the most beautiful experiences came and went. Yet perhaps the most fundamental of all was the feeling of peace that remained underneath, which has never left me since. At times it is very strong, almost tangible, something that can be felt. At other times it is as if a distant melody were playing somewhere in the background.”
“The Power of Now”
The next morning Tolle wandered around London for a long time, amazed at “how astonishingly beautiful everything around was, and how the presence of the calm of deep inner balance could be felt in everything, even in the traffic.” He said that from then on he constantly felt within himself the power of the presence of this calm of deep inner balance in any situation. After this event, according to the Telegraph Magazine, he spent almost two years in Russell Square, in central London, sitting on a bench in a state of deep inner bliss, “watching the passers-by.” At that time he stayed with a friend, sometimes stayed at a Buddhist monastery, and sometimes slept out in the open on Hampstead Heath. His family considered him “irresponsible, or even insane.”
During that period many people, including his former fellow students from Cambridge, began asking him what had happened to him and what he now believed. Then he moved to Glastonbury in the south-west of England, three hours’ drive from London – a place of alternative lifestyles in the county of Somerset – where he spent more than five years. Soon he began working in London again as a counselor and spiritual teacher.
In 1995, after several visits to the West Coast of North America, Eckhart Tolle, at the age of 47, settled in Vancouver, British Columbia (a province of Canada). Soon after that Tolle published his book The Power of Now (in Russian, “The Power of the Present Moment”, or, in the new Russian version, “The Power of the Ever-Continuous NOW”). By 2008 The Power of Now had been translated into 33 languages, and it has since also been translated into Arabic. Despite criticism from some major media outlets, by August 2000 the book had made it onto the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover books. Two years later it reached the top of that list. In March 2010, more than nine years later, The Power of Now was still on the list, in 7th place.
Video
Tolle’s books in Russian
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Publisher: Ripol Klassik, 2009
Hardcover, 336 pages
ISBN 978-5-386-01833-7
Print run: 3,000 copies
The Power of Now
Publisher: Sofia, 2009
Paperback, 288 pages
ISBN 978-5-91250-901-8
Print run: 4,000 copies
Stillness Speaks
Publisher: Sofia, 2010
Paperback, 160 pages
ISBN 978-5-399-00053-4
Print run: 5,000 copies
Practicing the Power of Now
Publisher: Sofia, 2009
Paperback, 160 pages
ISBN 978-5-91250-902-5
Print run: 4,000 copies
Eckhart Tolle. The Power of the Present Moment. Thich Nhat Hanh. Peace Is Every Step. Living Buddha, Living Christ
Publisher: Nirvana, 2002
Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN 5-94726-020-4
Print run: 3,000 copies
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Publisher: Ripol Klassik, 2009
Hardcover with dust jacket, 336 pages
ISBN 978-5-386-01488-9
Print run: 3,000 copies