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A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to join Eckhart Tolle, as he came to speak in Denmark. My friend and I saw that he was coming several months prior to that and decided to go and see him and hopefully talk to him. In spite of both of us being quite poor, my friend was a single mother with a small child and I was a student, we saved up the equivalent of 250  Euro or 370 US $ that the ticket to see Tolle costed. Both of us had prior to this read “The Power of Now” and at that stage I had started reading “A New Earth” as well. So you can say that we were hardcore Tolle fans, although my friend was (and as far as I know still is) a bigger fan than me. I was fascinated by the story of how Eckhart Tolle became Eckhart Tolle, meaning how he got from being a German College nobody to being a spiritual guide for millions of people (not to mention a very rich man). At the time I was very interested in disengaging the personality as I perceived to be in the way of “the real me”. Tolle both supported that view, but also nuanced it by saying that we should accept ourselves unconditionally. That sounded good to me.  However what I have only realized recently, was that I was even more fascinated by how Tolle had achieved the status he had. I secretly desired becoming a guru, a superhero, a star and of course having a lot of money, in such a way where no one would blame me for it and where I would go to sleep with a good conscience. If there are any readers out there who are familiar with Tolle’s work and life (perhaps more than me), you will know that he was a university professor teaching in Germany at the time where he had his “enlightening” break-through. He was miserable with his life, at the brink of suicide and suddenly he experienced himself breaking into two parts. After that he was more or less enlightened and the story goes that he spent the next two years or so in a state of permanent bliss, sitting on a park bench. He sat there until a publisher, who had felt drawn to him, came and gave him a lot of money and an opportunity to write a book. (At least that is how I remember reading the story) I went to Tolle’s website to double check this story and here the description is even more vauge:

“At the age of 29, a profound inner transformation radically changed the course of his life. The next few years were devoted to understanding, integrating and deepening that transformation, which marked the beginning of an intense inward journey.”

So he had this amazing experience, which  I was extremely fascinated of. In my eyes he had so easily broken free of the chains of personality, experience and even the runt of an everyday life. So he became my roll model in that sense, rather than his teachings actually “speaking” to me.  Believe me, I tried. I tried feeling it, being it and I did practice the exercises that Tolle suggested. But looking back at my experiences with Tolle, it was as much an inner as an outer scam. Back to the day where I ‘met’ Eckhart Tolle. My friend and I arrived at the place where Tolle would speak, which was a huge concert hall in the center of Copenhagen. Thousands of people were there, mostly women, and some men and slowly the room filled up. I applied within myself a reverent expression, and I saw others doing the same. At the same time I was struggling inside myself with “feeling it”. I had previously gone to spiritual conventions and often felt cheated in that most of it were clearly created for profit, yet pretending to be “enlightened” and benevolent. It made me sick, but I kept going. I had a similar experiences with the Tolle event, especially cause I had spent so much money on seeing him. So I mustered a serene an calm feeling and sat down waiting for “the man himself to arrive”. I could see below me further down on the front seats a row of celebrities that I knew from TV and the tabloids. They also looked very serene, yet in an elitist “front-row” kind of way. If I recall correctly, one of them was wearing sunglasses. Then he came out, Tolle and he talked and it was difficult to hear what he was saying. I tried getting some of his energy, by sort of awkwardly ”opening myself up” to him, but it did not really work. I could not feel it and afterwards I blamed myself and believed that there was something wrong with me because I was not able to “feel it” and get a profound spiritual experience from listening to Tolle (and after having paid that much money).  Soon after that, I stopped reading Tolle’s books and I slowly but surely started realizing how I had in fact deceived myself into a major self-delusion through the “support” of Eckhart Tolle’s books and the entire movement that he represented. I realized that what I required was to be self-honest with and as myself. That is another story. Now – if one goes to Tolle’s website, the very first point that springs in ones eyes, is the sentence “Creating a new world together”. When I was a Tolle-Follower, I believed that we were in fact changing the world, through following Tolle, through meditating and “accepting myself unconditionally” and essentially applying the Buddhist principle of avoiding desires and separating oneself from the mental experience of self. However, if we have a self-honest look at the world – which is simply to look at what is here, physically and in fact – it is clear that the world is not going to change from us drawing ourselves back into ourselves and refrain from standing self-responsible for this world through separating ourselves from what is Here. I realized this within and as myself, when I started simply applying self-honesty and for the first time in years were able to move myself and accelerate my process. Until then I had followed teachings such as Tolle’s that actually supports people to separating themselves from who and as how they’ve allowed themselves to exist and within that supporting them to abdicate self-responsibility. At the same time there is an entire hype that “we ARE changing the world” and “we ARE raising consciousness” – and it was within that I started blaming myself because I was not “feeling it”. No wonder I was not feeling it – it is not real. Changing reality starts with actually changing the reality of and as ourselves within standing self-responsible for all and everything we exist within and as – to do this we require to bring all of ourselves together, not to separate ourselves into parts – which is ironic as Tolle and the entire movement  promotes ‘oneness’ – but the problem is that this oneness is disregarding equality and thereby ends up being oneness of and as deception – a coming together in a mutal deceptive oneness. This can clearly be seen within my ‘encounter’ with Eckhart Tolle – how more than 2000 people were gathered, all paying a large sum of money simply to hear Tolle speak. It can also be seen within how it was pop culture celebrities for whom the front rows were reserved for. It can also be seen within my experience of pretentious serenity and reverence that I most likely shared with every other person in that room. Where is “the world” that we are apparently changing in any of this? Where is it really in Tolle’s words? When do any of the Tolle followers actually stand up for Life in self-honesty? Several videos on Youtube from different (Destonian) users criticizing Tolle has been removed from Youtube on a claim of Copyright infringement from the “Tolle Movement” – since Youtube complied and since there is an industry of spirituality behind Tolle, we can (at least polemically) conclude  that this means that one is not allowed to question ’the establishment’ of capitalist-lightworkers because within doing so, one might risk to expose the scam that spirituality is and has become. I was deceived by Eckhart Tolle – but I was really deceived by myself. I allowed myself to deceive myself because I preferred having closed eyes. I preferred a program where I could conveniently within a belief that I was changing the world, sustained by an millions of people around the world doing the same (albeit only the middleclass Elite) yet continue to exist in and as abdication of self-responsibility. Eckhart Tolle as such ironically represents the system of inequality, deception and separation. Therefore, when you got a capitalist-lightworker like Echart Tolle against you, you know you’re in the ‘right spot’ and should simply keep on doing what you are doing. I AM ONE VOTE FOR A DIRECT WORLD – WITH NO SPIRITUAL MIDDLE-MEN  I AM ONE VOTE FOR AN EQUAL MONEY SYSTEM – TO ENSURE THAT THE ONENESS WE LIVE, IS EQUAL AND DIGNIFIED FOR ALL LIFE. I AM ONE VOTE FOR A HUMAN BEING THAT VALUES LIFE AS LIFE

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