Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle (born in Lünen, 1948) is a German-born spiritual teacher and writer who has lived in Vancouver since the mid-1990s. He belongs to the contemporary world of self-help and meditation literature. Although he does not align himself with any religion, his books have reached millions of readers because they translate mystical and Eastern traditions into language that a modern Western audience can follow.

He was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle. In 1961 he moved to Spain to live with his father in Alicante, and for much of his adolescence he turned away from formal schooling in favour of his own creative and philosophical interests. Later, in England, he taught German and Spanish at a London language school and studied at the University of London. He then enrolled in a postgraduate programme at Cambridge, which he left before finishing.

At 29 he went through a period of deep depression, with suicidal thoughts. He later described a night of inner transformation, in which a question about which of two selves was real left his mind suddenly still. For about two years he lived with almost no money, sometimes on park benches in central London or sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, in a state of peace he describes as intense bliss. His family considered him irresponsible. Around this time he took the name Eckhart, which some accounts link to the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart.

Former Cambridge acquaintances began to seek his advice, and this led him into work as a counsellor and teacher. He moved to Glastonbury and then, in 1995, to Vancouver.

His first book, The Power of Now (1997), argues that attention to the present moment is the way out of the mind's constant chatter. For Tolle, the present opens onto a deep sense of peace, while the ego, identified with thought, produces what he calls the pain-body. A New Earth (2005) looks at how the ego pulls people away from their present experience. His declared influences include Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Meister Eckhart, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism and Zen Buddhism.

His influence is wide but contested. Some Christian theologians and readers value his synthesis of traditions, while critics find his work derivative and close to pseudoscience. After Oprah Winfrey promoted his writing in 2000 and chose A New Earth for her book club in 2008, his books spread enormously, especially in the United States.