Is Eckhart Tolle the new Freud? – and what about ‘Applied Tolle’

I think that Eckhart Tolle is a great spiritual teacher.

Following Oprah putting up on her website his New Earth  as a free online course – see HERE – Tolle has reached millions.

In writing about him and his teachings my purpose is not to do anything but appreciate and applaud him – and suggest that a few ‘tweaks’ might make his teaching accessible and palatable to even more people.

Why?

Well his ‘experience’ and his life-time of ‘wrestling’ with that experience culminating in his 3 key books, audio talks and the Oprah course give us a whole range of insights – enough to change the world if they get taken up by enough people – but you must admit it has been a very un-typical life. And does that un-typical life restrict at all the take-up of his insights?

What, for example, would be different if he had spent those 30 years raising children or working in schools helping raise other people’s children? The emphases, the suppositions, the challenges in and from his teaching would be different. If you are a 35year old dad or mum with partner, 3 kids, and an uncertain future, the issues and their management are bound to be different.

He is compassionate and empathetic but I fear that the same criticism will be leveled against him as was leveled against Freud i.e. that he generalized on too narrow an ‘experience base’

Most people don’t get to spend 30 years processing their stuff, including 4 year-long episodes of sitting on a park bench. Many people from enduring commitments are lucky to find 40secs. I know the world is insane, but kids have to fed and chauffeured, and guided , and…….

A harsh critic (not me) might say, “Freud generalized from experience largely confined to neurotic, middle-class Austrian women, and Tolle generalizes from a life of solitary, self-indulgent, self-obsession.”

His style does come down on the side I am talking about – compassion for ordinary people who are struggling to do their best in situations that they can’t walk away from – but I suspect that an even wider sphere of influence is needed than his present ‘constituency’. The breadth of constituency is also connected to another issue and that is the need for ‘applied Tolle’.

We need his wisdom to be as accessible and palatable right now.

The applied Tolle will take a little longer – but we can’t wait for a generation of PhDs, and PhDs have an average readership of 1.7 people!

We do however need right now the beginnings of Tolle applied to a whole range of areas including education, psychology, inter-faith understanding, therapies, politics.