Edited Nov 02 2008
If you start to teach spiritual stuff you better make sure you are walking the talk. I hope that Eckhart Tolle is walking the talk because he has a very powerful message, and is succeeding in communicating it like no other in modern times.
I hope that, with all of the attention he is getting, Tolle can continue to walk the talk. He did travel through a dark night of despair as a precursor to the personal revelation from which he is teaching, so he has paid some dues.
But what is the most important benefit he is giving us? He seems to be as sound as Ken Wilber and teaches the same stuff – Perennial Philosophy, the eternal mystical core that is at the heart of all of the world’s great wisdom traditions.
He has managed to attract extraordinary coverage for his teaching – notably the course co-hosted with Oprah Winfrey.
He and Oprah have attracted a torrent of vilification from the loony fundamentalists. If you want a glimpse of this start with this video;
….but there are loads more like it!
I suggest that the core of his value might be in showing us the eternal mystical truths with an integrity that helps anyone with a religious inklin, or connection, to step back to see more clearly the eternal reality of the mystical core. For many of us he is enabling us to re-experience the spirituality lost from established religions, as more and more man-made accretions have darkened the glass. Many religions, whatever their golden core teachings, seem to have forced out the true light, and salvation.
There are a tiny number of people who are seeking to bridge the divide between fundamentalists and teh Perennial Philosophy-minded. Louis Bourgeois seems to be one such a person. He has many videos out there. This one is specifically about building bridges;
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An impressive review of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now is to be found here;
The more I read of ‘The Power of Now’, the more I was convinced that in Eckhart Tolle’s teachings we had stumbled upon a genuine and profound expression of the non-dual realization, a rare pearl in the shallow tide-pools of new millennium spirituality. via A Review of Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”
Soul Needs - One Garden 