Beyond Happiness And Unhappiness

An Interview With Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle

At the age of twenty-nine, Eckhart Tolle was a research scholar, supervisor, and doctoral candidate at Cambridge University in England. He was also, by his own admission, deeply miserable. As he lay in bed one night, gripped by an intense dread and loathing of his own existence, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. In his book The Power of Now (New World Library), he describes waking the next morning:

I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.

Gone was the miserable self, replaced by a deep sense of peace. Tolle didn’t quite know what had happened to him, didn’t have any concepts or words for it. It was only later, after he had read spiritual texts and visited with spiritual teachers, that he understood: he had realized his true nature as “pure consciousness” rather than as an ego-bound, separate self, “ultimately a fiction of the mind.”

Recognizing he could not go back to being a research scholar and doctoral candidate, Tolle found himself with “no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.” (He laughs and says that this has scared off some readers and that you do not have to sit on a bench for two years.) Later, people began to approach him with questions about the power of his presence. Their dialogues became the inspiration for his books The Power of Now and Practicing the Power of Now.

With its question-and-answer format, The Power of Now can look, upon first glance, like a spiritual version of The One-Minute Manager. This impression quickly dissolves as one begins reading. Tolle writes in clear and simple language about surrendering to the present moment as a path to liberation from our conditioned mind. The peace that results is, in his words, “an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good and bad . . . beyond happiness and unhappiness.” He has something to say to people of any spiritual background, or none at all. (More information about Tolle’s books can be found at www.namastepublishing.com.)

Tolle was born in Germany, and his childhood was marked by spells of depression and suicidal thoughts. At the age of thirteen, he went to live with his father in Spain. Except for language classes, Tolle stopped going to school and began educating himself through books. Around this time, a family friend left at their house the works of German philosopher and painter Bo Yin Ra. “I felt later that these books were left there for a reason,” Tolle says. “They created an ‘opening’ into that other dimension.”

When he was nineteen, Tolle moved to London and began seeking an answer to life’s questions through philosophy, psychology, and literature. He took preparatory classes and was accepted at London University. Upon graduating with the highest mark, he was offered a scholarship to do research at Cambridge. Despite his academic success, the unhappiness that had plagued him since childhood was growing worse. He would soon experience the awakening that would lead him down an entirely new path.

Tolle lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For the past ten years, he has been a spiritual counselor and teacher, and currently gives workshops for large groups in Europe and North America. When I learned that Tolle was giving a rare East Coast retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, I knew I wanted to attend. Less than a week had passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11. During the seven-hour drive from my home in Maine, I felt overwhelmed by, and yet addicted to, the nonstop media coverage.

As I sat in the crowded main hall at the beginning of the retreat, a stillness surrounded me. I experienced Tolle’s presence as powerful, though not in an overt way. His is more the power of silence in a room full of noise. Although I can’t explain how, this silent presence is palpably felt. What isn’t apparent in his books is his joyful humor, which would appear just when it was most needed. His playful facial expressions and body gestures, as he described what he calls “the little me,” were as true to the human condition as the comedy of Buster Keaton.

Tolle described the role of a spiritual teacher as “an open window through which a breeze is blowing.” It is easy to confuse “the breeze,” he said, “with the window through which the breeze is blowing”: the physical form of a particular person.

Later, as Tolle greeted me in his room for this interview, I was struck by his quiet and unassuming nature as well as his impish and contagious sense of humor.

Donoso: We often try to escape from our daily lives: work that is unfulfilling; relationships that aren’t going the way we would like; family situations that become difficult. What is the origin of this desire to escape?

Tolle: The tendency to escape is a form of collective mental conditioning that is at work almost all the time in people’s lives, not just when situations turn out to be unpleasant or unsatisfying or difficult. In ordinary life, there is a continuous moving away from the moment to an imagined future that is unconsciously regarded as more important. Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever I “make it.” Our striving toward the future, our inner compulsion to deny the present moment, manifests itself as a continuous sense of unease and latent dissatisfaction with what is. This seems to be the “normal” state of our civilization. Freud recognized this when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. A literal translation of the German title is The Unease in Culture. He saw that our normal state of consciousness could be described as one of continuous unease, more pronounced at some times than at others.

Donoso: Why are we not more aware of this state?

Tolle: Because it is everybody’s normal state. Children are conditioned to look to the future from the moment they enter school, always needing the next moment and the next. Even if the future moment is feared, there is still a projection toward it, which generates anxiety. Then the recognition can arise — and this is an amazing realization for people who have never looked at it clearly — that the present moment is all there ever is in one’s life.

Donoso: But aren’t our past experiences and our potential future experiences central to our lives?

Tolle: One never experiences the future, nor the past. One experiences only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can unfold only Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.

Donoso: Is having hope for the future a help to us or a hindrance?

Tolle: I wouldn’t recommend it. [Laughter.] It is more mental projection. It just gives you some new future that you think is going to save you.

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