The Power of Eckhart Tolle

Four years after its publication, Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" remains on bestseller lists, regarded by many as a modern spiritual classic. Dr. Gunther Weil, a teacher of Tolle's work, spoke with Beliefnet about Tolle's personal history, and why his writing continues to resonate with spiritual seekers.

At age 30, Eckhart Tolle went from suicidal thoughts to spiritual awakening, literally overnight. Can you tell us the story of his life-changing epiphany?

Eckhart, according to his own description, was an unhappy, neurotic, confused intellectual and his background was of that generation of Germans who are carrying around a lot of the karma of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

He describes in his book an evening where he was ready to take his life. He said to himself, 'I can't live with myself anymore.' And then suddenly there was a kind of realization: Are there two of me here? There's the self that's so miserable that I can't live with, but what is the "I" that is observing this self?

It was a spontaneous process of what in the Advaita Vedanta tradition in India is called "self-inquiry." In other words, the question turned back on itself: Who am I? Who is this "I" that can't live with this self? And this produced a spontaneous form of self-inquiry that led very quickly to a kind of ego-death, where his personality died, his self as he had known it for 30 years, had died.

And he went into kind of a swoon, he describes it in the book as kind of what people describe in near-death experiences -- you know, going down through the tunnel, and so on. And then he woke up in the morning in a state of thoughtless awareness and happiness that never left him. And that was essentially his epiphany. It was a spontaneous death of the conditioned self, of the personality, of the ego.

Upon waking he didn't know what had happened to him, because he had no background in spiritual work at all. He was a kind of strict rationalist, you know, a research scholar in Cambridge in England. According to his own description he had no points of reference for understanding his own enlightenment. All he knew was that he was happy.

Continued on page 2: »