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Made Famous by Oprah, Spirituality Author Distills Divine in Stillness By MARCIA
Z. NELSON Maybe his eyes hint at some source of spiritual authority. They are pale blue and clear, as if they were clean windows offering a good look outside and within. Some 25 years ago, the German-born Tolle, 55, looked inside himself during a middle-of-the-night spiritual crisis. An intense bout of self-questioning led him to experience a mysterious surge of energy, drawing him into sleep. "The next morning I woke up, everything seemed fresh and new and had an aliveness to it," he recalls. This resulting "shift," as he calls it, gradually transformed a Cambridge University researcher into a contemporary spiritual teacher whose ideas have spoken to many, including ne influential follower named Oprah Winfrey. The TV host and book arbiter helped bring to prominence Tolle's first book, "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment" (New World, 1999), which has sold more than 1 million copies in North America and England and has been translated into 30 languages. Tolle's recently published second book, "Stillness Speaks" (New World), with 200,000 copies in print, elaborates on key ideas from "The Power of Now," yet the two works are different. Where the first book explained at length, the second is aphoristic, in the style of ancient Asian religious sayings known as "sutras." "Sutras are powerful pointers to the truth in the form of aphorisms or short sayings, with little conceptual elaboration," writes Tolle in the new book's introduction. As befits
the author of a book on stillness, Tolle sits with composure during
conversation, often keeping his hands folded in his lap, at rest.
No, he isn't enlightened, at least not exceptionally so, says
Tolle, who speaks English with a German-tinged British accent.
"Every human being is enlightened," he says. "The
only difference is most humans don't know that yet. I can sense
that in the background of my life." The essence
of Tolle's teaching is the recognition and use of "the power
of now." Human thinking, he says, is a process that cuts
us off from direct experience of the present, because thinking
obscures whatever is occurring. The mind is a human tool that
has become too dominant. The power of now is the liberation from
ceaseless thinking and the realization that each moment, each
now, is also an opportunity to experience fundamental peace. "Realize
deeply that the present moment is all you ever have," he
writes in "The Power of Now." "This will give you
a taste of the state of inner freedom from external conditions,
the state of true inner peace." Seeking for,
and teaching about, a peace that passes understanding and that
cannot be found through conscious thinking has a long history,
says Robert Fuller, who teaches religious studies at Bradley University
in Peoria, Ill. What Fuller calls "the gospel of the hidden
self" appeals with its promise that an individual can do
something that's simple and effective. "Right within ourselves
is higher power, and that's better than thinking that there's
a lot of social and economic things that need to be reworked,"
Fuller says. "This is a lot simpler." Tolle's teaching
draws on perennial wisdom within religions, yet he is not aligned
with any one and will as readily cite Jesus as he will the Buddha.
"Jesus speaks of salvation or the kingdom of heaven, Hindu
teachings speak of liberation or enlightenment, the Buddha's favorite
expression was that it is possible for humans to be free of suffering,"
he says. "There's only one essential spiritual teaching in
humanity." But religions over time have acquired what he
calls cultural baggage, and infighting and ideology have obscured
religion's truths. "I believe it would limit the power of
what I teach if it became identified with one particular set of
concepts, when there is such an enormous amount of intercommunication
between cultures," he says. "Perhaps the power of now
teaching is more accessible because it is fairly neutral in its
language." If Tolle is
working with what he and others see as a unifying essence in the
world's religions, he is also at their esoteric mystical edges.
His new work centers on stillness as the door to a larger realm
that humans can see themselves as part of. "Underneath thinking
there lies `Be still and know that I am God,'" he says, citing
the words of Psalm 46. "A deeper intelligence underlies the
manifestation of all forms." From this realization naturally
flows an ethic for living with others. "Love cannot be generated
by trying to be loving," Tolle says. "When you enter
that dimension of the kingdom of heaven that is here and now,
as a natural consequence you will love your neighbor as yourself." |
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© 2003-2008
Marcia Z. Nelson
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