Oprah and Eckart Tole

Oprah understands something that we in the UU church have not yet recognized. She sees not only that millions of us are seeking spiritual truth, but that authentic spiritual experience is much deeper than the mantras of liberal religion can accommodate. Her discovery of Ekhart Tolle, and her drawing millions of people to a webcast discussion of his book is news to which we as UUs should be paying close attention.

Ekhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, reflects the profound insight of a remarkable spiritual teacher. His own personal experience comes into deep context in the teachings of esoteric religion in any number of traditions. Many people confuse his work with the New Age. However, there are profound differences. Tolle’s work is unmistakably transpersonal. The New Age tends to devolve into the pre-rational. Tolle’s work calls us to transcend egoic structures whereas the New Age invites us to wallow in narcissistic impulses. The transrational Tolle speaks of is not irrational – it is consistent with reason, but recognizes that reason is a blunt instrument in truly understanding reality in its immediacy. Reason parses reality beautifully, but it cannot put it back together again. Reason objectifies reality to allow us to understand how it works, but in that objectification it deadens reality, separates us from our own true nature and becomes the cause of our fundamental alienation. Post-modernism is the end result of that rational enterprise – millions upon millions of data points with no wisdom; understanding everyone’s perspective, but endless nihilism. Pre-rationalism or romanticism (the old Romantics are the new New Agers) collapses into moment by moment waves of emotion and impulse. It is a reversion, not an advancement, in human consciousness.1

Tolle, and the teachers before him, point to a way out.

What is profound about Tolle’s work is his ability to allow us to glimpse that place of the transrational – not denying reason but moving beyond it to where we see the whole again, but from a place that is not pushed around solely by emotions and impulses. It transcends reason without descending to pre-rational states of consciousness. This is the place sages from Buddha, to Jesus, to Plotinus, to Nagarjuna, to Sankara, to Ramana Marharshi and hosts of other have gone and have pointed to. Eckart’s work is not new – it is the perennial philosophy re-framed for a modern audience. It is the awareness of our Ground of Being – of Awareness itself – choiceless, unmoved, ever present, always and ever existing, our own true Self.

What was interesting for me in watching Tolle and Oprah was the radical difference in their structures of consciousness. Oprah’s language and approach represented the multiplistic pluralism of liberal free-thinking religion. For us UUs we would have seen nothing new in her articulations and even though she identifies as a Christian, it is as a free thinking Christian that we would find wholly unobjectionable. Her belief structures were evident in the way she discussed Christianity and world religions. We should cheer that such a powerful figure is introducing open-mindedness to those Christians who are unsettled about their faith and seeking their own next stage of development. She can speak to them in ways that we cannot whether we be humanist or post-modern pluralist.

Tolle speaks from a different place. He made categorical statements (just as Oprah did) but did so from a set of transpersonal experiences that Oprah, by her own admission, is only beginning to glimpse. Indeed, the reason Oprah has been so taken with Tolle’s work is precisely because he taps not into a belief structure but into an experience of wholeness that liberal religion simply cannot deliver. We are watching Oprah move from one stage of consciousness to the next before our eyes and it is fascinating to see someone who has one foot in each world. The structures of consciousness that produce the doctrines of liberal religion (all paths lead to the same place, Jesus and Buddha were teaching the same truths, yada yada yada), is at least two developmental steps short of deeper realization of the dissolution of the self in the discovery of the Self. Indeed, if you listen closely to Tolle, he doesn’t say that these religions’ leaders “taught” the same thing – their content varies dramatically – but rather that they experienced something similar (sahaj, samadhi, the kingdom of God) and that they attempted to transmit these experiences to those around them. There are “jewels” of insight in the sacred writings that point to the ultimately ineffable experience. They communicated in the cultural language of their times and so the teachings are different, the exoteric religion is distinguishable, but the underlying mystical experiences, the esoteric religion, are profoundly similar.

What is interesting about most people who follow Tolle’s teaching is that they feel good for a time, but they get caught back up in their lives and the feeling state they experienced passes. Tolle inspires momentary experiences of living in the now. The systematic dismantling of the egoic structures that Eckart talks about is often painful and difficult work. In his case, he came to his awakened state only after years of despair and near suicide. His experience, as is the case with some, immediately rested in semi-permanent state. For most, these states begin as incidents or episodes but must be nurtured through spiritual exercises in community. Rarely does one progress on the spiritual path without a proven practice rooted in a wisdom tradition. And rarely does one progress on the spiritual path alone.

As a UU, I find liberal religion (as an ideology) is radically differentiated from the fundamental experience of enlightenment that Tolle experienced and teaches about. It is this deeper, more authentic teaching that we miss in our churches. And by authentic, I mean time-tested and profoundly proven approaches to spiritual experience. (I will write more about this in the next few posts.)

This fascination with Tolle will pass - it is a fad just like all of the other fads before it. Last year it was "The Secret", this year it is "A New Earth" and next year the pluralistic consciousness, which has difficulty putting down roots in any one place for long, will move on. However, for some, for a few, this will stick because it is rooted in a profoundly human experience. It is rooted humanity's experience of Consciousness itself. Those in our UU tradition who have practices in Zen or Kasmir Shaivism or Dzogchen or Advaita Vedanta, or contemplative prayer, or sufi whirling or any one of a host of other spiritual traditions and practices, get this stuff. If we are there to support those for whom this brings a shift...if we continue to work with this process with people who are seeking this depth, and if those of us who are living the lives of ordinary mystics are there to help, then good things will happen. The trick will be to use upaya (skillful means) to help people find deep spiritual paths that suit their sensibilities and stages of development. As more and more UUs get well and truly turned on to this work – and see it pass from the shallow grid of new age pluralism to the sacred work of grounded traditions– it will be useful for us to stand by and try to catch the attention of those who want to move from having occasional state experiences of transcendence or glimpses of meaning to living lives that rest more or less permanently in the Ever Present. If we are able to do that, we can change the world.

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1. In one of my first posts I suggested that the UU church should be paying attention to those who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I mentioned that there are those who are rational but spiritual. This post is designed to clarify and explicate some of these distinctions as well as place what I see as this most interesting cultural event of the media phenome and the transperonal pandit sitting down to talk about the fundamental nature of reality, human consciousness, and lasting transformation.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.