A New Earth: Create a Better Life

Eckhart Tolle was born Ullrich Tolle in Lünen, Germany, in 1948. According to New York Times writer Jesse McKinley, Ullrich changed his name to Eckhart after he began his spiritual teaching, in imitation of the 13th-century German theologian Meister Eckhart. As McKinley points out, the details of Tolle’s “personal history are murky,” although it is certain that he attended the universities of London, Cambridge, and British Columbia. (McKinley, Jesse. “The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway.” The New York Times, 23 Mar. 2008.)

Given Tolle’s repeated affirmation that becoming identified with one’s personal history is a destructive function of the ego, his lack of concrete biography is arguably intentional. Indeed, in the introduction to The Power of Now, Tolle states, “I have little use for the past and rarely think about it” (Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library, 2010.)

In A New Earth: Create a Better Life, Tolle only refers to episodes from his life in so far as they can act as parables. However, the past episode he most refers to is his crisis of consciousness at age 29. In his twenties an intellectually minded Tolle alternated between states of extreme anxiety and near-suicidal depression. One night shortly after his 29th birthday, when Tolle’s negativity had reached saturation point, he became aware of a self broader than the one that was making him miserable. This became a turning point in his life, as he opened up to the wonder of his mere existence on the planet. In the introduction to The Power of Now, Tolle describes the honeymoon period of his new consciousness, when for a while he renounced the material world in a monk-like fashion: “I had no relationships, 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” (The Power of Now). He thus relinquished all the forms that his ego could become identified with and existed in the realm of Being.

After a decade as a spiritual teacher, Tolle published The Power of Now in 1997 through boutique spiritual publisher Namaste Press. His star ascended when the title was picked up by the larger New World Library imprint, and then again in 2002, when Oprah Winfrey informed her audience that the book was “essential spiritual teaching.” Tolle’s popularity with Winfrey and other leading figures in the personal development world, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, has made him a spiritual superstar and a brand in the growing personal development market. McKinley writes that Tolle’s “secret, according to fans, publishing industry experts and booksellers, is packing thousands of years of teaching, from Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare and even the Rolling Stones into what one of his publishers, Constance Kellough, called ‘a clean contemporary bottle’” (McKinley). His work is therefore more accessible to Western audiences than the often complex and culturally distant texts of Eastern spiritual teachers with a similar message. Indeed, more than 2 million copies of The Power of Now have been sold.

Despite his considerable personal success, Tolle argues that fame is a “collective fiction” around a person’s identity and that it is an egoic “error” to become identified with it (83). Unlike some personal development gurus with larger-than-life personalities and inflated self-images, Tolle resists creating a cult of personality by turning his life story into legend. Instead, he prefers to be the medium through which people discover the truth about themselves and the universe.

In A New Earth Tolle makes brief references to other key figures, such as Buddha, Jesus, and Albert Einstein. Although they are the figureheads of three different ideologies, Buddhism, Christianity, and the physics of relativity, they all pioneered a different way of perceiving the relationship between self and world. These men drew attention to the limitations in contemporary perceptions of reality, and their messages eclipsed their personal fame. Tolle, with his self-effacing method of spirituality, aims to follow in their footsteps.