Nothing New
Oprah winfrey's recent promotion of Eckhart Tolle has put the German-born author's latest work, A New Earth, on the bestseller lists with the largest reprint run in the history of Penguin Books. Tolle, in turn, has given Oprah a new sense of purpose. She calls her work with him the most important and exciting thing she has ever done. This spring she hosted 10 Monday-night web seminars with him. As many as one million people watched them live, and 27 million more downloaded them afterward.
Tolle claims no specific religion and states that his teaching fits with the essence of all spiritual paths. While he quotes freely from Jesus, Buddha, and others, he focuses on the divinity in all beings. "How 'spiritual' you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness," he writes in A New Earth.
To his credit, Tolle is quite good at recognizing human folly, which is significant given New Age tendencies to deny evil outright. A New Earth states, "If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder, and acts of extreme violence and cruelty."
Tolle is also sharp in his critique of false paths to freedom. He warns about "outer riches and inner poverty." He states that "the absurd overvaluation of fame is just one of the many manifestations of egoic madness in our world." He also provides some telling commentary about the dangers of grounding identity in the external roles of society. Further, his writings are seasoned with sensible advice, such as, "It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living," or, "If you delve into the ...
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Albert Listy
What Eckhart Tolle has done here is to remove the key element for why Christianity is Christianity. If you remove Jesus as God, then you are no longer following Christianity as it is supposed to be followed. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life and NO ONE comes to the father except through me." Tolle, twists this to mean that, "Jesus reached awakening because he understood that he was the truth, just like each of us is the truth for ourselves, once we awaken." But he missed the point of what Jesus was trying to say. Jesus wasn't saying that he just realized this, it was a statement of fact. Tolle takes the best of all religions and links them together into his 'New Earth' and wants everyone to follow him. What's interesting is that he speaks of wealth and recognition as self indulgent but yet you don't see him on the streets like Jesus was, right? Jesus lived the life of poverty as an example, though he didn't have to. Where's Tolle's example, his awakening?
Teresa
Tolle is going to hell because he has rejected the one and only person that came as God in human flesh to pay for the sins of the world. He came to reverse the curse, where as Mr Tolle beleives that it is humanity that is divine as not Jesus Christ. That reject will be allowed in the Lake of Fire. I am not saying that I am happy about his denial and the consequnce of such, but no, Tolle is no more Christian then the Anti-christ is or Brian Mclaren for that matter. God bless, Serve your king!
George T.
It is a "good selling"anything that some people write to make us doubt our Christian Faith. The "Dan Browns" will multiply in various forms. They make lots of easy money!!