Comparisons: Eckhart Tolle vs earlier writers on the present moment or ‘now’

Charles Tart is a transpersonal psychologist noted for his work on altered states of consciousness. However, he once said his most important contribution was his book on the psychological methods of the Fourth Way, Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (1986).^[11] The above passages come from his next book on this topic: Living the Mindful Life: A Handbook for Living in the Present Moment (1994). It is based on transcripts from workshops he presented in the early 90s. Tolle’s passage comes from his breakout book The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997).

The comparisons above are drawn from a single passage by each author, which are very similar to each other. By breaking down the corresponding elements from these passages into separate entries in a table, it is easier to see how their writing correlates on specific points.

In the first entry, both refer to “dangerous” activities/sports, mention car/auto “racing” as an example of this, then say such pursuits can “force” one to be in the present/now.  In the next, they suggest this heightened state occurs because losing focus even for “a second” could be fatal. Both also claim that this forced awareness is the reason these activities can make those who do them feel more “alive.” Finally, each makes the point that we don’t actually need physical danger in order to be in this state.

You can see this comparison presented in a passage-to-passage format in my earlier article, ‘The Creation of Now: how Fourth Way authors sparked a present moment revolution, specifically in  this section on Tolle.

Unlike Tolle, Tart has never presented himself, or his books, as a guide to “enlightenment” it should be said.^[12] “I am not someone who has the truth or is awake in any absolute sense,” he writes in the above-mentioned book’s introduction. “But I have learned some useful things about being . . . at least a little more awake.”^[13]

Long before Tolle was “catapulted to ‘bestseller-dom’ by . . . Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic endorsement of his work,”^[25] Jon Kabbat Zinn, a Professor Emeritus of Medicine, had adapted eastern mindfulness techniques into a format to help patients manage pain and mental health at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Stress Reduction Clinic, which he founded in 1979. His 8-week course, now referred to as “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction,” was outlined to the wider public in Full Catastrophe Living (1990). Because of its clinical applications, that book dives heavily into scientific evidence and medical explanations for the practice and various elements of the course, but his follow-up book, Wherever You Go There You Are (1994), was a simpler guide for regular people to incorporate mindfulness into daily life. Both were bestsellers. Kabat-Zin’s quotations come from these two books, while Tolle’s come from The Power of Now and its follow-up A New Earth (2005), both of which sold millions of copies.

Interestingly, Kabat Zin’s work has also been featured by Oprah along the way too. In contrast to Tolle, Kabat-Zinn does not present himself as an enlightened teacher, or his work as a guide to enlightenment. While both talk about present-moment awareness in a non-denominational way, and stress its universality, their overall approaches diverge. Kabat-Zinn has secularised mindfulness in an effort to give it mainstream medical acceptance and broaden its applications beyond religious or spiritual contexts. Tolle very much spiritualises it, appealing to those seeking spiritual insight outside of traditional religious frameworks.

I’ve only done a light “first past” analysis of these authors’ works, who are both heavyweights in the present moment space. A closer analysis might prove interesting.

In my article “The Creation of Now: How Fourth Way Authors Sparked a Revolution of the Present Moment,” I argued the Fourth Way tradition—brought to the West by esotericists Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in the 1920s—paved a way for much of the emphasis on present-moment practice that became popular in the West later, where it’s now largely pursued outside traditional religious settings in everyday life.  I’ve since shown how a little-known teacher from this modern tradition, the Jungian psychiatrist turned esotericist Maurice Nicoll, was quite important in shaping this trend.

I’ve focused my comparative analysis on Nicoll and Tolle because in their work I noticed the most pronounced similarities. These can include not just common concepts but, at times, how they describe and express them too. This table is just a small sample of my findings.

While I’ve focused on the practical self-knowledge applications of this kind of present-moment practice in my self-observation series, in the table above we find the present moment discussed in a more cosmological way, where the symbol of the cross is used to contrast horizontal time and the human personality with the “vertical” dimension of eternity and essence. The present moment is “the the meeting-place of Time and Eternity,” the point on the cross where these dimensions intersect, Nicoll tells us. Yet the present moment “only becomes now in its full meaning when a man is conscious” within it.^[47] Self-remembering, or “self-awareness” (in a higher sense) is that state which brings a vertical “sense of now,” inwardly taking one beyond the horizontal limits of time and personality so one can “feel eternity.”

It’s interesting how strongly Tolle corresponds in expressing these idiosyncratic ideas, invoking the symbolism of the cross to describe two dimensions which intersect. Like Nicoll, Tolle also designates “time [as] the horizontal dimension of life,” and points to the present moment as the only portal by which to inwardly enter a timeless “vertical” dimension by raising one’s state of consciousness or “presence.” Interestingly, Tolle does mention that other people use the cross to symbolise this idea, but does not name them.

Also like Nicoll, Tolle associates the personality with the horizontal dimension of time while suggesting there is some real eternal aspect of us which is beyond time (which like Nicoll he sometimes calls “essence”) that is felt when are conscious or present in the moment; this is concomitant with “entering the vertical dimension.”

Although Tolle does not explicitly refer to eternity in the examples above, he does this elsewhere. For example, he writes that “your very being . . . exists eternally in the timeless realm of the present,” and also suggests that the inner purpose of life “concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension of the timeless Now.”^[48]  He also writes that people are so “consumed by time” that they have “forgotten the essence” and “forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.”^[49]

Nicoll similarly tells us that “our origin is . . . vertical.” Essence comes from above, and enters time, but is itself eternal and beyond time:

Personality is formed in Time, and belongs to Time, whereas essence enters Time and leaves Time. Essence is beyond Time. The quality of essence belongs to the vertical line [of eternity] drawn at right angles to Time—that is to say, essential being belongs here.^[50]

To sum up: Nicoll asserts that both our real self and eternity can only be felt now, when we are conscious in the present moment. This is essentially one of the central ideas—and practices—in Tolle’s work. Both link this conscious state with accessing a vertical dimension beyond time and personality, while our typical, more unconscious, state is equated to being limited to the horizontal dimension of time.  The present moment is said to be the only point where these two dimensions meet, and the potential to access the vertical dimensions exists—by raising ones state of consciousness.  Both use the cross to symbolise this.

I’ll make further comments about the now/present and eternity in the next section, where I compare Tolle to Barry Long on this theme.

Most of the examples above come from Nicoll’s extensive five volume work, ‘Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky,’ although one comes from Living Time and the Integration of the Life, where he first wrote about these ideas. About half of Tolle’s examples come from his two major books mentioned previously, while the rest come from public talks or interviews. Their similarities on these concepts are most extensively discussed in my article “Essence, Personality and the False Self” in the sections “Essence and eternity experienced now” and “The symbol of the cross.”

Their corresponding views on the spiritual importance of “now” can be seen elsewhere too. In Living Time, Nicoll described the act of being conscious in the present as “The Creation of Now,” while Tolle would later famously call this “The Power of Now.” This site gets its name from Nicoll’s phrase, which he also gives to a chapter title. Interestingly, Nicoll quotes the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart when discussing the “creation of now,” while Tolle changed his name from Ulrich to Eckhart, most likely after the same figure, sometime before publishing The Power of Now.

Tolle shares uncanny commonalities with Nicoll on a range of points however. To see many more examples of their similarities, refer to the series of articles I have written which are focused on highlighting correspondences between these two authors.

Here we see many close correspondences between Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle on the spiritual significance of the Now or living with one’s attention or consciousness anchored in the present moment. I think in these comparisons, Long’s direct influence on Tolle is clearly evident.

Back 2021, I laid bare how Eckhart Tolle’s “pain-body” concept is largely derived from Barry Long’s teachings (and argued Maurice Nicoll was a major influence on Tolle’s writing about this too). Tolle’s conspicuous commonalities with Long, whose London talks he attended in the min 1980s, go beyond the pain-body though.

In a recent article, I examined Tolle’s similarities with Long on a range of topics, and presented a series of comparison tables juxtaposing their words. I updated this post in 2025 to include the table above, which appears in that more extensive article.

In these comparisons, we can see Long and Tolle linking “now” or “the present” with eternity, which is something we also see Nicoll do in the previous table (“Eternity is always in now”). There, Nicoll is elaborating Ouspensky’s views on time and “the eternal now,” which is a notion Ouspensky equated with Indian philosophy.[74] However, Nicoll takes a much more practical approach to his more theoretical forbear, who approached these ideas in more abstract and conceptual way; Nicoll outlines a sort of practical mysticism, whereby the way to “feel eternity” (or the vertical) is to raise one’s state of consciousness in the present moment, so that one is “present to oneself” and feels one’s real self. This, as we have seen, is what now essentially means to him.

“The object is to reach a state of consciousness – a new state of oneself. It is to reach now, where one is present to oneself.” [75]

In other words, Nicoll translates abstract ideas about time and eternity into a more tangible spiritual practice, by describing how one might experience eternity here and now. In his writing, now comes to refer to the act of raising one’s state of consciousness or self-awareness in the present moment through practicing Self-Remembering.[76] The “sense of now” is said to bring “the feeling of eternity” because one then feels their existence beyond ordinary time; as we have seen, this occurs because a person’s real self, he suggests, is eternal, and exists beyond the personality and time as we understand it.[77] “Now is . . . a state of the spirit, when it is above the stream of time-associations,” he writes, and he insists we can experience this state of consciousness with the right inner efforts.[78]

Long and Tolle also take a similarly practical approach to this mystical idea, linking the eternal now/present with the state of being conscious in the present—a more spiritual state they portray as directly accessible to us.

Another point to briefly note is that Long and Tolle sometimes retread some notions J. Krishnamurti would cover; yet, as I explain the article this table is drawn from, they actually have profoundly different perspectives to him and approach present moment awareness quite differently. Tolle has far more in common with Long and Nicoll than he does with Krishnamurti overall.

That being said, I believe that Long and Tolle’s similarities, shown above, go beyond the sort of inevitable parallels one might expect to occur when two authors cover the same topic. I think Tolle was influenced by Long both conceptually and stylistically. Tolle can be seen making the same idiosyncratic points Long makes, and using the same or similar language to him–sometimes incorporating phrases matching word-for word, or which are closely-worded equivalents. As I commented in the Barry Long-Eckhart Tolle comparison article:

“Life is now,” Long and Tolle both write. Don’t turn an event “into a problem,” they advise.  “What’s the problem now?” Long asks rhetorically, which Tolle similarly echoes as, “Do you have a problem now?” Both tell us that the appropriate action required to deal with a situation will be clear to us when we are “present” in the moment. Both also suggest that, when we are conscious or aware in the now, we go beyond the mind and time and into pure “being.”

Here I wish to acknowledge the efforts of a certain longtime Barry Long enthusiast, who attended Long’s talks for many years, and kindly contributed towards my work to bring together these comparisons. He released his own essay last year discussing Long’s influence on Tolle, arguing that Long’s earlier teachings on the Now, among other things, had an important impact on Tolle’s work. My own research certainly supports this view.

For many more examples of Tolle’s similarities with Long, refer to my article, ‘Eckhart Tolle & Barry Long: a comparison.’