Eckhart Tolle & his Predecessors 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).

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, “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction,” was outlined in Full Catastrophe Living (1990). Because of its clinical applications, that book dives heavily into scientific evidence and medical explanations for the practice, 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 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 concepts but at times the ways they describe and express them too. The tables here are 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, the intersection point of these dimensions, “only becomes now in its full meaning when a man is conscious” within it, Nicoll has explained.^[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 and making present-moment practice key to the timeless “vertical” dimension too. Interestingly, he mentions other people using this symbolism this way, but does not name them.

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 raised 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 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, after the same figure, sometime before publishing The Power of Now.