Anthony de Mello had been my starting point on this journey thanks to a friend’s recommendation but many of his audios and films on YouTube referenced Eckhart Tolle as another worth knowing better.
I looked him up and found him to be a giant in the field of self awareness. 35 million people tuned in to watch a series of Webinars with Oprah Winfrey and him in 2008 and Watkins Review named him as the most spiritually influential person in the world in 2011. I had never heard of him.
That’s not quite true. Someone I knew had sent me a book months ago which has sat on my Kindle doing nothing. That book was called ‘The Power of Now‘. Its author? Eckart Tolle.
I had mistaken it for yet another motivational book about how we can achieve anything blah – more fool me!
Eckart Tolle’s base approach is pretty much identical to Anthony De Mello’s but perhaps Tolle came of age at a time when the internet was spreading and De Mello had recently died.
I’d almost believe that Tolle plagiarised de Mello’s work but it is also perfectly possible that this was a Darwinian moment where two people come to the same conclusion without ever having come into contact with each other.
Tolle’s story is that he was on the verge of suicide when he realised the thought “I can no longer live with myself” made him realise there were two (the self and I). De Mello claims to have come to that realisation through scriptures.
What is most interesting is Tolle’s belief that this philosophy represents the next phase of human evolution and so the increasing number of people waking up to it is no coincidence.
Tolle claims we have reached a point as a race where we will either wake up to self awareness or wipe ourselves out – either through war or by completely buggering up the planet in our ever increasing appetite for material possessions which we have persuaded ourselves (and which industry through continuous advertising helps keep persuading us) will make us happy.
Tolle is definitely more to the point than De Mello but sometimes that is an issue in itself. De Mello moves slowly to help people like me wrap their heads around something they have never considered before.
Tolle is fast and can leave some people on the offensive. Take this comment from someone on Eckhart Tolle’s Wikipedia Page talk area:
Poof !! Your depression is already gone. Nothing like awareness that its all make believe that you are going through.
Its a sarcastic response which means the person writing it is angry. But why be angry?
Well Tolle is a lot to take on board and it is a bit annoying to have suffered from something for years and then for someone to turn up and say “Its very easy to get rid of that” because it almost points out your own stupidity. Why didn’t you see it.
Imagine if you had hobbled around for years and someone told you if you took the stone out of your shoe you would be able to walk properly. Anthony de Mello would warm you up to the idea that it might be worth looking in your shoe and almost make you feel like you spotted the stone – even though he knew full well it was there all along. Tolle just says “You’ve got a stone in your shoe, take it out and you’ll walk fine”.
My advice then is to put your pride to one side before you take on Tolle and you will learn a great deal very quickly.
Its also worth pointing out that neither De Mello or Tolle came to sudden revelations and then were instantly great spiritual teachers. Both studied for many, many years in order to put their initial revelations in context.
I for one am very much on board with both De Mello and Tolle but I still need to finish The Power of Now to see if I agree with Tolle’s entire approach to self awareness.
I say this because there is a fundamental issue with De Mello that I am grappling with and which I will blog about once I can get my head a little further around what I am grappling with!
Hi. Just read this little post and appreciate your thoughts. I too had just read or listened to awareness by Anthony de mello. I had read power of now a long time ago and liked it, but I don’t think I was ready to grasp it at the time. De mello hit me like a thunder bolt. I new it was true. I listened to it many many times. I’m getting better and better at implementing it. So a friend was reading power of now and I decided to read it again. I was so convinced that Tolle got most of his ideas from DeMello that I did a search and found your post. Tolle calls it presence and DeMello calls it awareness. I’m about half way through power of now. Getting good renewal of concepts. Truth is always good from whatever source.
What are your conclusions after reading and implementing the ideas of DeMello and Tolle? Where are you now in your journey?
Thanks for reading this
Best of luck
Bjorn
Hi Bjorn,
I was the other way round to you. I read De Mello before Tolle but your description of feeling like you were hit with a thunder bolt when listening to De Mello is very much how I felt. He rambles a lot but when he came to the key point about dropping attachments everything just suddenly fell into place.
I think Tolle does a great job of presenting Buddhist ideas in a way that is easier for Western minds. I don’t, for example, agree with his thinking on the Pain Body but I also understand it is probably a very helpful concept for some people who are just starting out in self discovery.
Personally I now do plenty of meditation and constantly practice how to be aware of attachments forming (be it to things or opinions) and then letting them go. It was slow at first, I might only realise I had an attachment a few hours after it happened but over time it gets faster and faster!
Good luck with where ever your journey takes you!
Hi,
I stumbled on your post after doing some research on comparisons between De Mello and Tolle. I’ve been a huge fan of Anthony De Mello’s work for a couple years now. His spiritual guidance really changed my life and a lot of what he has said and taught are things I think about and carry with me every day. Since I’ve pretty much read all of De Mello’s work and listened to all of his audio I started looking for other authors who were in line with the De Mello Spirituality concepts. I found Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth: Awakening to your life’s purpose” in my Mother’s house and borrowed it from her. I have to say, like De Mello, it really captures my attention and is extremely interesting to read. However, as I think you mentioned before, it seems like a lot of the ideas and even examples used are stolen directly from Anthony De Mello. One example I just read that actually prompted me to post this is Tolle’s reference to “Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.” That analogy and exact verbiage is something that De Mello used quite often in his work as well at conferences. I have to think others have found this alarming as well but I can’t seem to find any commentary online about people raising a concern about this. Regardless, I do enjoy Tolle’s book so far and will continue reading it, but as a staunch believer in Anthony De Mello and what he stood for, I can’t help but feel a little cheated when reading Eckhart Tolle’s work. I would have felt a lot better if he had at least referenced Anthony De Mello as a source of inspiration for his ideas/writing. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this or had read any more into this? Thanks!
I think you raise a good point however De Mello read widely and came to a conclusion. It is possible that Tolle read very similar documents and manuscripts and by chance came to the same conclusion … just as happened with Darwin and Wallace. It’s totally possible that “Life is the dancer and you are the dance” came from a much older source but is now mostly attributed to Tolle because the original source is not in English or such like.
Personally I give Tolle the benefit of the doubt as he is pretty good at pointing out his sources. However I think De Mello is the better teacher, its just he was not around during the age of the Internet which lead to Tolle’s fame. But Tolle works for some and De Mello for others and that’s all (to me) that is important.
I know much of De Mello’s work verbatim. It would be interesting if Tolle’s ‘New Earth’ were to be put thought a plagiarism analyser. The similarities are far too close and far too numerous for me to believe that De Mello has not been plagiarised.
Has Tolle referenced De Mello anywhere?
One of the things that does get me about Tolle is that he implies that much of what he writes and says are his ideas while De Mello is at pains to point out there is nothing new in what he says – it is all in the scriptures and other writings, you just have to see it. As De Mello also often points out it was all “staring him in the face” but he missed it for many years.
You have to dig far deeper with Tolle to hear this kind of messaging (although it is there when you look hard enough). It’s another reason why I prefer De Mello over Tolle.
The dancer / dance idea is old wisdom. Which, to my mind anyway, makes it even more meaningful… 🙂
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
From W.B. Yeats: ‘Among school Children’ 1933
Thanks for sharing your de Mello / Tolle thoughts. They are both inspiring figures; I have a lot to be grateful to them for!
… and thank you for the Yeats!