Tolle did not immediately sort out the puzzle of his awakening 30 years ago. He drifted for years: poor, happy, but aimless, sharing with fellow seekers his evolving thoughts, rather like an itinerant monk. In 1995 he washed up in Vancouver—one of the least formally religious and most spiritually restless places in North America, as poll after poll has revealed. He was home. “There is an openness here on the West Coast, anything is possible,” he says. “It could be that the lightness here has something to do with the relatively little past. Obviously there were people here before the Europeans came but they didn’t accumulate past the way Europeans do. They didn’t keep records of the past. They probably lived naturally in the present moment.” Professor Mark Shibley, a specialist in the sociology of religion at Southern Oregon University, puts the attraction in more base terms. “Spiritual entrepreneurs” like Tolle, he says in The Elusive Utopia, “relocated to this region because they perceive an open religious marketplace.”
In fact, eckharttolle.com reaches everywhere. The site sells an impressive product line of Tolle’s books, with the message recycled into music, cards, calendars, CDs and DVDs, as well as meditations from Eng and her instructional Qi Flow Yoga video. Tolle lives well, though not ostentatiously, on what must be substantial royalities. There is this high-end condo in one of Canada’s most expensive neighbourhoods, and a property on Salt Spring Island. He drives an Infinity, because he loves the name. Now comes Eckhart Tolle TV, an Internet site with streaming video of monthly group meditations, video responses to life’s tough questions (“To Think Or Not To Think?”, “What is Self?”) and perhaps most important, unlimited access to an “online community to chat with members worldwide.” The cost: $14.95 a month; six months, $74.75. “We think we have a winner here,” says Anthony McLaughlin, its executive producer and founder.
ET-TV had a soft launch in the summer and will be more heavily promoted this fall. “You can travel the world and teach 2,000 to 3,000 people at a time, but that’s got limitations,” says McLaughlin. “The idea of the online model is to make it really affordable and be able to go worldwide on demand.” The message board is already abuzz, with a discussion string on “sexual energy in the process of awakening” drawing particularly enthusiastic attention.
The site is at once technically advanced and decidedly unslick. A case in point is Tolle’s meditation, broadcast Sunday, Sept. 20, “a live transmission of stillness,” as he describes it. The camera fixes on a black backdrop, a table with a vase of flowers and an empty chair. Tolle enters the frame. He sits silent, staring into the camera—a concept that would be death on Oprah, or 100 Huntley Street or the emotive theme-park excess of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s old Praise The Lord Club. Finally, he speaks. “I trust that everybody is comfortable with stillness,” he begins, with an uncharacteristic hint of steel. “If you’re not, then get comfortable.”
The camera draws close and for the next 46 minutes he expands on achieving the virtues of stillness and emptiness through “a cessation in the stream of thinking.” He stops speaking at the 41-minute mark. “And that’s it,” he says with a slight smile and a bob of his head. There follows five minutes of unblinking silence, broken just three times as Tolle delicately strikes two Tibetan meditation bells. Then he walks off camera.
No communion. No choir. No saints. No sinners. No benediction. And yet, in the bells, chiming into infinity that Sunday afternoon, in the silent meditation, in the online congregation, there is something akin to liturgy. One is reminded of Bishop Ingham’s musing on the well-travelled arc from spirituality to religion. Tolle may be farther down the path than he cares to admit. “How does one get closer to God?” an admirer would later post on the site. “Listen to Eckhart Tolle.”
