[Buddha-l] In Praise of Eckhart Tolle

[Joy Vriens]

curt wrote:

> I think that critical assessment is even more important today than it 
> was in the Buddha's day. Alternative spirituality has become a business 
> - and many successful teachers are essentially (or even literally) CEO's 
> of a successful money making enterprise.

Why is it more important now than then? I am not sure things have 
changed that much, for better or for worse. Spirituality has always been 
alternative, i.e. distinguishing itself from a more consensual 
spirituality of the day. And it has always (also) been used to control, 
manipulate and exploit others or in the best case to live on others. On 
what criteria should spirituality be assessed? On criteria that are 
inherent to itself, on non-spiritual criteria or on both?

> This is especially true of 
> people like Echkart Tolle and Byron Katie and Ken Wilber who seem to 
> have had the same experience when reading Trungpa's "Cutting Through 
> Spiritual Materialism" that Dan Quayle reportedly had when he saw the 
> film "The Candidate". How's that for an obtuse allusion?

If spiritual materialism is a problem that one finds one needs to get 
rid of and one turns to successful teachers to do so, then I don't see 
how those teachers successful money making enterprises could stop us 
from doing so. Au contraire, they provide us with excellent testing 
material to see whether one has achieved detachment or not. It is one 
thing to give one's money, it's another to see the person we give to 
seeing richer and wealthier while we are getting poorr and yet another 
thing having friends and family telling us we're such a sucker for being 
so gullible. If you manage to sit it out til that point, you are quite 
detached and have made real progress IMO. You have almost achieved what 
you set out to achieve. Isn't that priceless?

Joy