[Buddha-l] In Praise of Eckhart Tolle

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 08:53 -0500, RonLeifer at aol.com wrote:

> Tolle advises us to look within ourselves to understand how we create
> our own suffering and how we can relieve ourselves of our self created
> suffering. 
>  
> He discovered this by looking within himself at a time when he was
> suffering and unhappy. He saw how his mind generated his pain. Through
> his own efforts, he discovered the causes of his suffering and a path
> for the relief of suffering. 

As you point out very well (for which, thank you!) this
"methodology" (if I may use a word I have learned to hate) has a pretty
decent pedigree. Not only is it what the Buddha did, as you point out,
but it's not so different from what Jung did and from what Emerson did
and from what most people who are worth listening to have done. 

What is interesting is that most people who look in themselves come up
with a pretty strong sense that the traditional categories of analysis
(non-dualism being one of them) have become somewhat threadbare, and
that people who rigidly follow them ring hollow, like spit falling into
an empty bucket.

> Because the Advaita Vedantists discovered this does not make Tolle a
> neo-adviata. Because Buddha discovered this does not make Tolle a
> revisionist Buddhist-lite. 

Every now and then I like to imagine how the world would look if time
ran backwards. Then we could hear Devadatta fulminating against Gotama
and accusing him of being nothing but Tolle Lite.

> No one can live in a non-dual state of mind.

True enough, but come to think of it, are states of mind the sort of
thing that can be lived in? The only states of mind I have ever
encountered are so short that by the time I've packed up my household
goods to move into them, they have left. As one of my professors, Tony
Warder, used to point out, minds do not have states. Only static things
have states, and the mind is the least static thing there is. (Of
course, he had never tuned in to my mind, which is full of static most
of the time, but I digress.)

> Tolle makes a great contribution if only by showing that the normal
> human mind is neurotic. Alan Watts said the same thing. He said the
> normal human mind is the breeding ground of neurosis. Ronnie Laing
> said it too, and was considered crazy for calling normal people crazy.

Jack Kornfield raised many a Buddhist eyebrow when he said (agreeing
with Jung) that no one ever gets rid of all their neuroses; at best, one
learns to manage most of them them most of the time. I heard Buddhists
saying that at the moment Kornfield said that, he stopped being a
Buddhist, as if that were some kind of tragedy.

Since you are too modest to toot your own whistle, let me remind our
kind readers that your <cite>Happiness Project</cite> is a wonderful
book that bears reading by oneone interested in psychotherapy and
Buddhist practice. People may also be interested in reading Jeff
Schaler's introduction of you when you won the Szasz award in 2001. It's
at http://www.szasz.com/leiferawardintro.html

Thanks for your praise of Tolle. Seeing him attacked by all those pain
bodies out there was beginning to take a heavy toll on my already meager
storehouse of equanimity.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico