Interview On The Hour With George Stroumboulopoulos

It has arrived. We talked about it off the top, right? Are you one of those people who worries about everything what happened yesterday, what's happening tomorrow, and your mind just keeps going and going and going and going. And there's always somebody in your life that says you gotta live in the moment. You gotta live in the moment. If you worry so much about yesterday and today, you're missing the now. Well, chances are your friend who told you that, read our next guest book because he can help teach you. Live in the moment. Millions of people have read his work. Oprah loves him. Spiritual writer teacher Eckhart Tolle will be right here. Here's his bio.

Who you are and stillness, one and the same.

Now, if you're into this guy, you consider Eckhart Tolle one of the world's most influential spiritual leaders. People say he's a master of inner calm and peace. Was he born that way? Is he some kind of a Buddha?

Well, no.

Here's how it Eckhart was born in Germany, spent his teenage years in Spain, then headed to Britain for university and grad work. Now up until that time, Eckart said he was depressed, he was anxious, he was often suicidal. But at the tender age of 29, his life suddenly changed. He says he woke up one day feeling an overwhelming sense of joy and peace. And it took him years to figure out what had happened. Took him even longer to teach others how to get to the same place. So in a nutshell, here's what Eckhart says you are not your mind. In fact, he says your mind is your worst enemy, that it overtakes the real you and creates thoughts that make you miserable. So if you want to achieve peace, well, then you've got to disassociate yourself from your mind. Eckhart's key live in the present. Because according to him, dwelling in the past only leads to guilt and regret. Thinking about the future brings anxiety and worry.

You may have noticed that already, and.

It'S all summed up in Eckhart's enormously successful book called the Power of Now. He wrote it in Vancouver, where he currently resides. That thing came out over 10 years ago and sold more than 5 million copies. You know, thanks in large part to this person. She's also a big fan of Eckhart's follow up book, A New Earth. It was one of her book club picks. This is the most exciting thing I've ever done. And last year she made it the basis for 10 weeks of seminars with Eckhart on oprah.com thanks, Sean. Everybody, say hello to Eckhart Tolle. Thank you so much. It's great to see you, man. Okay. You know, when you first published that book, Paranoia, with small independent publisher, 3,000 copies, I. I can imagine you would have no idea that this was going to happen to you.

No. I thought the book would only appeal to people who are already deeply into spirituality or had been meditating for many years. And after about three or four months after it got published, I realized that many people were phoning and writing in to tell me they'd bought more than one copy for friends or relatives. And then I began to realize that it was a kind of snowball effect, and it would be growing and growing. That was a surprise. Another surprise was that for quite a few people, that was the first spiritual book they had ever read. And it made sense to them. And so I hadn't realized the degree of readiness in people for this message. And that was the surprise. And then more surprises came later. The book became what one reviewer called an underground bestseller for a while.

Usually music underground means people like it, but no one buys it.

Well, here, underground means people buy it, but there's no publicity, there's no advertising, nothing on television about it. And so word of mouth. So it grew for about a year and a half, it grew through word of mouth. Gradually, it got to some cities. There was a time at that time, I would take a few copies of the book to little spiritual bookstores in Vancouver every couple of weeks, and then they would phone me again, say, we need another five copies. I would carry five copies.

You did it yourself?

Yes. That's fantastic. That was enormously satisfying to have this personal contact with the book. And at that time also, there were not that many readers. People could phone in and say, oh, I'd like to meet you, and said, okay, what time do you want to meet? And then as it grew, after a while, I couldn't do that anymore.

Yeah, rule number one, man. If someone wants to meet you on Facebook, don't. That's the trick. Do you have horror stories?

Horror stories.

When you met somebody and you went, oh, I gotta get out of here.

No, nothing that comes to mind. But the book does seem to. Not only the Power of Now, also the later book, A New Earth, for some reason, it does seem to upset some people. I remember my office getting. They told me, they don't show it to me, but they told me they got the Open One package and somebody had shredded the entire New Earth book and sent it in the shredded version back to my Office. So something must have triggered something in here.

If you go back a few decades, you're 29 years old. A fateful night. Was that what started this whole thing?

Yes, a night when I'd had many unhappy nights. But that night I was just so deeply depressed again. And I'd spent the previous weeks in anxiety. And what happened? A thought came into my head which said, I can't live with myself any longer. And at that moment, a separation happened between myself and that thought. And I looked at the thought and said, I can't live with myself. What does that mean? There must be two of me. There's an I. And there must be some unhappy self that I cannot live with. And through that, although I only understood the full implications, years later, a separation happened between the unhappy self, which I later realized is a mental construct consisting of repetitive unhappy thoughts about me and my life. An unhappy story. I was continuously retelling myself the unhappy story of me. And I was so identified with the unhappy story of me that there was no gap between that and me. And that was the self that I couldn't live with. And when I realized that there is a self I can't live with, something separated. And I became the consciousness behind the unhappy self. And I could see that the whole structure of the unhappy self was a kind of fiction, a narrative that I kept repeating in my mind. So the separation happened, and I realized that in essence, I'm not my story, whether happy or unhappy, I'm the consciousness behind the story. The consciousness or the space, whatever you want to call it, there's not really a name for it. And I suddenly realized myself as that. And with that, I was in a state of peace. From then onwards, I never again identified with this unhappy mental construct, the me with its story. And that's what I call now the shift in consciousness that happened. Or you could also call it an awakening. And then later it became the teaching, because I tried to explain after years. A few years later, people started coming to me, just casually asking questions. And gradually a spiritual teaching developed. But it's all based on that disidentification from this continuous stream of thinking that you take to be yourself. But it's no more than a stream of thinking. It's not who you are. In essence, I don't think we know.

But however it is we are or we act, ultimately we are all affected by where we come from. That sort of sets the table for who we're going to be in the next phase of our life. And I wonder for you to get to that point, what were your folks like? I never hear about what your childhood was like. That would have set that set these sort of dominoes up for them to come falling down that one night.

Well, the childhood was already unhappy. There was always almost continuous conflict in my parents marriage and I was the only child, which makes it even more difficult because if you have siblings then you can kind of relate to them. And so I suffered a lot, became I think the beginnings of the deep unhappiness on depression are probably there. But again, I'm glad now that it did happen because otherwise the shift wouldn't have happened.

You know, the idea of being in the now, it's something that my friends, they've sort of stopped asking me to be in the now because they recognize it's not a reality for me because so much is like I'm sort of in the now, but I'm going here trying this. The one thing we know is that our society is constructed in a way where we have a history and we have things to look forward to. How do you almost approach the unlearning of a people to change the way that this structure, that this society is built, this society is built on? Here's my past, learn from my past. If I don't learn from my past, I'm doomed to repeat the mistakes. How do you put all that together, realizing how society is?

Well, this is all true, of course. It's good to learn from one's past mistakes. On the other hand, if you identify with your past and your memories and that forms the basis for your sense of self, that becomes a kind of prison. So nothing wrong with learning from the past. But the very essential thing is the realization that your life is always this moment. Your life is never not this moment. And whatever you think or experience has to be in the now. So life and now are actually inseparable.

It's tomorrow never comes, right?

Yes. When it comes, it's today. As they said in the British pub, there was a sign which said free beer tomorrow.

And that is so unfair to drunks. That is so unfair to drunk people. You said Tiger Wood lives in the now, right? That Tiger woods is a great example of the now.

Yes.

What's the difference between being in the now and just being simply focused? Because I don't. When I watch him golf, he golfs like a man who's chasing something. So what's the difference between in the now and being focused?

I don't think he's chasing anything. I think he is present. There's a Nice story of a Zen master who was watching a sports person perform. And he didn't. He was watching very closely, and the person wasn't quite making it. And the Zen master observed him and said the need to win drains him of power. The need. Because if you have the need to win now, the west, of course, subscribes to that. It says you must want to win, but that's not the Eastern way. And I believe that that's the truer way. Because the need to win, you project a goal to some future moment. You cannot fully be present in what you do. If you have the need to win, you want to get there.

If you're a pro athlete, you only have to win, right? That's the challenge.

But the great ones, when they actually perform, when they are, as the expression goes, in the zone, they don't think about winning. They're absolutely and totally present. And so I believe that's where mastery arises. In that state of absolute and complete presence. There's also a nice film, the Legend of Baga Vance, where it's about a golfer who learns to be present.

You said that there are certain people or things that are better at being in the now than others. You said animals are great at being in the now, but then you also. Women are better at being in the now than men. Is that true?

Yes, to some extent. Women are not quite as much in their head as men. Women tend to be. They are in their head too, but not quite as much. They tend to be still a little bit more connected with the body, the energy in the body, with their feelings. So they're not as mind identified, not quite as. There are, of course, always exceptions. Not quite as mind identified as man. And therefore it's a little easier. And so many talks that I've given. There's always more women than men. This is beginning to change a little bit occasionally now, but still the case.

And the new Earth is just taking the idea of the power of now to a much bigger level, right?

Yes. New perspectives on it and an elaboration and a new also indicating what it is that prevents you from being present structures in your mind. The ego, the identification with the voice in the head. To become aware of that. If you're not aware of it, it will take you over again and again.

I know you've got a lot of traveling to do when you come back to Canada. Please come back on our show.

Thank you. I will.

I want to talk about Eckhart. Tolle.com is his website. And there's a lot more to see with what he's got going on. And of course, he's got them books. Good to see him.

Thank you for coming.

Told everybody. Thank you very much for watching the program tonight. There's an awful lot more to come. Thanks for watching. Next time.