They want to know more and more about the person." He smiles at the absurdity of this. "The person isn't actually that important," the 61-year-old says, in a voice tinged with the accent of his native Germany.
This presents a technical difficulty with the whole notion of his being interviewed by a journalist: I want to discover what made Tolle into the person he is, whereas Tolle wants me to grasp that the question of who he is is, in a profound sense, irrelevant. It is a central plank of Tolle's teaching that the set of concepts that make up what each of us calls our "personality" is a false construct.
(During the online seminars with Winfrey, she frequently characterised him as a spiritual leader with the power to transform the consciousness of the planet. He really does exude a palpable stillness, responding to questions with several seconds' thought before speaking his standard expression is an amiable smile. At home in his pleasant-but-not-opulent top-floor flat in a leafy neighbourhood of Vancouver, he is quiet-spoken and somehow fragile, his elfin frame swallowed up by a brown leather armchair. New age guru stereotype dictates that I should find Tolle bloated by wealth, surrounded by fawning acolytes, an egomaniac in robes and gold chains. (The Dalai Lama and the pope are presumably ahead of him, but their sales figures are tricky to quantify.) He owes his dominance of the mind/body/spirit sections of bookshops, in large part, to a mysterious cosmic force beyond all human understanding - specifically Oprah Winfrey, whose championing of his books, including a 10-week online seminar series, watched by 11 million people, has ensured their long-term tenure on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. The books that grew out of his Belsize Park epiphany, The Power of Now and A New Earth, have made Tolle by some measures the most successful spiritual author of the modern age, with tens of millions of copies in circulation. That morning, he writes, "I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born." Tolle says he doesn't mind the fact that some sceptics don't believe this story, though the sceptics might reply that he doesn't have much choice: once you've told the world that you abide in a realm of infinite equanimity, you can't very well start getting all snippy when people don't take you at your word. One evening, he was a near-suicidal graduate student, living in a Belsize Park bedsit by the following morning, he'd been flooded with a sense of "uninterrupted deep peace and bliss" that has never left him since. W hen Eckhart Tolle was 29, he says, he underwent a cataclysmic and terrifying spiritual experience that erased his former identity.
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