When an Atheist Listens to 100+ Hours of Eckhart Tolle — The Telepathy Tapes PART TWO

What you need to know about me first...

Eckart Tolle (pulled from a Reddit forum)

Before I dive into my thoughts about The Telepathy Tapes some background is necessary. I was not raised with religion or spirituality, unless you count my parents’ reverence for nature and outer space. I grew up watching nature documentaries on PBS and attending summer camp at the Marine Biology Institute in Redwood City. For my first three years at UCLA, I studied biology, chemistry, and physics with the intention of applying to medical school. Throughout my 20s, I would have identified as an atheist or, more generously, an agnostic, except that I never thought about the afterlife, a higher intelligence, or anything other than racking up as many achievements as possible.

Spirituality entered my world around the time I entered my first 12-step program at age 31. The word “God” or “Higher Power” is used frequently in meetings and is integral to the Steps. When I first joined, I did not understand what these words meant. Intellectually, I knew their definitions—but I could not comprehend the felt experience they signified. Still, I’d been humbled enough by recent events in my life to remain open to these terms. This despite an ingrained proclivity, thanks to my Silicon Valley upbringing, to find myself intellectually superior to believers of faith.

Around the same time, a friend recommended listening to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I was reluctant, judgmental of its self-help-y title and aesthetically dubious cover. Yet I pushed past my resistance and found myself listening to over a 100 hours of Eckhart Tolle within a matter of months (including his two other books Stillness Speaks and A New Earth and plethora of retreat recordings, many of which I listened to multiple times). In these books and recordings, Tolle discusses two realms. The realm of “form,” i.e. the contents of one’s life. And the realm of the “formless,” i.e. life itself. By this token, birth—not life—is the opposite of death. Because birth and death are matters of “form,” whereas life belongs to the “formless.”

When I first heard this idea, it seemed so self-evident as to be beyond refutation. I know that my atoms, upon my death, will take up different forms, the same way a composting apple will eventually turn into soil. There is no less “life” now that the apple is soil or my body is xyz. Life merely shape-shifts. Tolle is not a scientist (though he was enrolled in a postdoc at Cambridge before dropping out), but he does not need to be. These ideas are, if not beyond science, then too basic for it.

One last background anecdote before I return to The Telepathy Tapes. The therapist I was seeing around this time recommended I attend a Family Constellation workshop with Mark Wolynn author of It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle. Long story short, I watched attendees’ family traumas acted out (in a general way) by other untrained attendees completely nonverbally. I’ll save the details for another post, but the experience left me agog. I couldn’t make sense of it. I chalked it up to the power of body language plus a willingness by attendees to see their story in the opaque movements of strangers standing in for their parents. Still, that explanation felt lacking. It didn’t explain the power of the experience for certain participants who regressed to an infant-like state, their faces red, their mouths wailing, their bodies porous, open wounds. I felt compelled to allow for that New Age idea of hidden “energies.”

Which brings me back to The Telepathy Tapes…

Except that I’m out of bandwidth for this week. I will have to continue this post next week and, hopefully, you’ll stay with me.

In the meantime, I’ve included some Eckhart Tolle memes for your enjoyment.