You are so right about the abuse apologists.

Welcome to CEI.

Hi all, new to this forum!
I was researching info about the Avatar cult (which is quite difficult to pinpoint) and came across this website. Amazing place to clear your ideas and keep away from insanity!
First of all, you both are very brave and I encourage you to keep looking for answers, without walking into gurus traps. I hope you both are doing fine with tour lives.
I am quite surprised about all the info about Tolle's (and others) misleading teachings that it can be found here. I read his books many years ago, and liked some of his ideas, even admire him a bit I must recognize, but never bought some of his other crap.
If it is helpful to anyone, my approach to these things is that of a disbeliever. Obviously, when we are seeking for answers to distress our suffering, we are vulnerable. But that doesn't mean that we must blindly follow any teachings, not even those from wider acceptance such as Buddhism or Hinduism. We are all Westerners and we'll never grasp the deep meanings and practices of those whose culture, infancy, family story and traditions, etc were founded on those teachings.
If you allow me a couple of analogies, me being a musician, I can ever truly acquire the mindset of a hindustani musician, even with full lifetime dedication, because I have not experienced it from my childhood, and can't understand the religious and social aspects of it (I tried for a couple of years until I realized of this). Being spanish (catalan), I can't even connect with flamenco (which is common in Andalusia), because I have not "been born" into that social reality. I can learn it, of course, but there are many things I will never understand deeply, aside from moving into that region and living there for 40 years.
I was once playing for a yogi meeting, and they were thanking Krishna and other hinduist deities, but none of them knew a sh*t about all that. Aside from being disrespectful, I found it very disturbing.
On the other hand, being also a pedagog, I never approach a didactic method as if it was THE method, because they all are incomplete in some sense. So the best you can do is learn from all of them, and take what it makes sense for you.
I think the same should apply to gurus or enlightment practices. Sure, this or that guy seem to have the truth, but what is your truth? My point is, learn from everywhere but don't buy everything. Make your own path, something that makes sense for you, and if something doesn't feel well, it is probably not for you.
Having myself tried LSD, and not willing to judge ThePowerofNo, I think the feeling you explain after taking some LSD might have a lot to do with that. It's a powerful drug, and while you can have truly amazing experiences with many kind of enlightening substances, it has to be 1. Properly accompanied by someone expert (like some of the ayahuasca rituals, which I never tried and I'm a bit suspicious of them, but at least are done in a relatively safe enviroment, with people that take care of you through the experience), or 2. With the knowledge and awareness that you are under the effects of the drug. The first time I tried LSD I was out for a week, unable to speak or think coherently. At first I was very scared that it would stay that way forever (it is for some people, you should know). It didn't, I think because I tried not to overthink about it and be confident that it was a temporary state. The mind is very powerful, and when we struggle with thoughts, we can convince ourselves of anything, leading to destruction, or reconstruction.
Also, I wouldn't take it if I have doubts or I m having a bad emotional time.
Shashah, I can't imagine how it must be to have a terrible trauma like you explained. It must be very hard to overcome the anxiety of something like that. My only and humble advice is, find some good old therapist that is not trying to empty your pockets, and believe in yourself, and not the toxic guru-says that you'll find, sadly, everywhere. In any case, read them, don't believe what they say, and if something resonates and you think it might be positive, try it carefully. I think anyone with the need for answers should be accompanied with the most care. Changing the mindset in order to change your reality, paraphrasing the ugliest gurus, is difficult, so don't treat it lightly, and go to the extent where you feel safe.
One thing helps me to bring calm to my mind when I feel overwhelmed (I think, in fact, that I read it on Tolle's sh*tbooks, but I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, he took it from Buddhist teachings): the very essence of existence is a void, and no one can escape from that. So, knowing that, you can take some distance from the pain (and euphoria) and see that we cannot do anything else but take what we've got, and make the best of it. Taking care of others and focusing on basic needs (eating well, having a good sleep routine, keeping mind and body awake without being too harsh, just enough to feel well) can help a lot. Also, even I being someone who was thirsty of epiphany moments, extreme sensations of joy and euphoria (as well as the opposite) are not what life is made of.
In regards of this, a little personal anecdote: I played in a psychedelic rock band for many years. We were smoking pot all the time, looking for connection and enjoying the power of sound. We did a concert once, where a member of the band was in Thailand (where he had a breakthrough mainly beacuse of combining many powerful drugs). Other friends joined us, and so the experience of our music was all new (we didn't rehearse too much so it was kind of a jam). That gig I had an epiphany moment, so strong that for the next 6 months I couldn't find joy in anything around me, not even in the music, because nothing was giving me an experience so strong. Know what? It passed. After a time (and some conversations with friends and some connecting with the ground), things returned to a normal state. You can't live from epiphany revelation state-of-mind. Life is much simpler than that, even when it is hard and difficult.
I hope my babbling brings some light to someone.
Be strong, calm, and take care!

I find Eckhart wholly depressing.

Have to add also, if you are of understanding age and have taken a choice to take LSD, then life must be pretty unsatisfactory as it is for that person.

He runs a big business, and would have had to have engaged in propelling that with his choices and actions.. he didn’t just magically have everything organised in this way it would have taken the strong wish and drive to achieve a lot of what he has created.

It is sad because we have all these lovable figures who are actually just full of S at the end of the day.

“Bing - now silence as you ingest what I have said, because it is the authority.” - that’s basically him before he even speaks at his conferences isn’t it?

PowerofNO, thank you for writing on this topic. I have currently suffered the loss of my son and am writing a book on the experience. One of my chapters is titled The Death of Right and Wrong. And guess who's work is mentioned? You guessed it. Thought I'd pass along a few paragraphs from this chapter. And I hope you make a full recovery from the brainwashing stupidity of Ekhart Tolle!

" And of course, along came the spiritual enlightenment leaders of the Boomer generation. (Apparently these folks had nothing better to do.) One of these, was a man named Eckhart Tolle.

Tolle, born in 1948, said he was depressed for much of his life until age 29 when he underwent an “inner transformation”. He spent several years “wandering in a state of deep bliss” before becoming a spiritual leader. (I’m fairly certain he was stoned out of his mind most of those years.) He wrote several books, the first was The Power of Now in 1997, which hit the New York Times best seller list in 2000. Next came A New Earth….. Awakening Your Life’s Purpose, in 2005. And then he was lauded by the enlightened Liberal, Oprah Winfrey, in 2008 with a a series of ten webinars that were watched by 35 million people. While Tolle repeatedly warned his readers about the evil trappings of “ego”, he apparently believed in capitalism. It worked, and his net worth quickly soared to 70 million dollars, as a pampered generation blindly searched for the spiritual meaning of life.

Tolle’s rambling writings, and so called spiritual teachings, focused on the strength of living in the moment, the virtue of removing ego from any situation, and enjoying the power of now. He professed to alter your entire consciousness, but of course, for only those that were ready. (So apparently if you dared to challenge his words and concepts, you were one of the poor souls that just wasn’t ready for his profound message. Well isn’t that convenient! That philosophy also worked well for Charles Manson and Jim Jones.)

I read A New Earth, and never forgot the night I wanted to throw his damn book at the wall. While I must mention that millions of people found his work “life altering” and very helpful, just as he promised, to me, this guy was nothing but a pot head, stoned out of his mind. (I must have been one of those poor souls that simply wasn’t ready.) What I gained from his nihilistic writing, was worth far less than the price of his book. Why I remembered Tolle’s writing on the Zen story, Is That So?, a dozen years later is beyond me. Possible because it made me so mad, that I simply couldn’t forget it."


ENJOY YOUR RECOVERY!

Hello everyone. For some reason I decided to check back on here for the first time in a couple of years and lo and behold, there's activity on my thread! Thank you to everyone for commenting and sharing your own stories and views.

I am pleased to say that I have come a long way from the clutches of Eckhart Tolle and his teachings on the awesome power of lobotomy (teachings that have led all his many millions of readers to enlightenment, thus transforming the world into the wonderful utopia we see around us today). On the rare occasions I think of his bullshit now it usually just makes me chuckle.

On a less happy note, the intense personal inquiry that followed my apostasy from Tolle-ism led me to uncover the roots of my own vulnerability in a very severe childhood trauma that I had never properly acknowledged. This has been, and continues to be, a painful process. But at least I'm confronting reality now rather than spinning cartwheels in la-la land.

So, sashah, as a fellow victim of prior abuse, it doesn't surprise me that you could relate to me so much. But God damn if I didn't feel the same way reading some of what you wrote. You absolutely nailed it when you spoke about how perfectly the no-ego philosophy of Tolle et al. makes the victims of abuse introvert the blame for their abuse, how that then makes them a target for further abuse, and how it can reinforce unhealthy emotional bonds of victims to their abusers. In my own way I've been through all of that.

I'm really sorry to hear about what you've been through. But speaking from my own experience, there is life at the end of the tunnel, even if light can be intermittent. I wish you well in your recovery.

Zato, thank you also for sharing your thoughts. I agree that we can be very gung-ho in modern Western societies thinking we can just grab ideas from foreign cultures and instantly understand them inside-out. Maybe it's some sort of hangover from the old colonial mindset of rape and plunder. Or maybe it's the influence of the Internet giving us the (illusion of) the world at our fingertips. I appreciate your suggestions about how to explore ideas in a more careful and reflective way.

HisMother, I'm so sorry to hear you lost your son. It's fantastic that you're writing a book exposing how damaging people like Tolle can be. This sort of thing is much needed. I'm sure it will counteract victimisation and provide help and support for a lot of people. The paragraphs you shared are excellent and darkly hilarious. When the book's finished I would be very interested in buying a copy.

Hey man thanks for sharing your story I went through something similar with meditation and the new age bull crap. I wanted to ask how is your recovery coming along?

Hi Tone1997. As I said in my post just above, I consider myself close to fully recovered from the Eckhart Tolle mind virus. However, I'm left with the deeper trauma of events that happened much earlier in my life, which I've come to believe contributed in large part to my susceptibility to Tolle. Living with that is an ongoing challenge. But compared to the wreck I was when I started this thread, I'm pleased to report I am much more mentally stable and things are generally going much better in my life. I hope you also make progress in your own recovery.

Thank you for sharing our story it is a source of hope to those facing similar circumstances to these cult like mind messing messages. These pseudosciences are dangerous and stupid and I’m angry at myself for allowing myself to fall into this trap of a black hole that started with meditation and led me to experience depersonalization and trauma related symptoms thinking it was”ego death” but it wasn’t. I’m happy you are almost recovered and I’m sorry for the trauma that came up. You’ll overcome it brother. If I may ask what steps or help helped you recover?

I also had very bad spiritual experiences, but because I trusted wrong person - Guru. He used my trust to abuse me, constantly. I was easy target as I had no other support in life.

In the past I was obssessed with mediatation and having no thought. E.T teaches that we should stop our minds and as a goal, to have no thoughts in our minds, but the very thing that try to stop the mind - is mind. And I did stoped, I was breathing consciously and nothing worked, and it was impossible, and I hated myself, for being unable to stop my mind.
I learnt to be good for myself. If I have a day with busy mind, that's fine. Mind is no other than thought. One thought is trying to stop another thought. When no thought is judged and just observed, there might be realization, that mind is not a thing to be stoped, it is empty, and everything is empty of self. But I do not see this anymore. I listened to advice of Krishnamutri, and then I had this realization. But then thought come, that this bad guru from past abused me, and I started to smoke cigarettes from fear, or stress and I'm my body-mind again.

Tone1997, the first step, really, was finding this place. Having immersed myself in the Eckhart Tolle philosophy for so long those ideas had become unquestionable truths in my mind; the discussions on here were the first thing to give voice to some of my growing doubts, and open me to some fresh perspectives.

But the terror of having my sense of reality suddenly torn away without anything obvious to replace it with, was, to begin with, too much to handle. Unfortunately, shortly after my first post on here, I had a complete mental breakdown. I actually ended up in a psychiatric hospital, after a critical episode where I was so overwhelmed by the terrifying uncertainty of it all that I just started screaming and screaming... looking back, I'm sure the after effects of the LSD played a big part.

Fortunately, the story didn't end there. I managed to get out of the hospital quickly and relatively unscathed. I then found a good therapist, and working with her was slowly able to pick through some of the wreckage. It took a good couple of years, though. Hell, it took the best part of year for me just to begin to trust her - the fear of being betrayed again, as it felt like I'd been by Eckhart Tolle, was so strong.

And where the by-no-means-painless process of therapy eventually led me to was a door that had been locked and barred for many, many years. This is the childhood trauma I referred to above. Now that I've re-entered through that locked door, I still have a lot of work to do, to really heal.

But I've come a long way. I've rebuilt my self-confidence to where I will never allow myself to be victimised by New Age creepers again. I've learned to stand up for myself. And new ideas have slowly percolated through and crystallised into a new understanding of reality, to replace the void of meaning that threatened to swallow me after my apostasy from Tolle-ism. I'm doing better, as I said above, in all areas of my life. I'm living independently, have a fulfilling job, a few good people around me. Modest achievements, perhaps, but I've had to fight hard for them, so to me they're victories.

So the rough formula for me has been psychotherapy, reflection, exposure to new ideas - and above all, time. But maybe it'll be different for you. For me, I came to believe that trauma was at the root of a lot of this stuff, and so trying to understand and integrate that has become the main thing.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/16/2020 08:52PM by PowerofNo.