Is Tolle a tool for starting a million ego wars?

Tolle has been getting a lot of national media play due to Oprah's endorsement of his ideas. Again, I've only gone skin deep with him, and what I take from my survey is that he's demonizing the ego. He may backpedal in his talks a bit and attempt to present a more balanced view, but when you count all the change in the end, he's still setting folks up for an internal schism of personality features, setting sub-personalities against one another in a fruitless attempt at identity purification. There is a very longstanding precedent for this in Vedic-based spiritual culture, but that doesn't mean it actually works.

I started watching the 'new earth' oprah/tolle love-fest netcasts. As a side note, it was interesting to see what an expensively produced netcast can achieve: reaching a large worldwide audience, all connected in real-time via the video-cast, telephone, email, skype, etc.

Apart from 'The Power of Now' none of Tolle's books ever resonated with me. Once he started getting into the pain body he lost me, adding an unnecessary layer of language to describe something which could be done in a much simpler way. But I have to say, that if you listen to him carefully, you can get some good insights.

The majority of people will turn his words to suit their life (i.e. ego=bad, let me fight ego to find happiness), but some may understand that he is really talking about identification. So I think the netcast is better than his books. When he is explaining something in real-time, he does have more opportunity to say the same thing over and over again, and a few more splinters of the truth come out.

There is always going to be great difficulty in bringing nondual truth to a mass audience. No matter how clear they make the language, folks are going to create their own interpretations, and that's going to muck it all up.

That said, I don't think you ever have to use the "e" word to put across nondual truth. It's a mistake right from the start. Tolle should excise the term ego from his teaching. It would go a long way toward preventing the kind of confusion that is occurring in mass quantities now.

A couple years back, I visited a long-time friend, someone I know through many meditation retreats and discussions and such. He'd become a big Tolle fan, so we watched about an hour of a video of one of Tolle's programs. One thing stood out for me, and I wonder if anyone else relates. Tolle was talking about some particular contemplation or practice, and suggested that during the course of ordinary life, if we'd just dedicate a minute or two of each hour to remembering it, it'd serve to bring us back to Now. But what about the other 58 minutes of the hour? It sounded like Tolle was offering a way to periodically rise above our mundane lives and enter his spiritual Truth. Like: his is a teaching of discarding the mundane for the spiritual. It didn't include any inspiration for questioning the very duality of spiritual/mundane.

I think doing business is wonderful. I don't begrudge anyone for making a buck. And yet... it does seem difficult to reconcile good teaching with a profit motive. If you really are teaching people that Truth has already appeared, right now... the problem is that you're not inspiring them to BUY anything!

Tolle was talking about some particular contemplation or practice, and suggested that during the course of ordinary life, if we'd just dedicate a minute or two of each hour to remembering it, it'd serve to bring us back to Now. But what about the other 58 minutes of the hour? It sounded like Tolle was offering a way to periodically rise above our mundane lives and enter his spiritual Truth.

I think that Tolle isn't that far off the mark there. Most people don't have the concentration or mindfulness to stay "in the moment" or whatever 100% of the time. That was what Sidd G. was pointing to: these are the ways we cling, these are the things we are confused over, etc. that prevent us from being in the true nature of each moment. So when Tool-uh tells us to practice 1 or 2 minutes out of the hour, he could just be trying to cultivate good habits. 1 or 2 minutes of presence in an hour for someone whose mind is a wreck is a dramatic improvement. Of course, you want to get to the other 58 minutes but that's a hefty goal. That said I could see how someone would also take it as a dictum to just half-ass it. "I'm 'in the moment' 16 minutes a day!!!" Again, an accomplishment but not the end. Compared to some of the crap out there, it can't hurt.