The Antidote (12 page)

Eckhart Tolle looked at me and blinked amiably.

‘Thanks for sparing the time!' I began, a little hesitantly, before immediately berating myself for not remembering that ‘time' was one of the things that Tolle claimed no longer to experience in a meaningful way. ‘Time isn't precious at all,' he writes, in
The Power of Now,
‘because it is an illusion.' Only the present, ‘the now', is real.

More on this – ironically enough – later.

‘It's really a pleasure,' he replied, blinking amiably again, and waiting. This waiting and smiling and blinking was something I'd seen him do before, albeit at a distance. A few years previously,
Oprah Winfrey, while championing his books on her talk show, had enlisted him to take part in a ten-week online seminar video series, during which she repeatedly characterised him as a spiritual leader with the power to transform the consciousness of the planet. Tolle had just smiled and blinked. Winfrey seemed unnerved by his willingness to break one of the first rules of broadcasting: no long stretches of silence.

The voice in my head – the one that was, right at that moment, criticising me for still not having come up with a meaningful opening question – is something most of us notice only when we're stressed, as I definitely was. But the starting-point of Eckhart Tolle's philosophy – as he began to explain, once I'd finally phrased a question – is that we spend our whole lives in the company of such a voice. The voice judges and interprets reality, determines our emotional reactions, and chatters so constantly and so loudly that we come to identify with it: we imagine that we
are
the chattering stream of thinking. If you doubt this account of what it's like inside your mind, consider the possibility that this might be because you're too closely identified with the chatter to notice. ‘There is this complete identification with the thoughts that go through your head,' Tolle said, his accent betraying a trace of his native Germany, when I asked him what he thought was the biggest barrier to happiness for most people. ‘It's just a total absence of awareness, except for the thoughts that are continuously passing through your mind. It is the state of being so identified with the voices in your head' – and at this point he emitted a tight Germanic chuckle – ‘that you think you
are
the voices in your head.'

In his book
A New Earth,
Tolle recounts an outwardly insignificant incident that occurred some months before his terrifying nocturnal experience in the Belsize Park bedsit. It was the first
time he realised how closely identified he was with his thinking. At that time, he was studying in the central library of the University of London, and would travel there on the Underground each morning, shortly after rush hour:

One time, a woman in her early thirties sat opposite me. I had seen her before a few times on that train. One could not help but notice her. Although the train was full, the seats on either side of her were unoccupied, the reason being, no doubt, that she appeared to be quite insane. She looked extremely tense, and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was totally unaware, it seemed, of other people, or her surroundings … Her monologue went something like this: ‘And then she said to me … so I said to her you are a liar … how dare you accuse me of … when you are the one who has always taken advantage of me … I trusted you and you betrayed my trust …'

The woman got off the train at Tolle's stop. Out of curiosity, he decided to follow her, until gradually he began to realise that she was heading for the university library, just like him. For Tolle, this was troubling. He was an ambitious and driven young graduate student who had come to think of academic research as a pinnacle of human activity, and of universities like his as being home to an élite class of accomplished, or at least aspiring, intellectuals. He remembered wondering: ‘How could an insane person like her be part of this?'

I was still thinking about her when I was in the men's room, prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I
thought: ‘I hope I don't end up like her.' The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I suddenly was shocked when I realised that I hadn't just thought those words, but mumbled them aloud. ‘Oh, my God, I'm already like her,' I thought.

I squirmed when I first read this, recalling my own Stoic exercise in talking out loud on the London Underground. Back then, my intention had been to learn that I could tolerate embarrassment, and live with the thought that other people might think me insane. Tolle was making a more radical point: that only a very thin line separates such ‘insane' people from the rest of us. The main difference is that, most of the time, we non-insane people manage to keep our constant mental chatter inaudible to others.

It is when we identify with this inner chatter, Tolle suggests – when we come to think of it
as
us – that thinking becomes compulsive. We do it all the time, ceaselessly, and the idea that we might ever enjoy a respite from thinking never occurs to us. We come to see our thinking, and our continuing to exist as people, as one and the same thing. ‘Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction,' Tolle writes. ‘But we don't realise this, because almost everybody is suffering from it. So it's considered normal.' The sense of self that we construct from identifying with our thoughts is what Tolle calls the ‘ego'. (Different thinkers use this term in very different ways.) And by definition, living in the service of the ego can never make us happy.

Why can the ego never bring happiness? Tolle's argument here echoes the Stoics, who concluded that our judgments about the world are the source of our distress. But he takes things further, suggesting that these judgments, along with all our other thoughts, are what we take ourselves to be. We're not only
distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we
are
those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own. It sustains itself through dissatisfaction – through the friction it creates against the present moment, by opposing itself to what's happening, and by constantly projecting into the future, so that happiness is always some other time, never now. The ego, Tolle likes to say, thrives on drama, because compulsive thinking can sink its teeth into drama. The ego also thrives on focusing on the future, since it's much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present. (It's really quite tricky, when you try it, to think compulsively about right now.) If all this is correct, we have inadvertently sentenced ourselves to unhappiness. Compulsive thinking is what we take to be the core of our being – and yet compulsive thinking relies on our feeling dissatisfied.

The way out of this trap is not to stop thinking – thinking, Tolle agrees, is exceedingly useful – but to
disidentify
from thoughts: to stop taking your thoughts to be you, to realise, in the words of
The Power of Now,
that ‘you are not your mind'. We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said ‘I think, therefore I am,' he had not discovered ‘the most fundamental truth', Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to ‘the most basic error'.

What Tolle claimed had happened to him with such force that night in his bedsit was, precisely, a disidentification from thinking. At the time, he had just graduated with a first-class Master's degree in languages and history, and was preparing for a doctorate. ‘I'd done well because I was motivated by fear of not being good enough,' he remembered. ‘So I worked very hard.' He saw himself as an intellectual in the making, and was ‘convinced that all the
answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect – that is, by thinking'. But his intellectual labours weren't making him happy – and this realisation made him feel even worse. ‘I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety,' he wrote. Gradually, and then not so gradually, the anxiety was ratcheting up and up. Something had to give. And on that night, shortly after his twenty-ninth birthday, it did:

I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence … I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. ‘I cannot live with myself much longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind.

‘I cannot live with myself': the phrase is a cliché, but Tolle was stopped dead by its implications. ‘If I cannot live with myself,' he remembered thinking, ‘there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” that “I” cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real. I was so stunned by this realisation that my mind stopped. I was conscious, but there were no more thoughts.' And then, before he knew it, it was morning – the morning that he felt suffused with a feeling of ‘uninterrupted deep peace and bliss'.

What had happened, if his account is to be believed, was that he
no longer mistakenly believed he
was
his thinking; he saw himself, instead, as the witness to it. This is an experience you can easily taste for yourself by deliberately deciding to watch your own thinking. Sit like a cat at a mouse-hole, Tolle advises, waiting to see what your next thought will be. ‘When you listen to a thought,' he explains, ‘you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you, and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energising the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.' We have all experienced something ‘behind or underneath' thought, in those moments that thinking seems temporarily to fall away: when gasping in awe at beautiful scenery, after intense physical exercise, or while making love. The trick is to take that stance towards thinking all the time, even when you're thinking. If any this sounds familiar, it may be because it leads back to Buddhism. Watching your thoughts in this way is a form of meditation.

This is the point at which Tolle's outlook gets especially tricky for a sceptic to swallow. He seems to assume that when you stop identifying with your ego, you discover who you
really
are – that you discover your ‘deeper self' or your ‘true Being', which was hiding behind the fake self all along. But this kind of talk rightly makes more mainstream philosophers nervous. Just because you have succeeded in dismantling the conventional understanding of the self, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll find the ‘real' one. Perhaps we are just a ‘bundle of perceptions', as Hume put it. Perhaps there is no ‘deeper', ‘truer' meaning to the notion of who we are. Once again, though, this isn't a question that we
need to answer conclusively. Merely asking it is what matters. It is enough, for now, to enquire within: don't you feel a certain tranquility when you seek to become the witness to your thoughts, rather than identifying with them completely?

The optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to happiness is exactly the kind of thing the ego loves. Positive thinking is all about identifying with your thoughts, rather than disidentifying from them. And the ‘cult of optimism' is all about looking forward to a happy or successful future, thereby reinforcing the message that happiness belongs to some other time than now. Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present. ‘The important thing,' Tolle told me, ‘is not to be continuously lost in this mental projection away from now. Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.' Another staccato chuckle. ‘And that's a revelation for some people. To realise that your whole life is only ever now. Many people suddenly realise that they have lived most of their life as if this were not true – as if the opposite were true.' Without noticing we're doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.

Instead of seeking ways to solve your problems in the future, it can be illuminating to try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you're currently in physical pain, is very likely to be ‘No'. Most problems, by definition, involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, whether in five minutes or in five years, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. It can be curiously
difficult to identify any problems that afflict you at this very moment, in the present – and it is always the present.

Or consider the fraught topic of self-esteem. We tend to assume that having high self-esteem is a good thing, but some psychologists have long suspected that there might be something wrong with the whole notion – because it rests on the assumption of a unitary, easily identifiable self. Setting out to give your ‘self' one universal positive rating may in fact be deeply perilous. The problem lies in the fact that you're getting into the self-rating game at all; implicitly, you're assuming that you are a single self that can be given a universal grade. When you rate your self highly, you actually
create
the possibility of rating your self poorly; you are reinforcing the notion that your self is something that can be ‘good' or ‘bad' in the first place. And this will always be a preposterous overgeneralisation. You have strengths and weaknesses; you behave in good ways and bad ways. Smothering all these nuances with a blanket notion of self-esteem is a recipe for misery. Inculcate high self-esteem in your children, claims Paul Hauck, a psychologist opposed to the concept of self-esteem, and you will be ‘teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority' – or alternatively, when their high self-esteem falters, ‘guilt, depression, [and] feelings of inferiority and insecurity' instead. Better to drop the generalisations. Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. But leave your self out of it.