A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle's #1 Bestseller

By Richard Abanes

When Christians are confronted by media with a "new" theology, they aren't always sure what to do. It may sound spiritual, almost Christian. But something isn't quite right. Richard Abanes helps believers as well as the curious understand that Eckhart Tolle's message in A New Earth is dangerous. He then provides a clear biblical response to this New Age message. Topics include Tolle's misuse of Scripture, false teachings on God, the Bible's teaching on evil, A New Earth's version of salvation compared to God's plan, and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781441203137

Richard Abanes

Richard Abanes is a bestselling and award-winning author of twenty books, specializing in the area of cults, the occult, world religions, and pop culture. His most popular titles include The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code; One Nation Under Gods; and Harry Potter, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. He's written for most major Christian magazines and in 1997 received The Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America for his "outstanding work on intolerance." That same year he also received the Evangelical Press Association's "Higher Goals in Christian Journalism" award for his articles on non-Christian faiths that appeared in Moody magazine. He has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs including The 700 Club, Hard Copy, MSNBC, FOX News, and CNN. He and his wife make their home in Irvine, California.

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PRAISE FOR  A New Earth, An Old Deception

Using compassionate arguments, inescapable logic, and a skillful presentation of biblical truth, Abanes has put together an insightful, fair-minded, and cogent refutation of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings.

—Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast

"Richard does an excellent job researching, reviewing, and writing for us an important exposé of this dangerous deception. Fueled by the high-powered marketing machine of Oprah Winfrey, Tolle’s claims are bound to travel far and wide. In the spirit of Paul the Apostle’s warning to ‘take heed lest you fall,’ A New Earth, An Old Deception equips the believer with solid answers for those who may be confused by Tolle’s claims."

—Tom Stipe, Senior Pastor, Crossroads Church of Denver

Richard Abanes offers an irenic, yet piercing, analysis of Eckhart Tolle, and in doing so exposes another New Age guru. Abanes carefully explains the origins and elements of Tolle’s ideas and helps us understand how to minister to those drawn into yet another eastern mystical attempt to escape from the self and the world.

—H. Wayne House, Distinguished Research Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, Faith Evangelical Seminary

"Richard Abanes clearly shows the differences between the ‘gospel’ of self and the Gospel of Jesus Christ by dismantling popular New Age teachings point by point. A New Earth, An Old Deception is a much-needed Christian response to deception."

—J. Mark Martin, Senior Pastor, Calvary Community Church, Phoenix, Arizona

© 2008 by Richard Abanes

Published by Bethany House Publishers

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Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

www.bethanyhouse.com

Bethany House Publishers is a division of

Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

Ebook edition created 2010

Ebook corrections 04.18.2016 (VBN), 05.03.2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book

ISBN 978-1-4412-0313-7

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Cover design by Paul Higdon

TO

MY ONLINE BROTHERS AND SISTERS

at Phoenix Preacher Blog, phoenixpreacher.com,

a place where I frequently list-text out

for healing, fellowship, and spiritual growth—

thank you, my friends, for all of your

love, prayers, and encouragement.

Michael, you’re the best.

CONTENTS

Cover

Endorsements

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to A New Earth

Meet the Teacher

Are You Ready?

Here Comes the New Age—Again

Finding the Truth

CHAPTER ONE

My Truth Is Your Truth

Tolle Against Tolle

Making Sense of Nonsense

Losing My Religion

Anti-Christian Angst

CHAPTER TWO

God Is, You Are, I Am

The Real Me

I Am God, I Am God, I Am God

Tolle’s Divine Crusade

Awakening to My Purpose

CHAPTER THREE

Bible Abuse: When Words Fail

The Old Testament

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Romans to Revelation

CHAPTER FOUR

A New Earth Jesus

Christ’s Life

The Cross of Self?

Still Dead, Never to Return

CHAPTER FIVE

No Suffering, No Sin, No Salvation

Suffer No More

Sin Is As Sin Does

The Illusion of Evil

Tolle and Eternal Life

Appendix A: What Really Happened to Tolle?

Appendix B: Guide to Questions Answered

Notes

About the Author

Back Cover

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A HEARTFELT THANKS goes to Greg Johnson for believing in me and encouraging me to do this project. Deep gratitude also belongs to Bethany House, especially Kyle Duncan, for recognizing the need for a such a book. Finally, I must mention my friend Doug Fields, a great guy, loving pastor, and gifted teacher of God’s Word, whose faith in my work and ministry has been a source of great comfort and renewed strength.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to A New Earth

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[A]ll of you have joined us in this global community to talk about what I believe is one of the most important subjects—and presented by one of the most important books of our time—A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

OPRAH WINFREY1

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ON MARCH 3, 2008, Oprah Winfrey hosted a unique online class in cyberspace that reached 500,000 people in more than 139 countries. The interactive webcast, which featured spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and his mega-bestseller A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, ended up making headlines as one of the largest single online events in the history of the Internet.2

But this was only the beginning. The momentous event kicked off a ten-week, Oprah-hosted study of A New Earth and its importance to everyone’s spirituality—a quest for enlightenment in a virtual classroom where seekers worldwide could ask questions via email, telephone, and Skype connections. As Oprah commented with unbridled enthusiasm during her first evening’s class: "I don’t think there’s anything more important than awakening and also knowing what your purpose is."3

The seminar was a resounding success. By week five, the number of online students watching it had risen to one million, and more than ten million copies of the previous webcasts had been downloaded by fans of both Oprah and Eckhart. It was a remarkable achievement that once more demonstrated the talk show host’s giftedness in the areas of entertainment, public relations, and media resourcefulness.

Even prior to the event, A New Earth had already skyrocketed in sales. Oprah’s recommendation of the volume, coupled with her listing of it as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club, sent Tolle’s self-help guide to the #1 spot at amazon.com and made it the fastest-selling pick in the history of Barnes & Noble. Retail sales of 3.5 million copies came through in just one month.4 And at Penguin—the publisher of A New Earth—Tolle’s spiritual tome set a record shipment in a four-week span for any previously released title.5

Meet the Teacher

Who is Eckhart Tolle? What is his background? When did he become a spiritual teacher? And why does he feel his message is so important for the world? These are the questions that must be answered if one is going to understand the hype now surrounding the soft-spoken, likeable, and seemingly enlightened man who is reaching untold millions of truth-seekers through his books, lectures, and appearances with Oprah.

Tolle—a Cambridge-educated scholar—was born in 1948 as Ulrich Tolle, and raised by his father in Spain from about age 13 until he moved to England in his early 20s.6 Beyond these sparse facts, his early life remains a mystery since his youth is something he has never discussed in detail, explaining that he now has little use for the past.7 The most extensive account of his younger days can be found in The Power of Now, which only reveals that throughout his young adult life, he lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression.8

Then, not long after turning twenty-nine, Tolle woke up in the early hours one morning with a feeling of absolute dread.9 Life had become so utterly meaningless that he felt nothing but a deep loathing for both the world and his own life: I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.10 Tolle was ready to die:

I just can’t live with myself any longer, it’s so painful. And that thought repeated itself a few times. And then suddenly, something happened inside me and I looked at the thought. . . . I became aware of the thought and I said, I cannot live with myself. That’s strange, so there must be ‘I’ and there must be ‘myself’ [who I cannot live with]. Am I one or two? I seem to be two. Because if ‘I’ can’t live with ‘myself,’ there must be two of me here. . . . And [I] said, If that’s the case, then who is the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with? And who am ‘I’?11

Then, instead of killing himself, Tolle experienced the unexpected. His mind stopped and he was drawn into a vortex of energy. Intense fear gripped him, and his whole body started shaking as he heard the words resist nothing. He felt himself sucked into a void and passed out—to date, unable to recall what happened during the hours that followed.12 He awakened the next morning filled with an odd peace.

Tolle spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.13 It was during this period that he became a spiritual teacher: People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a ‘mystic,’ and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives.14

Eckhart now understands his traumatic night as a shift in consciousness; a kind of evolutionary leap of the spirit that he took to another level of truth-based existence—a higher level of understanding that enabled him to see and respond to life as his real self (i.e., his inner essence) rather than as his false self (i.e., his ego/mind/form). It was this false self, he realized, that had been causing him so much agony; the self that had been thinking incessantly about his pain-filled past; the self that had to die.

Much to his surprise, Tolle found that after his so-called spiritual breakthrough (see Appendix A: What Really Happened to Tolle? p. 163), he had gained the ability to exist exclusively in the now; in the absolute present. There was no longer a past, nor a future, in his new paradigm. There was only the is-ness of moment. Tolle’s brain had found a solution to his anguish—stop thinking. His ego (i.e., his self-identification with thinking or his concept of ‘me’ based on thought and emotions) had relinquished its control.15 Thought lost its power over him. And no more thinking meant no more pain:

[My thought process] created the dreadful suffering. The mind created entity; the unhappy me was continuously fed by my thinking. It consisted of thinking; a stream of thinking. . . . [S]o the ego died instead of me having to jump off a bridge. Fortunately, the ego died. The ego dissolved as the unobserved mind dissolved. . . . The full self, the me, the unhappy story. Me as the unhappy. My identity as me and my unhappy story.16

It is indeed fortunate that Tolle did not commit suicide, which would have been a tragedy. But equally tragic is how he has equated his experience in the midst of excruciating psychological strain with some sort of spiritual step forward. Other explanations are available.

For example, it is quite possible that Tolle simply could not face his life (i.e., his unhappy story), and so his mind created another self who could go on living—i.e., his real self, which had never been connected to the painful life that haunted him. This kind of psychological redirection would be consistent with a phenomenon known as dissociation (see Appendix A).

Tolle also might have even fallen under the deception of spiritual forces of darkness, which the Bible depicts as both real and active within our world: Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12).

No one can know for certain what happened, but what we can know with absolute clarity is what Tolle is now teaching as a result of his experience and whether or not those teachings are in line with scripture.

Are You Ready?

The claims made by Tolle concerning the worth of his teachings are impressive. Along his road of enlightenment can be found an end to suffering, solutions to psychological troubles, and even cures for physical ailments. Total peace and happiness are there for the taking as well. Addictions can become a thing of the past, and everything desired can be achieved. You can even be a better parent!17

All of these wondrous blessings will allegedly occur in readers as they open themselves up to Tolle’s spiritually alive and therefore transformational18 teachings. Accepting his Truth will supposedly cause a shift in consciousness19—a transformation of consciousness, a spiritual awakening that he sees as the next step in human evolution.20 Those who embrace Tolle’s ways will be able to leap to an entirely different level of Being.21

But there is more to be gained. According to Tolle, if enough people become enlightened to his Truth, then humanity will finally be able to achieve worldwide peace and harmony—i.e., a New Earth populated by a new species of human being.22 Crime will be eradicated. Wars will cease. Selfishness and greed will no longer reign in our governments. Awakening is our only hope for survival, asserts Tolle, who believes that [a] significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.23

We are coming to the end, Tolle says, of all mythologies, ideologies, and belief systems—i.e., A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH.24

The benefits seem endless, as evidenced by an Oprah-produced PR video for Tolle’s book (downloadable from oprah.com). It is an emotionally moving series of images that feature all kinds of people interacting joyfully, blissfully, and lovingly in a variety of situations and at beautiful locations: a park, a hillside, a picturesque street corner. The musical soundtrack is lush and heartrending,

Reviews for A New Earth, An Old Deception

[Chris Liko · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

As a Christian, this is such a dumb take. Go read Tolle’s book, you’re much better off.

[Hani Brombach Scott Boeck · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This author would have had Jesus Christ killed too. Sad that such hatred still exists

[mace · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is the ego’s work. Spiritual awakening is for everybody to embrace. Eckhart Tolle is a great spiritual teacher.

[Veron · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Horrible book. No point explaining colors to a blind person

[dang_rantham · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Sux

[Ross Hicken · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Nothing more than the writings of a frightened bigot for frightened bigots.

[Chrissie Romea · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Sounds like a Bigot with a lot of time on his hands

[Shekisha S Ray · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Lift others up, Tolle is wonderful and kindly helping humanity. Be still, and you want need to judge others walk. ?????