Eckhart Tolle After the Bench: Oprah's Double Pick and Kendrick Lamar

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Eckhart Tolle was born Ulrich Leonhard Tolle in 1948 in Lünen, in the Ruhr region under British occupation. At 13 he moved to Spain to live with his father and stopped attending school for nine years, reading the German mystic Josef Anton Schneiderfranken by 15. At 19 he moved to London to teach languages, studied at the University of London, and in 1977 entered a postgraduate program at Cambridge. That year, at 29, he woke in dread with the thought I cannot live with myself any longer, asked which of the two selves in that sentence was really him, and woke the next morning with his depression gone. He spent about two years in bliss, sitting on benches in Russell Square and sleeping on Hampstead Heath or at a Buddhist monastery, and changed his name to Eckhart.

Former acquaintances sought him out, and he drifted into teaching, moving through Glastonbury to Vancouver in 1995, where he met his partner Kim Eng. The Power of Now appeared from a small publisher in 1997, was picked up by a larger one in 1999, and took off when Oprah Winfrey recommended it in 2000, reaching number one on the New York Times list and 33 languages. A New Earth followed in 2005; after Oprah chose it in 2008, 3.5 million copies shipped in four weeks. Around 2003 Tolle warned against heavy commercial structures, yet he now runs a website, meditation subscriptions and spin-offs. Evangelical critics James Beverley and John Stackhouse object to his pantheistic leanings, while Stafford Betty and Richard Rohr praise his revival of contemplation.

• One account says the name Eckhart honors Meister Eckhart; another says he saw it on a book in a dream before a psychic friend began using it.
• Oprah's 2008 webinars with Tolle drew 35 million views by the following year.
• In January 2025 Oprah picked A New Earth again, the only book her club has chosen twice.
• His children's book Milton's Secret became a 2016 film starring Donald Sutherland.
• He appears as a narrating guide on Kendrick Lamar's 2022 album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers.