Oprah Winfrey Promotes Pantheist Eckhart Tolle

What sort of god needs to read a book or go to a seminar to discover his own identity? According to Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle, millions of such deities find it necessary to act on that need to awaken to their own godhood. These are human beings who lack a sense of consciousness of their divinity, and Oprah and Tolle have set out to remedy that situation.

Oprah entices visitors to her Web site with this quote: “Are you ready to be awakened? Millions have experienced Oprah and Eckhart’s A New Earth classes.“1 The subtitle to Eckhart’s A New Earth is “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.”2 Under Oprah’s influence, millions are being led away from rational, revealed truth, such as is found in the Bible, to a new state of consciousness under the guise of being awakened. They are being awakened to their own state of cosmic deity that supposedly has been hidden from them by ego and forms appearing to be “real” but are actually illusory.

“Forms” for Tolle are not just things and bodies; they are also “thought forms.” Here is his definition of ego and his use of form: “Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of ego. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of ‘I Am,’ which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. . . . This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare” (Tolle: 54). In other words, we have become blind to our deity and think that we have real existence as individuals.

Tolle calls Christianity a “mind-dominated religion” that is committed to dogma and a rigid belief system (Tolle: 18). In his pantheistic worldview, thoughts and beliefs keep people from being conscious of their own deity, and Oprah understands what he is saying. She believes what Tolle teaches, promotes his book and concepts, and speaks with the passion of a true believer. Though perhaps my readers are not likely to be converted to Eastern pantheism (God is everything and all categories are illusions), I am certain that each of us knows someone who has been mesmerized by Oprah’s promotion of Eastern monism (that God is all that exists) cloaked in the verbiage of self help.

I shall outline some of Tolle’s key ideas, and later we will examine them more thoroughly. The subtitle of his book claims that we shall awaken to our “life’s purpose” and appears to be another journey of self-discovery. But consider where that journey leads: to consciousness of your own deity. And to its corollary: Everything that would define you as a unique person created by God in His own image is merely “ego and form” that are the illusions that keep you from consciousness of deity. Even thinking is a huge problem that has to be overcome because thoughts keep one from becoming aware of his or her own godhood.

Most Americans are defenseless against this Eastern allure because they don’t understand pantheism—and as a result they get seduced to experience what it teaches. The first part of Tolle’s book is couched in self-help terms that indicate that his teachings will help solve conflicts and relationship issues. It suggests that one can reach a Stoic-like state where he or she has no reaction to whatever may happen. This means accepting everything because what happens is merely a necessary part of the spiritual evolution process whereby God’s dysfunction becomes progressively cured. In Tolle’s pantheism, “happenings” are dysfunction in the mind of God that must be cured by creation becoming aware that God simply became infolded into creation and is in the process of unfolding. Tolle writes, “This [consciousness becoming unconscious of itself] could be described as the descent of the divine into matter. At that stage in the evolution of the universe, the entire outgoing movement takes place in that dreamlike state” (Tolle: 292). So when he speaks of awakening, he means gaining consciousness of deity, consciousness that had been lost.

I state this at the beginning of the article so that you know immediately where this is going. Oprah’s listeners and Tolle’s readers hear a message that sounds like an attractive journey of self-discovery. The hard-core pantheism is not revealed until the end of Tolle’s book (for readers who make it that far). He writes in the tone of a guru who tells his adoring students the secrets of the universe. There are no footnotes and precious little objective evidence to help the perceptive student to believe what he says. He is the master teacher; we are the students. Our questioning his ideas serves only as evidence that we are not “enlightened.”

I will unpack the key ideas found in The New Earth so you understand what it means and be equipped to warn your friends and family, pointing them instead to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
— Read on www.cicministry.org/commentary/issue114.htm