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Can a Suicidal Episode Trigger a Spiritual Awakening?
What if suicidal thoughts weren’t what they seem? What if they were actually an invitation to wake up?
Eckhart Tolle blinks like a chameleon: slowly.
One time he walked out onto the stage for a lecture and he just stood there for three full minutes, looking at one person in the crowd and then the next, which is a long time when 10,000 people are staring back at you.
Then, he kind of licked the inside of his mouth, like a chameleon would lick his eyeballs, and everyone leaned forward in their chairs, and then he took one more agonizing breath and finally, mercifully said, “And if you understood that, you understand what the present moment is.”
Then, he laughed.
He laughed the way an old lizard-man laughs, rapidly and silently snorting through his nose, with his caved in shoulders bouncing ever-so-slightly up and down to the rhythm, the crinkling crow’s feet at the corners of his penetrating blue eyes, betrayed an otherwise imperceptible smile.
The whole act, if it is an act but I’m sure it’s not, serves his image well. He’s one of the greatest living spiritual teachers, patriarch of one of the world’s largest spiritual communities, and author of one of the most-read spiritual books ever, second only to the Bible, probably.
But none of that is why I like him so much. I like him because he has the most unlikely origin story.
It sounds disturbingly familiar to me and maybe it will to you, too.
The Spiritual Awakening of Eckhart Tolle
Tolle was miserable when he was younger. His parents fought a lot. He was a sensitive child who lived in a near-constant state of anxiety, broken only by periods of suicidal depression.
He lived in an apartment building in Germany that had scaffolding lining its facade. “I’ll be okay as long as the scaffolding is there,” he remembers thinking when he was younger, “That way, I can always climb up…
