Eckhart Tolle’s Hall of Mirrors: A Guide to Finding Your Way Out

by Steven Heymans

Publisher:

Wipf and Stock

, 2024

Overview

Tolle’s project is one of empowering humans to detach from the many externalities that people typically identify themselves by--histories, bodies, desires, beliefs, work, emotions, roles--which are thought to be the sources of personal affliction. To detach from them allows one to enjoy a more truthful and untroubled life. The “true self” that Tolle promotes is a self that is stripped of the externalities people identify with so that they might enter a spiritual realm that is transcendent and anxiety-free.

One of the criticisms of Tolle in this book is that the spiritual wisdom he promotes makes people less human and more spiritual, angelic, and godly. But that world--the world of spirits, angels, and gods--is not where people belong, says classics scholar Martha Nussbaum. Humans are mortals, and their mortality brings with it limitations and constraints within which they must operate. But operating within such limitations--which include time (temporality) and death--does not mean people are without resources in the human project to live and flourish.

Humanness has allowed people to develop an array of skills that have become their birthright--rationality, resourcefulness, emotional intelligence, cooperation, and storytelling, among others. This book argues that Tolle’s project of transcending leads to an impoverishment of humanity; in contrast it calls for an understanding and embrace of humanness that allows people to flourish within the limits imposed upon them within their material and bodily conditions.

Praise for Eckhart Tolle’s Hall of Mirrors

“As someone who grew up close to the soil as a farm kid, the lessons of life, death, and relationship were deeply instilled in me. They are lessons I take with me as a mother, wife, daughter, and citizen of the world. I deeply appreciate Steve’s gentle yet resolute pushback on Tolle’s message of transcendence. He champions the experience of living fully as a human and embracing the grit and grace that comes along with that journey.”   

—Constance Carlson, sustainable agriculture and environmental leadership, Minnesota



“Heymans compares Tolle’s worldview to the ideas of some classical and modern philosophers, including the themes film director Wim Wenders explores in Wings of Desire. Heymans’s fascinating analysis of the film shows why we humans should want to live in our temporal, physical reality rather than trying to live as supernatural beings, attempting to transcend time and our individual circumstances, as Tolle advocates.”

—Mark Anema, farmer, vice president, Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota



“Heymans puts Eckhart Tolle in his place. In a wise and adroit reading of Tolle, this book points to the deep resonances of Tolle’s project with that of Plato and the long-standing problem of the search for universal transcendent forms and ideas. Heymans, following in the footsteps of Aristotle, Nussbaum, and McIntyre, brings us back down to earth, showing us the way to be fully human is to embrace the body, particularity, the place we live, and the people to whom we belong. If you have felt wary of Tolle’s flight to the beyond, Heymans will help you know why.”

—Kathleen A. Cahalan, professor emerita, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota



“Heymans brings his readers into a dialogue, not only with Eckhart Tolle, but with many other philosophers concerned with issues of personal identity, agency, and self-awareness. In addition to drawing upon insights from Edith Stein, George Herbert Meade, Thomas Aquinas, Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair MacIntyre, and David Abrams, Heymans critiques Tolle’s “essence of all religions” through the lens of the ancient contrast between Plato and Aristotle. While Tolle aligns with the Platonic pursuit of timeless abstraction and detachment from the transient material world, Heymans argues for an Aristotelian engagement with the particulars of narrative-based physical experience, the creative and emotionally charged exploration that he sees as the truly human project.”

—Jim Hoffman, professor emeritus of liberal studies, California State University Fullerton





“Steven Heymans gives serious consideration to Tolle’s highly popular understanding of the nature and purpose of human existence--and shows that this understanding obscures the realities of human experience and distorts the actual conditions of human flourishing. Drawing on close readings of Tolle, his forebear Plato, and key philosophers who challenge their assumptions, Heymans rejects Tolle’s emphasis on detachment and transcendence. Instead, he crafts a persuasive invitation to embrace the embodied and storied, vulnerable and relational quality of the lives we actually live with one another, in all our particularity.  This book brings rich philosophical analysis to matters of constant concern, including how to understand and address anxiety and affliction.  Rarely do popular spiritualities undergo such thorough and much needed analysis.”

—Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass, editors of Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be

Product Details

• Title: Eckhart Tolle’s Hall of Mirrors: A Guide to Finding Your Way Out
• Author: Steven Heymans
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 132
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9798385218790, 9798385218776, 9798385218783
• Resource ID: LLS:9798385218790
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-23T00:26:31Z

About the Author

Steven Heymans is a former teacher, campus minister, and essayist and is now a native plant community restorationist, nurseryman, and member/nurturer of the total land community of his fifty-acre farm in Central Minnesota, where he has lived since 1987. He has spent much of the last year learning from his wife (now deceased) about the vulnerable nature of human as well as non-human animal existence.