I published a book called Critical Revelations in the Realm of Contemporary Spirituality about a profound event that occurred in 2014.

I had read Tolle's book, A New Earth, about six months prior, and the event helped me understand why some people like and follow Tolle, and why I never could.

As I read A New Earth I was stunned at some of the comments in it.

I have no problem with my ego as it is defined in Dictionary.com as simply an awareness of myself as someone different from another person. Tolle calls the ego "a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind." He says "our egos are pathological."

I love thinking. It's what I thrive on.

In A New Earth, Tolle suggests that people who identify with their minds "only relate to others through some kind of role they play, and that everyone can recognize the way they behave and interact as phony." To me that is really hurtful.

Tolle tells a lot of people to not think, to just be, then he proceeds to spend a lot of his time thinking since that is what it takes to speak and write books. He just seems to want everyone to let him do the thinking for them!

If no one had ever mentioned the idea of the present moment to me, I could have lived my entire life without ever thinking about it. I am a writer and a planner. In my writing and my life, I focus on the past and the future, but Tolle refers to our life stories "as part of our 'little me.'"

I have been experiencing profound events for over 20 years that have shown me it is important for me to be exactly who I am, for each of us to be the unique people we are. IMHO, we should not all try to be Tolle. In what I learned from the event in 2014, the people that have similar personality traits to Tolle will be drawn to him, but as far as I can see, that is the extent of it.