I have read about Eckhart Tolle and his philosophy. Apparently many people find it appealing. However, something about it is disturbing to me. Would you please comment on whether his ideas are compatible with the Deanic/Filianic Faith or not and why. Thank you, Rev. Madria Georgia Honored Madria Georgia, we cannot claim to be in any way experts on the writings of Herr Tolle, although we have encountered the name before and done a little research. Essentially the work seems to be rather similar to many New Age writers who take bits of the more "airy" aspects of world traditions and stick them together to make something new. While this is in itself a little dangerous, by far the worst part of the New Age is not the bits it collects, but the "glue" it uses to stick them together, which invariably turns out to be modern individualistic ideas, post-Freudian "psychology", Darwinist evolutionism projected onto a supposedly "spiritual" plane etc., etc. Alarm bells should immediately ring when we read (on Herr Tolle's official website) that:

"at the core of Tolle's teachings lies the transformation of consciousness, a spiritual awakening that he sees as the next step in human evolution."

This is one of the key "fingerprints" of New Age error - the notion that humanity is "spiritually evolving" into a higher phase, when in fact, in spiritual terms, humanity in the late Kali Yuga has never been at a lower ebb. This adoption of the modern progress/evolution superstition (and when a biological theory and a social ideology are mixed together, as they are in most people's minds, as though they were somehow the same thing, one can only speak of superstition) and then re-packaged as a "spiritual truth" we know we are dealing with one of two things: unfortunate error or deliberate charlatanry.