Below is my essay titled "The Tyranny of the Eternal Now: Why Eckhart Tolle's Promise Is a Spiritual Bypass”

It’s followed by Honey Hanline’s defense of Eckhart Tolle, and then by my rebuttal of Hanline’s defense.




The Tyranny of the Eternal Now: Why Eckhart Tolle's Promise Is a Spiritual Bypass

Eckhart Tolle's declaration that "nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now" sounds like liberation. It’s not. It's a gilded cage disguised as an open door—a spiritual bypass that mistakes the amputation of memory for the achievement of freedom.

The statement operates on a sleight of hand so elegant that millions have mistaken it for wisdom: it redefines "presence" so narrowly that it excludes most of what makes us human.

Yes, technically, in this precise nanosecond, you can notice your breath, feel your feet on the ground, observe the play of light across the wall.

But this atomized present-moment awareness, severed from the continuous stream of experience that constitutes a human life, isn't presence. It's dissociation with better marketing.

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The Past Lives in Our Bodies

Anyone who has worked seriously with trauma knows that the past doesn't politely wait in some sealed archive marked "Then." It lives in the nervous system. It shapes our baseline arousal levels, our window of tolerance, our capacity to regulate emotion.

When someone with complex PTSD enters what should be a neutral social situation and experiences a cascade of fight-or-flight activation, they aren't "failing to be present." They're dealing with a past that has literally rewired their neurobiology.

The body keeps the score, as psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk documented exhaustively. Traumatic memory doesn't store itself in narrative form, accessible through conscious recall. It embeds in implicit memory—in muscular tension, in breathing patterns, in the hair-trigger responsiveness of the amygdala.

To tell someone that "nothing from the past can prevent you from being present" when their autonomic nervous system is screaming danger signals based on actual past danger is not just unhelpful. It's a form of gaslighting that blames the victim for their own dysregulation.

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The Complexity of Integration

Being present as a human being requires constant negotiation with what has been. This isn't a deficiency to overcome; it's how consciousness actually works when it's embedded in a body moving through time.

We don't arrive at each moment as blank slates. We arrive carrying:
- Learned patterns of relationship that developed in response to real experiences
- Cultural conditioning that shapes what we perceive and how we interpret it
- Emotional associations built through countless repetitions
- Knowledge gained through previous encounters that informs present choices
- Somatic memories that influence our felt sense of safety or threat

To be genuinely present means showing up with all of this. The goal is not to transcend it or pretend it doesn't exist, but to integrate it. The integration work is where the actual growth happens.

When we notice ourselves reacting with disproportionate anger to a minor slight, presence means recognizing "Ah, this anger carries the weight of all those times I was dismissed as a child.” And then we choose how to respond. This is infinitely more genuine than simply "being in the now."

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The Ethics of Spiritual Amnesia

Tolle's formulation also carries disturbing ethical implications. If nothing from the past can prevent our presence, then historical trauma becomes irrelevant.

Generational wounds can be dismissed. Systemic oppression that operates precisely through the accumulated weight of injustice becomes something individuals should simply rise above through better consciousness.

This is spiritual bypassing at its most pernicious. It transforms legitimate suffering into personal failure.

Can't be present? Must be your attachment to past narrative. Can't access peace? Must be your identification with victimhood. The teaching shifts responsibility away from addressing actual conditions and onto the individual's consciousness practice.

For someone dealing with the intergenerational legacy of slavery, or genocide, or colonization, the suggestion that the past cannot prevent present-moment awareness is an act of violence.

It denies the reality of how trauma moves through families, communities, and cultures. It pathologizes reasonable responses to unreasonable circumstances.

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What Actual Presence Requires

True presence, which allows us to act with clarity and grace, demands that we include rather than exclude our historical selves. It requires us to:

• Acknowledge how the past shapes current reactivity without being enslaved by it. This is the difference between "I feel rage because my father abandoned me" (insight) and "I must rage at everyone because my father abandoned me" (compulsion).

• Process unintegrated experiences so they stop running us from the shadows. This takes time, skill, and often support. The work of therapy, or deep spiritual practice, or trauma healing isn't about achieving some pristine awareness untouched by history. It's about metabolizing experience so the past becomes soil rather than shackles.

• Respect the wisdom embedded in our survival strategies, even as we update them. The hypervigilance that exhausts you? It once kept you alive. Honoring that before trying to transcend it is basic decency toward your own developmental history.

• Maintain accountability for how our wounds might wound others, which requires remembering where those wounds came from. Awareness of our triggers helps us avoid inflicting them on innocent parties.

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The Grace of Temporal Continuity

Here's what Tolle's formulation misses entirely: the richness of being a temporal creature. We're not meant to exist in an eternal now, endlessly refreshing like a browser window. We're narrative beings who create meaning through the relationships between past, present, and future.

When I recognize my daughter's gesture as echoing my wife’s, I'm experiencing the beautiful continuity of lineage. When I apply lessons learned from previous failures to navigate a current challenge, I'm demonstrating wisdom. When I honor a commitment made yesterday despite today's different mood, I'm exercising integrity. None of this is possible in Tolle's flattened now.

The grace we seek doesn't come from amputating our temporal depth. It comes from moving through time with increasing consciousness of how our past informs our present without determining it and how our choices now shape what becomes our past. This requires metabolizing experience, not transcending it.

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The Practice of Incarnated Presence

The alternative to Tolle's bypass isn't wallowing in past grievances. It's what we might call incarnated presence: We show up fully in this moment with the accumulated wisdom and wounds of our history, working skillfully with both.

This means developing the capacity to:
• Notice when a current reaction is disproportionate to the present trigger
• Hold space for the younger self who formed that reaction pattern
• Consciously choose a response that serves the actual present rather than the internalized past
• Accept that this work is never "done.” We're always integrating new experience
• Extend compassion to ourselves and others for how difficult this constant navigation actually is

This is vastly more demanding than simply "being in the now." It requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, tolerance for complexity, and the humility to recognize that transformation is a process, not a revelation.

The past does impinge on our present capacity. Pretending otherwise doesn't free us. What frees us is developing greater skill at working with that impingement. We feel our reactivity without being ruled by it and remember our history without being imprisoned by it. Gradually, we become more skilled at carrying our wounds without inflicting them on others.

This is the real work of being human. And it's hard enough without also having to maintain the fiction that we should be able to access some pristine presence untouched by everything we've lived through.

The truth is simpler and more beautiful: We don't transcend the past. We metabolize it. We transform wounds into medicine, carefully and slowly, through the ongoing practice of showing up for our lives as they actually are: complex, temporal, embodied, and gloriously, messily human.


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Honey Hanline wrote a critique of my essay, “The Tyranny of the Eternal Now: Why Eckhart Tolle's Promise Is a Spiritual Bypass.” It’s below.

Her article is followed by my rebuttal of her defense.

A Defense of Eckart Tolle
By Honey Hanline

This critique of Eckhart Tolle as a “spiritual bypasser” raises vital concerns about how spiritual language can be misused to dismiss trauma, but it ultimately collapses his teaching into a single quote taken out of context.

In The Power of Now and A New Earth, Tolle does not suggest that history is erased or that trauma magically disappears. Rather, he argues that the past persists as conditioned energy in the present moment.

His central claim is not that the past has no influence, but that the only place it can actually be experienced is right here and now; manifesting as sensation, emotion, thought, and reactivity.
This is why he introduces the concept of the pain-body, which he defines as the accumulated emotional pain of both personal and collective history.

Far from being a state of spiritual “amnesia,” the pain-body is a somatic reality that can temporarily take over perception and behavior when triggered. In this sense, Tolle is explicitly acknowledging what contemporary trauma science now articulates in different terms: that unintegrated experience lives in the body and autonomic nervous system, not just in narrative memory.

When we look more closely, Tolle’s framework is not about dissociation, but arguably its opposite—turning toward internal experience as it unfolds, without the narrative amplification or resistance that creates secondary suffering.

Where trauma-informed language might say, “Your nervous system is activating due to a past threat,” Tolle says, “The pain-body has been triggered.”
The vocabularies differ, but they describe overlapping territory from distinct explanatory frames. His work is descriptive rather than comprehensive.

He's not claiming that the past doesn’t affect us, but that the past affects us as a present-moment phenomenon, and that the “Now” is the only place where it can be consciously met.

What is missing from this debate is that Tolle’s “Now” is not a mental abstraction or a flattened browser refresh. It is a non-conceptual state of active acceptance—a willingness to allow what is already arising in the body and psyche without immediate resistance.

Practices like “inner body awareness” are, in contemporary terms, forms of interoception, or the sensing of internal bodily states, which is now widely recognized as a cornerstone of trauma recovery.

Tolle is not asking us to amputate memory or bypass history. He is asking us to stop resisting the somatic activation of memory as it appears.
By saying “yes” to the fact of a trigger in the moment it occurs, we move from being possessed by the past to witnessing it.

This witnessing consciousness can function as a functional inner secure base—a stabilizing capacity that allows painful material to be metabolized rather than compulsively reenacted.

That said, the strongest critique of Tolle’s framework is not that it denies trauma, but that it insufficiently addresses the relational and structural dimensions of harm.

Trauma is not only a nervous-system event; it is often formed in relationship, reinforced by power imbalances, and sustained by ongoing social and material conditions.

Presence can help us meet activation without dissociation, but it cannot substitute for being believed, receiving repair, engaging in relational healing, or changing external conditions that continue to cause harm.

To suggest otherwise would indeed slide into spiritual bypass—not because presence is false, but because it is incomplete on its own.

It is therefore fair to say that Tolle underemphasizes systemic injustice, historical trauma, and the ethical demands of collective repair. But it is an overreach to claim that he denies embodiment or advocates spiritual amnesia.
He frames embodiment phenomenologically rather than politically, offering a top-down spiritual anchor rather than a full trauma-informed or sociohistorical framework.

When paired with bottom-up psychological, relational, and social work, this anchor can be valuable.

Presence does not erase the biological “score” of our history, but it can provide the internal capacity required to engage that history without being overwhelmed by it.

Meeting the past in the present does not mean accepting present-day harm as neutral; it means cultivating the clarity and stability necessary to respond to harm ethically, relationally, and effectively rather than reactively.

We do not transcend the past by ignoring it. We transcend it by metabolizing it—by meeting it in the only place it exists, while also tending to the relationships, structures, and conditions that shape our lives.

Presence, understood this way, is not an escape from history but a laboratory for integration, where embodied awareness, relational repair, and ethical action can begin.

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Below is my rebuttal to Honey Hanline’s “A Defense of Eckhart Tolle.”

Presence Is Not Neutral: Why the Defense of Tolle Still Misses the Core Problem

Honey Hanline’s “A Defense of Eckhart Tolle” seeks to reframe his work as phenomenological rather than political, descriptive rather than prescriptive, and broadly compatible with trauma science if translated charitably enough. This is the best possible defense of Tolle, and yet still doesn’t succeed.

Why? Because the problem isn’t whether Tolle acknowledges trauma in theory, but how his framework functions in practice, psychologically and ethically, when taken up by real people in real conditions of harm.

The defense quietly shifts the question from impact to intent, from structural consequences to interpretive possibility. That move itself is the bypass.

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The Issue Is Not Vocabulary Overlap, but Power Asymmetry

Yes, Tolle’s “pain-body” overlaps superficially with trauma-informed concepts. Yes, interoception and inner body awareness resemble somatic practices used in therapy. And yes, unintegrated experience does arise in the present moment.

But similarity of description doesn’t equal equivalence of function.

Trauma-informed frameworks are built around titration, pacing, relational safety, consent, and contextualization. Tolle’s framework is not. His language collapses wildly different nervous system states—mild emotional discomfort, complex trauma, intergenerational terror—into a single spiritual category: unconscious identification.

That collapse matters.

In trauma work, the question is never simply: Can this be met in awareness? It is: Is the system resourced enough to meet this without fragmentation, collapse, or retraumatization?

Tolle’s teachings offer no reliable way to answer that question. Worse, they subtly imply that if presence is insufficient, the practitioner is failing to “stay conscious.”

This isn’t neutral phenomenology. It’s a hierarchy disguised as spaciousness.

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Witnessing Is Not Integration

The defense leans heavily on the idea that “witnessing consciousness” provides a secure base for metabolizing trauma. But this confuses observational capacity with developmental repair.

Many traumatized people can observe their pain exquisitely. What they can’t do, without relationship, time, and safety, is reorganize it.

Witnessing without co-regulation often becomes:

• emotional distancing mistaken for equanimity
• affect suppression reframed as acceptance
• premature transcendence celebrated as awakening

In other words: dissociation wearing a halo.

True integration requires new experiences that contradict old learning. Presence alone doesn’t provide those experiences. A nervous system shaped by abandonment doesn’t heal because it’s observed; it heals because it is met differently, again and again, by others and by life.

Tolle’s model has no robust account of this. The defense admits this weakness, but then treats it as a minor omission rather than a structural flaw.

It’s not minor. It’s decisive.

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“The Only Place the Past Exists” Is a Category Error

The defense repeats a familiar line: The past exists only as a present-moment phenomenon. This is functionally misleading.

Yes, memory is accessed in the present. No, this doesn’t mean history is reducible to present sensation.

The past exists in:

• legal systems
• land ownership
• epigenetic inheritance
• social stratification
• unchosen economic conditions
• collective narratives enforced by power

To say that the past “exists only now” quietly shifts attention away from responsibility for repair and toward individual regulation. It subtly reframes injustice as an experiential event rather than an ongoing structure.

This is why the teaching so easily harmonizes with neoliberal spirituality. It trains people to manage their responses to harm rather than interrogate its sources.

The defense concedes this point, but only partially, and then attempts to rescue Tolle by saying his work is simply “not comprehensive.”

But incompleteness is not neutral when it predictably tilts in one ideological direction.

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Acceptance Without Agency Becomes Accommodation

The defense insists that presence doesn’t mean accepting harm as neutral. But Tolle’s language consistently privileges non-resistance over discernment, acceptance over interpretation, and stillness over strategic anger.

This creates a strong gravitational pull toward accommodation, especially for those already conditioned to endure rather than protest.

Telling someone whose survival depended on compliance that the path to freedom is “non-resistance to what is” isn’t benign. It reinforces the very adaptations that trapped them.

Anger, memory, narrative, and judgment are not merely “mental overlays.” They are often the psyche’s first attempts at justice.

Any spiritual framework that treats them primarily as obstacles to presence rather than signals to be honored is already biased, no matter how gently it is framed.

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The Central Disagreement Remains

The defender concludes by saying that presence can be “a laboratory for integration.” That sounds conciliatory, but it quietly reverses the burden of proof.

My original critique doesn’t deny that presence has value. Rather, it denies that Tolle’s version of presence is adequate, safe, or ethically sufficient as a primary framework.

And that denial still stands.

Because the problem isn’t that Tolle denies embodiment outright. It’s that he offers a model of awakening that:

• underestimates developmental complexity
• overestimates individual capacity
• abstracts suffering from history
• privileges transcendence over repair
• and subtly moralizes regulation

These aren’t misunderstandings. They’re consequences.

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Integration Requires Time, Memory, and Relationship

My essay insists on something Tolle’s framework can’t fully accommodate: temporal depth as a feature, not a flaw, of consciousness.

We don’t become free by stepping outside time.
We become free by becoming more skillful inhabitants of it.

That requires remembering, narrating, grieving, contextualizing, repairing, and sometimes refusing. It requires letting the past speak, not only as sensation, but as story, meaning, and claim.

Presence that can’t tolerate these isn’t liberation. It’s anesthesia.

The truth remains what my original essay named plainly: We don’t transcend the past. We metabolize it.

Slowly. Socially. Embodied. In time.

And any spirituality that suggests otherwise, however defended, will continue to function as a bypass for those who most need something sturdier than the Eternal Now.