Eckhart Tolle: Interview by John Parker

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This morning we are speaking with Eckhart Tolle. As a note of introduction, can you share with us where you grew up and how it impacted your outlook on life?

Yes. I was born in Germany, where I lived for the first thirteen years of my life. At age thirteen I moved to Spain to live with my father, who had gone to live there, and I spent the rest of my teenage years in Spain. So that became the second culture in which I lived. The second language for me became Spanish- At nineteen I moved to England. For most of my adult life until about five or six years ago, I lived in England. So the fact of having lived in two or three different cultural environments perhaps was important because I was not conditioned by just one particular culture. People who have lived exclusively in one culture, part of their mental conditioning is the cultural collective conditioning of that country. It probably helped to live in more than one country, so that the conditioning was not so deep. One became more aware of the surrounding culture without being totally identified with it.

Another interesting fact is that at the age of thirteen I refused to go to school any longer. It was an inner impossibility for me to go to school. I was not a rebellious child at all, but I simply refused to go to school. The environment was so hostile. I simply refused, and so between thirteen and twenty-two or twenty-three I had no formal education. When I went to live with my father in Spain—my father was a very unconventional person, which is wonderful—he asked me, "Do you want to go to school here?" I was thirteen. I said, of course, ...

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