Early Life

Eckhart Tolle was born Ulrich Tolle, in Germany in a town near Dortmund, to a matter-of-fact mother and an eccentric, head-in-the-clouds father; they fought, then divorced, and his father left the country for Spain.

At the age of 13, he abruptly refused to go to school - "I hated having to study things that were not compatible with my inner being" he said later.

His exasperated mother eventually sent him to live with his father in Spain. "My father said: 'Do you want to go to school here?' I said, of course, 'No.' Then he said: 'Well then, don't. Do what you like. Read.'" Tolle credits his unconventional upbringing with broadening his mind. "Spain at that time was very different than Germany, almost medieval. So I didn't get totally conditioned by one culture. If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it. My conditioning got completely broken, so there was an opening to other world views.

He did not attend formal schooling after age 13, but rather took language and other courses. Later, he attended night colleges to obtain the necessary entrance requirements for studying in a university in England.

In his early 20s he moved to England to study there at the University of London.

Spiritual Transformation

In 1979, at the age of 29, he was a near-suicidal graduate student living in Belsize Park in London, England.

Tolle had just completed a degree in languages and history at the University of London, graduating with a first, yet he was anything but happy.

He said about that:

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