Eckhart Tolle

German-Canadian · b. 1948

Eckhart Tolle was a suicidally depressed Cambridge researcher when a midnight thought — 'I cannot live with myself' — split in two and dissolved, he says, along with the suffering self. After years on park benches in unexplained contentment, he wrote The Power of Now; Oprah's endorsement turned the tiny-press Q&A into 16 million copies and made 'presence' a household word.