Reading

I'm reading Eckhart Tolle right now. He is pretty good at taking Buddhist ideas and applying them to other religions/aspects of life. He is basically saying what many have been for a long time, but in more plain instructional words. He's saying spirituality is essentially the same experience for everyone, but we just express it in different ways. We often get caught up in our expressions and lose the spirituality. He focuses on western culture in his critique.
The most interesting observation Tolle made was how much of an impact Descartes statement "I think therefore I am" has had on western society. A monk would answer "you think, therefore you are not!". This of course leads us to dysfunction, expensive diets, books from amazon.com "like Tolle's :-)" that "explain" to us how to know the difference between -being- and thinking "Ego".
I would swap out the term spirituality for a more Heidegger like "authentic experience". There are many issues with the comparison, but at the core is the idea that we must not question what something is as a substance, "even emotions" but in a more basic pre-theoretical way. I specifically like Heidegger's "thing v object" distinction. The difference between fine art and a mouse pad. I think Tolle's discussion of the Ego overcoming our spirituality is another more specified way of talking about authentic v. inauthentic experiences. I'm pretty sure he would disagree with me. I imagine a teenager who is kissing for the first time, thinking about kissing, and a song they like involving kissing, and imagining the character they idolize in that movie when they are kissing v. the person who is experiencing a kiss, what it does, and how they "ego and all" are reacting to it. I think that is essentially the same thing Tolle is talking about, but not in spiritual terms.

Tolle's big mission seems to be discussing the ego in Buddhist terms, but relating it to western religion/spirituality to form a conclusion of similarity over difference while facilitating personal growth.

It's a good thing, I just wish he expanded beyond the Ego to other interferences such as social norms, commercialism, etc. I suppose he would say that these are merely different expressions of the Ego....