"I might as well get drunk, and then experience, the briefly—that—and then, the next hangover, and then get drunk, again, and then, eventually, I'll kill myself. But that's oh, that is only the first part."
—Eckhart Tolle, "Transcending the Ego for Lasting Fulfillment | Eckhart Tolle's Wisdom"
The above is one of the funniest things I've ever heard from Eckhart Tolle, who's been saying pretty funny things all the way along. As his commentors on YouTube often say, Eckhart is a comedian, and he truly is funny, often, yes, playing on the card of how funny it is that he is this little spiritual teacher with an Aladdin vest and yet he's talking about modern, sort of debased things, and yet, even there, he is hilarious, and even also in the above video.
Anyway, Eckhart Tolle while being funny usually packs it with meaning, and the humor partially comes from pointing out how silly this all is. And as I've said in the past, and as I thought when I was in jail for speech crimes (at least I can always say that, lol—who can say they got sent to hell by the government for words, beginning and ending, and had their lawyer refer to the person who was pushing the charges as someone who might indeed have some egoic attachment to what's happening?), drawing a little picture of Eckhart Tolle to look kind of like Yoda, and as I've thought more recently, as well, perhaps presence is the only way.
And unlike perhaps others, Eckhart appears to be a living example of that. Beyond the potential truth drop of his first book's, The Power of Now, subtitle, "A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment," which is such a bold claim coming from such a huge, worldwide figure in the spirituality scene, albeit starting with that book (and maintaining an exceptional restraint with having only written, really, two more main books, and one most people don't even know about), that it seems like it might be true, not to mention that very few other teachers go so far as to say, "My book is literally a guide to Enlightenment."
Adyashanti actually, to his credit, had the same subtitle on a book he gave out for free, and that I heard him, in person, on a Christmas intensive/Satsang, talk about how many of those books he had given out, and in the sense, perhaps I think it was, that people didn't listen. But anyway, that kind of direct claim makes a statement.
And in his own life, or at least his retellings of it, and I don't find his telling of this story to be all that manipulative-sounding, in this way, even though on a surface level it might look like that's exactly the point, of it, Eckhart Tolle talked about a woman he rented a room to, and that she was so put off by his energy, which she later described as like "being in a float tank," or something, who had asked him to let her out of the lease after the first night, and then asked him to let her stay, and then I think asked him again to let her leave, maybe, and then she asked, why are you so calm about me changing up your thing, over and over again? Because each time, he just said Okay.