A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you.

The more limited, the more narrowly egoic the view of yourself, the more you will see, focus on, and react to the egoic limitations, the unconsciousness in others. Their “faults” or what you perceive as their faults become to you their identity. This means you will see only the ego in them and thus strengthen the ego in yourself. Instead of looking “through” the ego in others, you are looking “at” the ego. Who is looking at the ego? The ego in you.

You are not the ego, so when you become aware of the ego in you, it does not mean you know who you are—it means you know who you are not. But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.

There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don’t confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself.

Knowing yourself is being yourself, and being yourself is ceasing to identify with content.

He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama.

Bad turns into good through the power of nonresistance.

your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment.

The problem is: For every problem that is solved, another one pops up. As long as the present moment is seen as an obstacle, there can be no end to problems.

The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.

They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.

The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event—through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you—ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.

If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.

God, the scripture is saying, is formless consciousness and the essence of who you are. Everything else is form, is “what people here adore.”

We could say “God” if the word had not been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence. Existence is form, content, “what happens.” Existence is the foreground of life; Being is the background, as it were.

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

Most people are so distracted by their thoughts, so identified with the voices in their heads, they can no longer feel the aliveness within them. To be unable to feel the life that animates the physical body, the very life that you are, is the greatest deprivation that can happen to you. You then begin to look not only for substitutes for that natural state of well-being within, but also for something to cover up the continuous unease that you feel when you are not in touch with the aliveness that is always there but usually overlooked. Some of the substitutes people seek out are drug-induced highs, sensory overstimulation such as excessively loud music, thrills or dangerous activities, or an obsession with sex. Even drama in relationships is used as a substitute for that genuine sense of aliveness. The most sought-after cover-up for the continuous background unease are intimate relationships: a man or a woman who is going to “make me happy.” It is, of course, also one of the most frequently experienced of all the “letdowns.” And when the unease surfaces again, people will usually blame their partner for it.

That “empty space” is life in its fullness, the unmanifested Source out of which all manifestation flows. The traditional word for that Source is God.

Here are some ways in which people unconsciously try to emphasize their form-identity. If you are alert enough, you may be able to detect some of these unconscious patterns within yourself: demanding recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don’t get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of your illnesses, or making a scene; giving your opinion when nobody has asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other person, which is to say, using other people for egoic reflection or as ego enhancers; trying to make an impression on others through possessions, knowledge, good looks, status, physical strength, and so on; bringing about temporary ego inflation through angry reaction against something or someone; taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself right and others wrong through futile mental or verbal complaining; wanting to be seen, or to appear important.

It has been said: “Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.” Stillness is really another word for space.

To be still is to be conscious without thought.

Many people long for the freedom and expansion that prosperity promises. Others already enjoy the relative freedom that comes with prosperity and discover that even that is not enough to endow their lives with meaning.

But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.

So the most important thing to realize is this: Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary. While this book speaks mainly of your inner purpose, this chapter and the next will also address the question of how to align outer purpose and inner purpose in your life. Inner and outer, however, are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to speak of one without referring to the other.

Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as ...

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some

but outer purpose alone is always relative, unstable, and impermanent.

Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called “God.”

When it becomes identified with mental-emotional formations such as wanting and fearing—the primary motivating forces of the ego—it loses itself in those formations. Consciousness also loses itself when it identifies with acting and reacting to what happens.

Your friends either go through this inner transformation with you or drift out of your life. Some relationships dissolve, others deepen.

As the ego is no longer running your life, the psychological need for external security, which is illusory anyway, lessens. You are able to live with uncertainty, even enjoy it.

When you have had a direct experience of the unstable nature of all forms, you will likely never overvalue form again and thus lose yourself by blindly pursuing it or attaching yourself to it.

Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose—what you do—with your inner purpose—awakening and staying awake.

Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.

any situation and in whatever you do, your state of consciousness is the primary factor; the situation and what you do is secondary.

The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.

Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly.

On the new earth, enjoyment will replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions.

When you make the present moment, instead of past and future, the focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do—and with it the quality of your life—increases dramatically.

Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.

You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn’t the action you perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that flows into it. That aliveness is one with who you are.

Make a list of a number of everyday routine activities that you perform frequently. Include activities that you may consider uninteresting, boring, tedious, irritating, or stressful.

Be absolutely present in what you do and sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the activity.

Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.

Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole.

The meek are the egoless.