A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Jean-Paul Sartre.

“The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”

When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness.

There are many accounts of people who experienced that emerging new dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in their lives.

Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter.

You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with.

That’s the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.

In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form. The fact that this new form is a deeply unhappy one doesn’t concern the ego too much, as long as it has an identity, good or bad.

Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield.

If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. You rest in God.

As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind.

Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself.

In most cases, when you say “I,” it is the ego speaking, not you,

also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure.

In other words: Egos only differ on the surface.

They live on identification and separation.

So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself.

At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own

Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior. COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone.

COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern.

Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right...

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego.

The ego loves it.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego.

When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people.

Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious.

Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overl...

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right.

Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.

The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

every time it is recognized, it is weakened.

Whereas resentment is often the emotion that goes with complaining, it may also be accompanied by a stronger emotion such as anger or some other form of upset.

They are addicted to upset and anger as others are to a drug.

Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen their feeling of self.

A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of “what someone did to me” or “what someone did to us.”

One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego.

Don’t try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.

The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.

they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right.

For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.

Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting.

It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.

It is hiding in the little word “me.”

Ego takes everything personally.

You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute.

Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts.

Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation.