A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Only through awareness—not through thinking—can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see: There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it. Only through awareness can you...

is a dangerous thing in personal relationships

The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say, right, can corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity.

The Truth was considered more important than human life.

That’s why Buddhists say “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego.

There is only one absolute Truth, and all other truths emanate from it.

The Truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you are the Truth. If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time.

The very Being that you are is Truth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”2 These words uttered by Jesus are one of the most powerful and direct pointers to the Truth, if understood correctly.

Some Christian mystics have called it the Christ within; Buddhists call it your Buddha nature; for Hindus, it is Atman, the indwelling God.

When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself—and

your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense ...

Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid.

Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth.

They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane than the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same.

By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable ci...

The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.

Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.

War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally anymore.

Reactivity.

The ego thrives on it.

When the ego is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is fighting to survive.

Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment.

Only Presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow.

The Buddha was probably the first human being to see this clearly, and so anata (no self ) became one of the central points of his teaching. And when Jesus said, “Deny thyself,” what he meant was: Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self. If the self—ego—were truly who I am, it would be absurd to “deny” it.

The only thing that ultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times? To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? Can I sense my essential identity as consciousness itself ? Or am I losing myself in what happens, losing myself in the mind, in the world?

Whatever behavior the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more.

Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.

Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it “eternal life.”

In addition, gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgment of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied but imagined moral superiority that is there whenever you apply a negative judgment to anyone.

The bane of being famous in this world is that who you are becomes totally obscured by a collective mental image.

They themselves may not know that they are not interested in you at all, but only in strengthening their ultimately fictitious sense of self. They believe that through you they can be more.

In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever. That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite for any authentic relationship.

And so, the three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining), and indifference.

Usually people are completely unaware of the roles they play.

A shy person who is afraid of the attention of others is not free of ego, but has an ambivalent ego that both wants and fears attention from others.

So the shy person’s fear of attention is greater than his or her need of attention.

Behind every positive self-concept is the hidden fear of not being good enough.

Conversely, the shy, inadequate ego that feels inferior has a strong hidden desire for superiority.

Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.

The playing of negative roles becomes particularly pronounced whenever the ego is magnified by an active pain-body, that is to say, emotional pain from the past that wants to renew itself through experiencing more pain.

Of course, once I am identified with a story in which I assigned myself the role of victim, I don’t want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity.

It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.

but it left behind an opening, and not just in those who were part of the movement.