A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

In many cases, happiness is a role people play, and behind the smiling façade, there is a great deal of pain.

Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: “There is unhappiness in me.” Then investigate it.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Facing facts is always empowering.

See the link between your thinking and your emotions.

Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it. Unhappiness covers up your nat...

but they are no more than unconscious players in the egoic game, a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose.

those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.

As a result, your actions have far greater power.

You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself.

But don’t try to be yourself. That’s another role.

Just stop adding unnecessary baggage to who you already are.

Give up defining yourself—to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life.

When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem.

That thought is: I am not enough.

But you cannot be more than you are because underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being.

A person in the grip of ego, however, does not recognize suffering as suffering, but will look upon it as the only appropriate response in any given situation.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want.

So, whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware at that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly.

Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.

impatience, irritation, nervousness, and being “fed up.”

Whenever there is unhappiness in the background of your life (or even in the foreground), you can see which of these thoughts applies and fill in your own content according to your personal situation:

The ego doesn’t know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now.

By making peace with the present moment.

Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you.

One With Life.

Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

Opposition toward that suchness is one of the main features of the ego.

In this way, you make yourself and others suffer and don’t even know that you are doing it,

When it is pointed out, it will use angry denial, clever arguments, and self-justifications to distort the facts.

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment.

The moment you become aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean you have failed. It means that you have suc

Before you were the thoughts, emotions, and reactions; now you are the awareness, the conscious Presence that witnesses those states.

All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions—as they happen.

Your entire personal history, which is ultimately no more than a story, a bundle of thoughts and emotions, becomes of secondary importance and no longer occupies the forefront of your consciousness. It no longer forms the basis for your sense of identity. You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.

are all painful episodes in human history dominated by extreme collective paranoia.

The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence.

In Zen they say: “Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.”

Those who are exceptionally good at what they do may be completely or largely free of ego while performing their work.

They are one with what they do, one with the Now,

It comes as no surprise that those people who work without ego are extraordinarily successful at what they do.

One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal selfhood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group—a nation, political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.

Have they truly become free, or has the ego simply shifted from the personal to the collective?

You live with a mental image of yourself, a conceptual self that you have a relationship with. Life itself becomes conceptualized and separated from who you are when you speak of “my life.”

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.

The density of the ego depends on the degree to which you—the consciousness—are identified with your mind, with thinking. Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

Most people are alienated from who they are, and some are alienated to such a degree that the way they behave and interact is recognized as “phony” by almost everyone, except those who are equally phony, equally alienated from who they are.

Alienation means you don’t feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get “home” but never feel at home.

Their contribution is to show us a reflection of the human predicament so that we can see it more clearly. To see one’s predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.