A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

There is a growing awareness of the intrinsic oneness of everything that exists, so that more and more we are seeing an awareness of and deep concern for our fellow humans, the countless animals that are our traveling companions, and the planet itself. Such awareness implies that there is indeed a lessening of the ego in a growing number of people, and in some parts of the planet more than in others.

Make sure the present moment is your friend, not your enemy.

Honor it by giving it your fullest attention.

Appreciate it by being thank...

if a perceiving consciousness had been there to witness it.

As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics.

Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being,

The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.

Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge betwee...

is, however, an extremely rare occurrence since it is more than an evolutionary progression: It also implies a discontinuity in its development, a leap to an entirely different level of Being and, most important, a lessening of materiality.

What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light.

Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. They didn’t become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.

Like all life-forms, they are, of course, temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life, one Consciousness.

Their special significance and the reason why humans feel such fascination for and affinity with them can be attributed to their ethereal quality.

they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.

An innocence, a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans.

When you recognize the unconsciousness in you, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising consciousness, is awakening.

You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.

to sin means to miss the mark,

so to sin means to miss the point of human existence.

It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to th...

Intelligence in the service of madness!

This is because it is still part of the same dysfunction, a more subtle and rarified form of self-enhancement, of desire for more and a strengthening of one’s conceptual identity, one’s self-image.

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.

They make plans without taking into account the blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.

To recognize one’s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity,

The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as “my god” or “our god.”

a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is.

fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. You then no longer derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from the incessant stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself.

What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.

For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.

In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself.

and also things that happened to “me” in the past, the memory of which are thoughts that further define my sense of self as “me and my story.” These are only some of the things people derive their sense of identity from. They are ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact that they are all invested with a sense of self.

Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.

“Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel.

When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously.

Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego.

It is important to recognize here that the story and the thought forms that make up the story, whether people agree with it or not, have absolutely nothing to do with who you are.

Renunciation of possessions, however, will not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identity with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another.

It ultimately doesn’t mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity.

making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness.

In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.

The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am.

If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total. “I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment.” That’s the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.

In some cases, the psychological need for more or the feeling of not enough that is so characteristic of the ego becomes transferred to the physical level and so turns into insatiable hunger.

Most egos have conflicting wants. They want different things at different times or may not even know what they want except that they don’t want what is: the present moment. Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting.

To be more precise, they derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body, which after all is no more than a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms—impermanence and ultimately decay.

For example, see if you can feel the inner body whenever you listen to someone. It almost seems like a paradox: When you are in touch with the inner body, you are not identified with your body anymore, nor are you identified with your mind. This is to say, you are no longer identified with form but moving away from form-identification toward formlessness, which we may also call Being. It is your essence identity.

Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego.