A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring t...

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

Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away.

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.

What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness.

the I Am, in the background of my life at all times?

profound joy of connectedness with Being, the Source, God.

The ego always wants something from other people or situations. There is always a hidden agenda, always a sense of “not enough yet,” of insufficiency and lack that needs to be filled. It uses people and situations to get what it wants, and even when it succeeds, it is never satisfied for long.

The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.

The satisfaction that you feel is of the ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense of self relative to the other person.

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.

Most people you meet want to enhance their identity—the mental image of who they are—through association with you.

In fact, he spoke of “a grotesque contradiction between what people consider to be my achievements and abilities and the reality of who I am and what I am capable of.”

A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.

The ego always either wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it is in a state of utter indifference: It doesn’t care about you. And so, the three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining), and indifference.

Behind every positive self-concept is the hidden fear of not being good enough. Behind every negative self-concept is the hidden desire of being the greatest or better than others.

conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self ? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept that you don’t know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating.

Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense of identity, but ultimately, you lose yourself in them.

The hippie movement represented a loosening of the hitherto rigid egoic structures in the psyche of humanity.

The conceptual image your mind has made of yourself is relating to its own creation, which is the conceptual image it has made of the other person. The other person’s mind has probably done the same, so every egoic interaction between two people is in reality the interaction between four conceptual mind-made identities that are ultimately fictions.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.

Facing facts is always empowering.

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

If there is awareness in you, you no longer need to believe in every thought you think.

In fact, doing is never enough if you neglect Being.

The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing.

As you look at, listen to, touch, or help your child with this or that, you are alert, still, completely present, not wanting anything other than that moment as it is.

What does that mean? Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being.

Then there is Being. It is found in the still, alert presence of Consciousness itself, the Consciousness that you are. Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

To love is to recognize yourself in another. The other’s “otherness” then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form. The longing for love that is in every child is the longing to be recognized, not on the level of form, but on the level of Being.

When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you.

So love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality.

Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.

To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose.

It is, in the words of Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up.

In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don’t project a mind-made image—and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world—but function from the deeper core of their Being, 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.

Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the...

Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence—simple, natural, unassuming—has a transformational eff...

When you don’t play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protecti...

You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don’t try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effe...

Then, the mind will develop some kind of strategy: “How to be myself.” Another role. “How can I be myself ?” is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. But how doesn’t apply here because you are yourself already.

myself.” If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are—the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”2

infinite possibilities which come to you when there is awareness—other vastly more intelligent ways of dealing with any situation. You will be free to let go of your unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected.