A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.

unconsciously held beliefs, that is to say, thoughts. You think these thoughts in the same way that you dream your dreams when you are asleep. In other words, you don’t know you are thinking those thoughts, just as the dreamer doesn’t know he is dreaming.

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

Or maybe it does know, and it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego.

The present moment is the field on which the game...

It cannot happen anyw...

Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rat...

There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being ...

Life is the dancer, and you ar...

The ego loves its resentment of reality. What is reality? Whatever is. Buddha called it tatata—the suchness of life, which is no m...

Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Emotions and even thoughts become depersonalized through awareness.

Their impersonal nature is recognized.

their story, is a complete fantasy, a fictitious edifice the ego has designed for itself to feel bigger, more special.

In the story that forms the basis of his delusional system, he often assigns to himself the role of both victim and potential hero who is going to save the world or defeat the forces of evil.

In Zen they say: “Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.” What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind. Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself.

Even people with heavy egos sometimes begin to relax, let down their guard, and stop playing their roles when they interact with them. It comes as no surprise that those people who work without ego are extraordinarily successful at what they do. Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.

There is a “me” that feels personally offended or resentful, and a huge amount of energy is burned up in useless protest or anger, energy that could be used for solving the situation if it were not being misused by the ego.

It can be painful at first to suddenly wake up and realize that the collective you had identified with and worked for is actually insane.

Some people at that point become cynical or bitter and henceforth deny all values, all worth.

They didn’t face the death of their ego but ran away and reincarnated into a new one.

We could even say that the notion “my life” is the original delusion of separateness, the source of ego.

But how could I be separate from life? What “I” could there be apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as “my life,” and I don’t have a life. I am life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life? How can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How can I lose something that I Am? It is impossible.

The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive.

Strictly speaking, you don’t think: Thinking happens to you. The statement “I think” implies volition. It implies that you have a say in the matter, that there is choice involved on your part. For most people, this is not yet the case.

think” is just as false a statement as “I digest” or “I c...

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 Eastern term for this is karma.

Through complete identification with the mind, a false sense of self—the ego—came into existence. The density of the ego depends on the degree to which you—the consciousness—are identified with your mind, with thinking.

The degree of identification with the mind differs from person to person. Some people enjoy periods of freedom from it, however brief, and the peace, joy, and aliveness they experience in those moments make life worth living.

They are not present in any situation, their attention being either in the past or future which, of course, exist only in the mind as thought forms.

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.

Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, recognized alienation as the universal dilemma of human existence, probably felt it deeply within themselves and so were able to express it brilliantly in their works.

Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the filter of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine.

feel any emotion when you are told that someone’s car has been stolen, but when it is your car, you will probably feel upset. It is amazing how much emotion a little mental concept like “my” can generate.

There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet.

The ego is not only the unobserved mind, the voice in the head which pretends to be you, but also the unobserved emotions that are the body’s reaction to what the voice in the head is saying.

The voice of the ego continuously disrupts the body’s natural state of well-being.

They do, indeed, but we need to differentiate between positive emotions that are ego-generated and deeper emotions that emanate from your natural state of connectedness with Being.

The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.

No situation or event is ever really finished. The mind and the mind-made “me and my story” keep it going.

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

Our duck’s lesson is this: Flap your wings—which translates as “let go of the story”—and return to the only place of p...

Now imagine what life would be like for someone who lived like Ekido all the time, unable or unwilling to let go internally of situations, accumulating more and more “stuff” inside, and you get a sense of what life is like for the majority of people on our planet. What a heavy burden of past they carry around with them in their minds.

This “little me” is an illusion that obscures your true identity as timeless and formless Presence.

Their emotional thinking has become their self, and so they hang on to the old emotion because it strengthens their identity.

refrain from mentally dwelling on the past, regardless of whether something happened yesterday or thirty years ago. We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making.

Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions.

Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being p...

The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.

A deeply unconscious person whose pain-body habitually replenishes itself through physical violence often directs it toward his spouse or children.