A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

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. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the

evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.

Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego.

Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

Pol Pot of Cambodia ordered killed included everybody who wore glasses. Why?

That’s why Buddhists say “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth.

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

What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their

greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, dishonesty, propensity to violence, or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

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.

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

Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it

knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if ...

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.

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

don’t say, “I’m unhappy.” Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: “There is unhappiness in me.”

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

See the link between your thinking

and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

“Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”4