A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

by Eckhart Tolle

When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.

You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

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.

Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times? To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? Can I sense my essential identity as consciousness itself ? Or am I losing myself in what happens, losing myself in the mind, in the world?

For that brief moment, you know more than the other. 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.

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

When you catch yourself playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the role.

The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become.

So you are not relating with that person at all, but who you think you are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.

The role of parent is still being played compulsively, and so there is no authentic relationship.

is enough for you to recognize that it is the ego in them, that it is not who they are.

Egoic patterns, even long-standing ones, sometimes dissolve almost miraculously when you don’t oppose them internally.

The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will

If you have young children, give them help, guidance, and protection to the best of your ability, but even more important, give them space—space to be.

Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.

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.

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

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable,

If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize “At this moment I am creating suffering for myself” it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions.

How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else.