A New Earth : In 2003 I read Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now", which I highly recommend. So, when I saw Oprah raving about Tolle's latest `book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose", I immediately ordered it.
Tolle speaks to me in a way few others do, and over the next few weeks I will be highlighting some of his words of wisdom. Here's a photo of the cover (a bit worn courtesy of our 14-month old who also just couldn't put it down).
"Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence."
"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."
"The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness."
"To recognise one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence."
"Is it wrong then to be proud of one's possessions or to feel resentful toward people who have more than you? Not at all. That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one's self through 'more than' or diminishment through 'less than' is neither right nor wrong - it is the ego."
"Many people don't realise until they are on their deathbed and everything falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless."
"No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting."
"Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. Wanting is structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental structure remains in place."
"For many people, their sense of self-worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength, good looks, fitness and external appearance. Many feel a diminished sense of self-worth because they perceive their body as ugly or imperfect...Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or abilities experience suffering when those attributes begin to fade and disappear, as of course they will. Their very identity that was based on them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive a significant part of their identity, be it negative or positive, from their body."
"Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same...They live on identification and seperation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thoughts and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other".
"The conceptual 'I' cannot survive without the conceptual 'other'. The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, 'Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?' At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticise or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior."
