A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Eckhart Tolle
One of the hot topics of this trimester’s Personal Leadership Development class has been ego, so I have been thinking a lot about how my ego is manifesting in my professional and personal life. Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth was either recommended by someone I met in the program, or could have been mentioned by one of the visiting speakers. I didn’t know that it focused on what Tolle calls egoic behavior at the time I picked it for one of my Personal Leadership Plan books. It is the perfect book for me to have read at this point in my life. It is the perfect book for me now. And now.
Tolle begins by recognizing and naming our inherited dysfunction: our collective mental illness, a veil of delusion. This delusion is that of suffering, or dukkha in Buddhism. Christians call it original sin. Tolle explains that in its original Greek, Sin means “to miss the point of human existence”, “to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target”. The point of human existence is not to suffer, but to be who we are. We miss this mark when we feed our egoic behavior.
What Tolle proposes is that we have an opportunity now to have a “radical transformation of human consciousness”. This consciousness will help us to create a new Earth when we become aware and break free of the “triggers” that feed our egoic behavior. Triggers are the things that activate your ego and are caused when we identify with the “I”, the “Me” and the “Mine”. (That’s what George Harrison was talking about when he wrote that song way back in January of 1969: Paul McCartney’s ego.) By recognizing our egoic behavior we will begin to liberate and awaken ourselves, be Who We Are rather than who we think others want us to be. We will then silence the looping voices in our heads which keep us from living in the moment, and keep us suffering.
Tolle also shares with us his idea of the pain-body, our “accumulation of old emotional pain” that we carry with us in our energy field. Some of us are born with a “heavy” pain-body, some with a light one. The kind of pain-body you are born with doesn’t necessarily determine how much more pain you acquire in your pain-body over your lifetime. That comes from your experience as you grow, and whether you learn to face your pain in the present. Tolle explains how we can help our children reduce the amount of pain added to their pain-bodies as they grow, by teaching them to face their pain in the now. I can’t think of any better gift for a parent to be able to give your children!
I can already feel the difference that reading A New Earth has made in my life. I feel lighter and more able to accept the challenges in my life now. I am more aware of my egoic behavior, and that awareness deflates the power it has over me. I know this will be a constant challenge until I am able to be present and aware automatically, but Tolle says this will happen eventually. Until that time, I will practice being aware of my voice loop and the thoughts feeding my pain-body, and will endeavor to remember the feelings and thoughts that trigger it. And not take myself so seriously!
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