Book reviews: A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle
“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.” (pg. 115)
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) offers readers a new compilation of ancient spiritual teachings and philosophies in his bestseller, “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose”. Mr. Tolle offers a powerful and poignant message: There is a way into peace. Tolle, a contemporary spiritual teacher, who himself has suffered from depression, writes his way into the core of the human desire to achieve a more purposeful life on a planet he feels is in peril. Unlike other self-help books, Tolle’s “Earth” is not a how-to manual for changing the external realities of your life. He offers no exercises or practical step-by-step goal setting. Rather, he invites you, the reader, to become open to a shift in consciousness. The reader is invited to engage fully in the powerful and ever-present Now which awakens the inner world of the sacred housed in all souls. To fully partake in the Now, one must identify and dismantle the ego as the origin of human suffering. Heaven, he says, is not a destination but an awakened sense of being. The title, A New Earth, is a biblical prophecy located in both the Old and New Testament calling for a new world order.
The human race is in trouble. According to Mr. Tolle, we must evolve or die. The definition of Tolle’s evolution is metaphysical rather than Darwinian. To evolve is not to transform gills into lungs, but to lose the divisive affect of the ego that equates truth with form. In other words, we are not our roles and material possessions, as the ego would have us believe. The ego, therefore, is the state of unconsciousness. When ruled by the egoic mind, we cannot connect to the very being, the very life that we are. We act, speak, and do things that hurt others and ourselves by obeying the stream of thoughts, “the voice in our head”, rather than staying inside the freedom and joy of the present moment. Tolle encourages us to observe our thoughts instead of react to them, much like standing on a bridge over a rapid moving stream rather than throwing ourselves into the rushing water, an analogy Gary Zukav uses in his bestseller, “The Seat of the Soul.”
We were not always egoic creatures. According to Mr. Tolle, the story of Genesis in the Old Testament is when humans began to think instead of be. Once the thinking began, we defined form as good and evil and then acted and judged accordingly. Society grew into a collective unconsciousness, placing identity
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