Summary of A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Chapter One
The awakening of man to consciousness is like the opening of a flower in the morning, the passage of light through a crystal, and the bird’s ability to defy the law of gravity and fly. An essential part of awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, which is the ego that thinks and acts through you, and also recognizing it as the collective mental processes that perpetuate the unconscious state. This ego is an inherited dysfunction, which Buddha called *dukka*, also known as *sin* in Christendom. Ego is behind all the killings, wars, genocide, and horrors in the world today. It manifests itself in the form of fear, greed, and a desire for power. And the only way out is through enlightenment or salvation; that’s awakening. This is the recognition of dysfunction at work in us, which marks the end of the dysfunction.
Chapter Two
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is connected, including the source of all life. This knowledge is greatly covered because we constantly mentally label things and draw conclusions in the mental realm. The words *I, Me, My, Mine, and Myself* can be the greatest error or the deepest truth, depending on the self-being referred to. When “I” refers to the illusory self, this is ego.
Illusion dissolves when it is recognized for what it is. But when “I” comes from my true self, it comes from a place of depth. One of the ego’s greatest desires is to make others wrong by making oneself right. It lives through comparison. It compels you to identify with real-life situations. But ego has its advantage; when the suffering that it brings becomes too much, it can force man into awakening.
Chapter Three
Most people are fully under the influence of their minds. Which means they are ego-driven. The ego can be collective or individual. The content of the ego can vary from one person to another, but it has the same structure. It manifests as complaining, resentment, anger, the victim’s mentality, a negative mental label of people, name-calling, unforgiveness, violence, etc. Knowing that these are general dysfunctions of man and that nothing personal can free you from them This goes to say that the dysfunction you resent in others is in you too. So to go beyond your ego, you will need to overlook the unconsciousness of others and not make it their identity in your mind.
Chapter Four
Ego leads to role-playing in different aspects of life, such as in relationships, as a wife, husband, mother, father, teacher, etc. But this can be dissolved by taking moments as they are and trying to turn them into role-playing, protection, or enhancement. Ego has made us not have the same bearing as before. We create a mental picture of who we are and who others are, and we communicate with them at that level.
It is love when you recognize yourself in another, and then otherness stands revealed as the illusion that it is. Apart from the obvious ways ego reveals itself mentioned above, it can subtly manifest things like irritation, nervousness, and being fed up. They constantly keep people in an unhappy mood.
Chapter Five
Thinking happens to us. Since the mind has been conditioned by the past, you are then forced to react to or relive the past again and again. Emotion is another dimension of the ego; that’s when they become “I.” Unconscious assumptions create emotions in the body, which in turn generate mental activity and instant reactions. In this way, they create your personal reality. The higher level of ego is the pain body. This is a semi-autonomous energy form that lives within most humans. This is made up of emotion. It feeds on negative emotions. It rises up occasionally to feed, and it will take a level of consciousness to recognize it in you. It can be equally dissolved by the power of now that’s present. Some couples fall in love or think so without knowing it is their pain body that’s complimentary to the other person’s pain body. There is a collective pain body. There is also a collective pain body, for example, the female collective pain body, that’s a result of the suppression of the feminine principle over the years.
Chapter Six
The way to be free from individual or collective pain body is to realize its presence and be present and alert enough. Its recognition makes it not pretend to be you anymore and cannot feed through you anymore. This pain body has its place in the bigger picture. Being one of the human sufferings, when it is not bearable anymore, you will begin to be awakened. Your child’s pain body can serve as a way of teaching that child by awakening the child’s witnessing faculty through relevant questions.
Chapter Seven
Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with the ideas in your mind but more with ‘’being’’. How you react to life situations is an indicator of how deeply you know yourself. You are not the content of your life. The danger of knowing yourself through content is that it makes you differentiate between good and bad, thereby labelling some things as good for me and others as bad. This doesn’t allow you to see life as an interconnected whole in which every event has its own necessary place and function within the whole. Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation of all abundance. The source of abundance is not outside you but within you. Both abundance and scarcity are inner states that manifest as your reality.
Chapter Eight
Non-resistance to events is the key to greater power in the universe. It is through it that the consciousness is freed from form. Non-resistance, non-attachment, and non-judgmental are three aspects of true freedom and enlightenment living. These three are important because of the law of impermanence. Everything is fleeting, both good and bad. So when we disidentify with things, we are who we are, whether something good or bad is happening. Presence is an inner spaciousness. You do not awaken consciously until compulsive and unconscious naming ceases, or at least you become aware of it and are thus able to observe it as it happens.
Our inner body is not solid but spacious. It is intelligence that creates and sustains the body. Our physical body is formless on the inside as you go deeper. When I no longer confuse who I am with a temporary form of “me,” then the dimension of the limitless and the eternal God can express Itself through me and guide me. It also frees me from dependency on form.
Chapter Nine
The true purpose of life cannot be found on the outer level. Life has inner and outer purposes. Inner purpose concerns “being,” and outer purpose concerns “doing,” and that is secondary. Your inner purpose is to awaken. Your outer purpose can change at any time, and it varies from person to person. Finding and living in alignment with your inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose.
Chapter Ten
New Earth is the reconciliation of the inner and outer purpose, which is to bring consciousness into the world. This is the reconciliation of the world and God.
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