A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

This week I finished reading three books: When Fear Falls Away by Jan Frazier, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and A New Earth; Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose also by Eckhart Tolle. They all had the same message: the source of joy, love, and fulfillment lies inside you in the space that is usually covered by ego — mind, emotions, and identification with aspects of the outer world.

A New Earth was the basis of our most recent Wednesday morning class at Unity. We spent a lot of time discussing “ego” and what Tolle calls the “pain-body” and we reached a consensus that ego is a necessary thing which all humans develop in order to be able to deal with the world. It is not quite as all-bad as Tolle seems to say; his term “pain-body” incorporates the more negative aspects of the ego, what in the American vernacular is referred to as “baggage.”

Tolle’s description of ego and our class’s concurrent discussion of it made us all very aware of how we are unconsciously manipulated by our egos. The ego rushes to defend itself from challenges to the opinions, values, and priorities it has latched onto. Because these things make up our sense of identity, a challenge to them is a challenge to our identity, our very sense of self. It is quite natural to fear dissolution of self. And it takes a good deal of enlightenment not to feel threatened by challenges to those opinions that lie close to our hearts.

When who-you-are becomes too tied up in defense mechanisms, ingrained attitudes, or external situations (job, possessions, hobbies, relationships, causes, etc.), you forget to look for that quiet place inside you where mind and emotions dissolve and you can begin to touch base with simple Being.

It’s that quiet place of Being that Tolle suggests is the divine part of us all. If we can bring it to the fore, we find our true selves there and we are as close to universal divinity as we can get. At that most profound level, we cannot in any way be threatened or challenged or diminished or hurt — and certainly not destroyed. It is also the level at which we begin to experience joy in simple Being and that is our purpose in life: simply to be who we are.

From that place of inner peace and joy, you cannot help but send out love to the world around you. And it is not that you lose your ability to participate in the world — to speak out, to help others, to do the daily necessary activities of life. It is just that your mind and body become tools to support those activities while your sense of self is centered in the divine.

Tolle is not formulaic about how to achieve this. He suggests observing your mind and emotions and identifying ego activity. Meditating, clearing the mind of thought or paying close attention to your breathing might help to move you to more awareness of your inner self. For most of us awareness comes about as we try to open up to it.

However, some people (“rare beings” according to Tolle) experience this connection in a more sudden and unexpected way. Serendipitously, I came across a book which is an example of that sudden awakening. Jan Frazier calls her memoir When Fear Falls Away, but she says that it was much more than simple loss of fearfulness. She found a joy beyond words and an ability to let go of fear and anxiety that was entirely new to her and changed her whole experience of life.

Even though I am very different from Jan Frazier, I was grateful to have found her book while reading Tolle, because it was a first person account of everything Tolle was talking about. The only thing I really balked at in When Fear Falls Away was the author’s devotion to a guru. “Learn from everybody, worship nobody” is my personal philosophy — or as one of my Unity classmates said, “You’re nobody’s groupie.”

One issue that both Tolle and Frazier touch upon is that of feeling too detached from life. In the faith and happiness I’ve developed in the last few years, I have sometimes felt that I might be getting too detached. It’s an acceptance of things as they are, a feeling that “this, too, shall pass.” Also, if you believe that ultimately there is no such thing as good and evil, if it’s all just part of a benign universe experiencing itself, if death simply reunites you with universal consciousness, then there really is no reason to take things of this world too much to heart.

Some defenders of more conventional religious beliefs might criticize this understanding of God as taking away motivation for behaving well. Personally, I believe that it is just common sense to follow the rules of civilized living. You don’t have to threaten me with “hell” to get me to refrain from killing my neighbor; I’m quite happy to agree that if he doesn’t kill me, I won’t kill him.