A New Earth: Create a Better Life

“Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness.” 

Tolle describes how humans can access their relationship to the universe by becoming alert to natural beauty. They subconsciously feel that the delicacy and goodness of a flower is part of them, and they are connected to that beauty without needing to possess or become identified with it. This sense of continuity between self and nature gives rise to a different state of consciousness than the ego’s tendency toward separation.

“This book is about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will be meaningless. It can only awaken those who are ready. Not everyone is ready yet, but many are, and with each person who awakens, the momentum in collective consciousness grows, and it becomes easier for others.” 

In contrast to other self-help titles, Tolle’s book does not promise a miracle cure for everyone who picks it up. Instead, he acknowledges that only those who are “ready” to hear his message will see how it applies to their lives and so be able to act on it. Those who are not yet ready may awaken at a later stage through the momentum created by others who have become conscious. Thus, the more conscious people there are on the planet, the greater the potential for everyone to become conscious and awaken to their true purpose.

“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.” 

Tolle reverses Western society’s tendency to measure humanity’s progress through its monuments and expansion of knowledge. Instead, he posits that humanity’s greatest accomplishment is the recognition that it is flawed and destructive. When people become aware of their own dysfunction, they have taken the first step toward diminishing their ego and appealing to the greater power of Being and connectedness in the universe.

“Words […] can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label.” 

Tolle uses words as a metaphor for the ego’s tendency to separate, label, and attempt to know and master others. He juxtaposes the lofty, enticing word “mystery” with “label,” a trifling bit of office stationery, to show the pettiness of the ego’s quest to summarize and control nature’s infinitely unknowable forms. By alerting the reader to the reduced potency of the words they rely upon to explain the universe, Tolle implies that so much more greatness lies beyond what we know and can explain.

“In normal everyday usage, ‘I’ embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein […] referred to as ‘an optical illusion of consciousness.’” 

Tolle takes one of the most common words in any language and exposes it as an illusion, owing to the separation it creates between self and the universe. Many people fall for this illusion, just as physicists before Einstein discovered the relativity of time and space had a limited and false understanding of the two entities. Crucially, if people opt for the illusory, limited version of self defined by the ego, they are choosing a lie over the truth.

“Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.” 

Tolle illustrates the futility of trying to satisfy the ego through identifying with transient, worldly forms by showing how the consumer society relies upon the short-lived satisfaction of egoic fulfillment. Our dysfunction is such that we have created an economy that relies on the in-built flaw of our illusory sense of self.

“One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.” 

While Tolle posits that humanity is powerless to control the outcome of events, he is certain that the universal purpose of awakening is behind the day-to-day challenges we experience. He reaffirms his prioritization of the present moment by stating that to evolve our consciousness, we must focus on the experience we are having in the present rather than orienting ourselves toward illusory future events.

“The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy […] And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.” 

The ego’s attitude of eternal dissatisfaction applies equally to its encounters with people and situations. Tolle’s repeated use of the word “enemy” highlights the ego’s conflict-driven nature. While conflict with other people disturbs peace, and in extreme cases takes away life, conflict with present situations opposes the life that is here, as the ego’s sense of entitlement and its own purpose gets in the way.

“You won’t find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, in ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to truth, but it never is the truth.” 

Tolle’s problem with institutionalized religion is its reliance on fixed texts, doctrines, and ideologies. These word composites, which rely upon human thought for their existence, are also prone to the fallibility and ego identification of human thought, as well as the ego’s desire to separate and make wrong. For Tolle, the truth of Being transcends all human thought and, consequently, word-dense sacred texts.

“The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies.” 

Tolle turns the ego’s need for separation and an us-versus-them mentality on its head. He emphasizes that there is no separation between self and other, and that the triggering aspects of others’ personalities also exist within us. The flaws in others thus serve to teach us about our own flaws. The ego’s manner of mastering them demonstrates how it has taken over us.

“Many people fluctuate between feelings of inferiority and superiority, depending on situations or the people they come into contact with. All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.” 

While the ego loves to create distinctions and hierarchies between people, these are as illusory as the ego’s worldview. The fact that an ego-driven person’s self-image fluctuates between inferiority and superiority depending on the situation indicates the limited and relative nature of the ego’s perspective. Nothing that is so subject to change can speak eternal truth.

“Every role is a fictitious sense of self, and through it everything becomes personalized and thus corrupted and distorted by the mind-made ‘little me’ and whatever role it happens to be playing.” 

Tolle teaches that the roles we use to define ourselves professionally and in relation to one another are fictional. In turn, these fictional roles create fictional worlds and stories around them. If our ego is strong, we can easily become identified with these roles, which are only ephemeral, changeable structures, not the essence of who we are.

“The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.” 

Tolle draws attention to the flawed nature of the human mind, which is conditioned by an already obsolete past rather than the present reality. People who are in the grip of mind-dominance are unable to live in the present because they are paying more attention to what has already happened. Worst of all, by being so reliant on the mind, a structure that relies on past forms, they are destined to keep repeating the past.

“Because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain, which I call ‘the pain-body.’” 

Tolle introduces the pain-body as the old emotional pain that becomes trapped in the body’s cells and energy field. The pain-body refers to an emotional excess from the past that people carry unconsciously as well as to a person’s present physical body. The past-oriented phantom body gets in the way of the bearer’s lively presence.

“Every human being emanates an energy field that corresponds to his or her inner state, and most people can sense it, although they may feel someone else’s energy emanation only subliminally.” 

Tolle uses the term “energy field” to describe the effect of one person’s presence on another. While the emotional charge around a person is something that most people are unconsciously aware of, not everyone knows that the quality of the energy field is determined by whether the person is present or trapped in the ego or pain-body.

“What you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you. Or in some cases, it may be there in the event or situation, but you amplify it through your reaction. This reaction, this amplification, is what the pain-body wants and needs, what it feeds on.” 

The bulk of unhappiness and dissatisfaction is caused by our reaction to events rather than the event itself. The pain-body feeds not on the source of objective misery but our overreaction to it. While we have no control over the situation, we can learn to react differently so that the pain-body has less material to feed on.

“Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious. You become whole. You are not a fragment anymore, which is how the ego perceives itself. Your true nature emerges, which is one with the nature of God.” 

By allowing, not resisting, the present moment, humans can step out of ego-identification and heal their relationship with the universe by identifying with its wholeness. Instead of being puny egoic fragments with their own agenda, humans who surrender to the moment resemble the supreme creator, God.

“Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The fact is: Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.” 

Tolle references the law of attraction when he states that acknowledging the existing boons in one’s life paves the way toward further abundance. Rather than operating from a place of lack, Tolle encourages the reader to give to the world what their ego is making them think they are deficient in. By acting as though they already have what they seek, and giving it liberally, people make the first step toward a benign sense of reciprocity.

“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly […] And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies […] beyond form.” 

Most people situate happiness in the future arrival of ideal external circumstances. To base happiness on external circumstances, however, is futile, as “what happens” is consistently unstable and unreliable. It is wiser to separate happiness from worldly forms and realign it with Being, which is the essence of life in the present moment. Tolle’s use of the word “perfection,” which denotes the finished product, indicates that there is no greater happiness than the present moment.

“When you are no longer identified with forms, consciousness—who you are—becomes freed from its imprisonment in form. This freedom is the arising of inner space. It comes as a stillness, a subtle peace deep within you, even in the face of something seemingly bad.”

When people liberate themselves from identification with mutable forms and stop relying on external circumstances to change to find happiness, they see a space between their true selves and the worldly events that could be labelled as good or bad. Their alignment with the present moment and true essence of Being thus means that they are less attached to worldly boons and better able to weather life’s ups and downs.

“Consciousness […] cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile. All knowing is within the realm of duality—subject and object, the knower and the known. The subject, the I, the knower without which nothing could be known, perceived, thought, or felt, must remain forever unknowable. This is because the I has no form.” 

Unlike the doctrine of text-based religion, the consciousness that governs the Being-based eternal part of us is ultimately unknowable and unexplainable. This is because consciousness belongs in formless space, but only the realm of forms can be known. If we seek to label consciousness, we will only have succeeded in making it another transitory form.

“When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change.” 

Given that uncertainty is the reality of living in a world of fluctuating forms, those who can accept it have a relaxed enough state of mind to see the myriad creative possibilities in the present moment. They are also better able to make bold changes that can benefit all. Fear derives from an overattachment to certain outcomes and can make people inflexible when dealing with the current situation.

“Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.” 

How a person lives, as well as their particular actions, determines whether they are fulfilling the universal destiny of awakening to consciousness. If they can be present in their actions toward some future goal, then their inner and outer purposes have become aligned. If they are only focused on the future, then they work in service of the ego.