36 pages • 1 hour read
Eckhart TolleA New Earth: Create a Better Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Limited Power of Words
For Tolle, words represent man’s attempt to control and limit what is “ultimately unknowable,” and their predominance in our world speaks to the human intolerance of uncertainty (25). Most humans are uncomfortable with the fact that objects in the world have “unfathomable depth” that we cannot see due to our ability to perceive only the “surface layer of reality” (25). Whereas words separate, by identifying one object apart from all the others, the truth of existence is that “everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came” (25-26). Tolle illustrates the arbitrary, approximating quality of language, by exposing that it consists of the “basic sounds” that human vocal cords are capable of (27). He then puts a rhetorical question to the reader, challenging them to think about whether “some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe” (27). Here, the reader has space to redress their estimation of words and their power.
Tolle’s desire to disrupt the centrality of words extends to the structure of his book, which begins with a meditation on a silent object, a flower. The first encounter of a “perceiving consciousness” with a flower’s beauty was an event far more “momentous” than the first human word (1). Tolle’s beginning of his literary sermon with a flower echoes the Buddha’s “silent sermon,” where “he held up a flower and gazed at it” before an audience (2). Here, both spiritual teachers’ purport to enable their followers to appreciate and experience their profound connection to other life-forms before words can get in the way. A person who understands the flower sermon, and lives by it, is likely already an inhabitant of Tolle’s new planet of rising consciousness. As the experience of being moved by the beauty of a flower is almost universal, other, less enlightened readers will likely recognize the experience and so prime themselves to absorb Tolle’s teaching.
While Tolle describes Buddha and Jesus, the protagonists of Buddhism and Christianity, as “humanity’s early flowers” who spread the truth about Source and connectedness, he argues that their teachings became “distorted” through the words of their followers (6). With such distortions, teachings can lose their power to impart a better way of living. One reason for this distortion is organized religions’ devotion to their sacred texts. Religions like Judaism and Christianity posit that their founding texts are the word of God and turn them into doctrines of belief. Tolle points out that such doctrines are “made up of thought,” which is a function of the ego’s limited perception of reality and its tendency to create distinction between self and other (70). Whereas true spirituality is all-embracing, established religions with their reliance on words claim “to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity” (17). Doctrinal religions can therefore be the origin of conflict and misunderstanding in humanity’s quest for a connection to Source. In contrast, Tolle, who does not identify with any religious dogma, aims to restore the transformative potential of Buddha’s and Jesus’s “messages” by showing their relevance to the increased consciousness of the new earth (6).
Tolle’s disparagement of words and the thoughts comprised of them extends to his own instructions to readers of his work. In his introduction to The Power of Now, he remarks that the essence of his message can only be “conveyed” to a limited degree in words. As “the words are not always concerned with information, but often designed to draw you into this new consciousness as you read,” Tolle makes use of repetition in a sermon-like manner. Moreover, as a means of limiting the word-dominated mind’s short-circuiting response, he advises readers to not only read his work on an intellectual level but to also be attentive to a more bodily “feeling-response” and “a sense of recognition from deep within” (The Power of Words). The innate sense of truth that the reader experiences with a feeling-response echoes their realization that a beautiful flower is part of their “innermost being, their true nature,” as described at the beginning of A New Earth (2). While words can impart novel truths, Tolle prefers to draw on feeling experience to awaken readers to the truths already inside them.
The End of Stories: Disidentifying with Personal and Collective Narratives
Tolle disapproves of the typical Westerner’s predilection for defining themselves by their personal history and identifying as a member of a racial, religious, or political group. Tolle judges that such identifications are a function of the ego and create the illusion of separation between a person and the wider universe. This sense of separateness creates “misinterpretations of reality” and runs through every aspect of a person’s life, from their thought processes to their relationships with others (28). For Tolle, the illusion of separateness, and the failure to see the other as oneself, is responsible for all the conflict in the world, from interpersonal conflict to war and genocide. Indeed, Tolle believes this illusion so destructive that he asserts the function of his book is to “disentangle” the reader’s “Beingness” from “all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with” (26). He wishes to rescue the true part of the reader’s eternal self from all the false categories or temporary forms that it has identified with.
Western society esteems martyrs and their stories of personal suffering, which often become a means of connection with others who identify with them. Tolle advises that this tendency is dangerous because it perpetuates both the illusion of separation and a cycle of negativity, where people’s “pain-bodies,” or the “old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field,” feed off and enhance each other (140). When we become identified with stories of past pain, both as individuals and as collectives, we are fated to relive past woes eternally and miss the present moment, and by extension life itself. Tolle acknowledges that some historically persecuted groups, such as women and African Americans, have strong collective pain-bodies, owing to gross mistreatment at the hands of an oppressor. However, he warns against blaming the oppressor and imitating their violence because “even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego” (159-60). Instead, he posits that “forgiveness” is the only solution, because “your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence” (160). Tolle theorizes that forgiveness and the presence in the moment will bring peace to a formerly violent context and alchemize negative energy into positive. He also argues that by not identifying with the “victim” role, the former-victim can claim power in the present moment (160).
Though Tolle’s intentions in ridding the public of their limiting stories are noble, they sit oddly with the lived experience of many Americans. For example, Tolle’s critics, including New York Times writer Jesse McKinley, imply that the “murky,” largely unknown nature of Tolle’s past is dubious. Arguably, a culture that increasingly bases confidence on knowledge of a person’s background and experiences finds it difficult to trust someone who withholds or obscures information about their past, even when the person in question insists that it is not as important as the present. Others may feel uncomfortable with a white, cisgender, highly educated man preaching that less privileged groups should not blame the oppressors who have profited, and in some cases continue to profit, from their subjugation. While Tolle argues that only forgiveness from the oppressed can end conflict, and that the separation between them and their oppressors is illusory, some feel this approach is too passive to counteract the urgency of injustice. Participants in the recent MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements might argue that sharing personal and collective stories of trauma, and displaying anger and intolerance to further injustices, can limit the oppressors’ power and even move them to empathy. Such emotion-based empathy is an appeal to the oppressor’s humanity and can serve as a bridge between the oppressed and their former oppressors.
Awakened Doing: Marrying Spirituality with Self-Actualization
Tolle’s main intention in A New Earth is to destroy the ego’s illusion of separateness and awaken readers to their interconnectedness to other life-forms and the creative source of all Being. However, his followers, who were nurtured on myths of the American dream and self-actualization, approach him with questions about how to find purpose in their lives. To have mass appeal, Tolle must marry his spirituality with the capitalist, goal-setting ethos of many of his readers. His ability to do this puts him in a similar camp as other North American-based spiritual teachers, including Marianne Williamson and Gabrielle Bernstein, who adapt the teachings of Buddhism to their followers’ personal aspirations.
Still, Tolle makes it clear that a human’s primary purpose is to fully inhabit the present moment without resistance and to “be rooted in Being” rather than overidentifying with the transitory elements in life, such as career and relationships to others (186). Tolle believes that prioritizing one’s inner purpose, which is awakening to unity and connection, over an ego-derived outer purpose, such as achieving a specific outcome in the future, opens a sense of the miraculous in a person’s life. It is through this state of connection and presence in the moment that a person’s outer purpose becomes apparent. While Western culture teaches that one must toil and suffer in the present to achieve future success and happiness, Tolle insists that only enthusiasm in the moment can bring happiness and bridge one’s inner and outer purposes. While intensity is a function of enthusiasm, he believes that stress and “efforting” to achieve one’s goal mean that one has overidentified with the ego and lost a sense of connection to the universe (306). He coins the term “awakened doing” to describe “the alignment of your outer purpose—what you do—with your inner purpose—awakening and staying awake” (294). When one is awake to the present moment in achieving their goal, they “become one with the outgoing purpose of the universe,” which is to render increasing numbers of life-forms conscious and have a positive impact on others (294). Instead of the Western tendency to discuss and obsess over individual purpose, Tolle claims that our only true purpose is to nourish the consciousness of the collective.
While other schools of personal development encourage introverts to become extroverts, and people of limited creativity to become creative, Tolle acknowledges that some people are more passive and less wired for an eventful existence. Although an egoic-minded Western culture judges such people as defunct or lesser than their creative and ambitious peers, Tolle teaches that more muted individuals are “frequency holders” who “are here to generate consciousness through […] ‘just being’” (307). Thus, whether creative or passive, the inhabitants of Tolle’s new earth have a function of equal importance in the mission of rising consciousness. In a Being vision of life, rather than ego-orientated one, outer purpose is a natural, not forced, phenomenon. Once you have stripped away the ego’s illusions of hierarchies and roles, there is no need to be more than you actually are.
