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A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Written By: ruchi - Feb• 06•19
A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

I recently read this wonderful book – A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, by Eckhart Tolle. I couldn’t leave the book down once I started reading it. I could relate to so many things in the book. I want to be able to refer to it again so I I have written a summary as my personal notes for future reference.

Identification with Things

A large part of many people’s lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to to try to fill it up with things. As a spiritual practice, I suggest that you investigate your relationship with the world of things through self-observation. Find out if your sense of self-worth is bound up with the things you possess.

The Ego

Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to, are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it’s the ego. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am, which is consciousness itself, emerges.

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.

The Illusion of Ownership

How do you let go of attachment of things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total. That’s the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.

Reactivity and Grievances

The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thoughts and emotions.

Being Right, Making Wrong

When you complain, by implication you are right and the other person or the situation you complain about or react against is wrong. There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right, places you in a position of imaginary moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.

In Defense of an Illusion

If you say, “Light travels faster than sound,” and the other person says the opposite, you are obviously right and he is wrong. But, if you find yourself saying, “Believe me, I know” or “Why do you never believe me?” then the ego has crept in. It has become contaminated with the false sense of I. The I feels diminished or offended because somebody doesn’t believe what I said.

The Ego is not Personal

The greatest part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can even say that on this planet normal equals insane. What lies in the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say ego.

Ego strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the others, whose otherness has become magnified to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one life that you share with each human being, your common divinity.
Whatever you fight, you strengthen and what you resist, persists.

All Structures are Unstable

Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death.

The Ego’s Need to Feel Superior

If someone has more, knows more, or can do more than I, the ego feels threatened because the feeling of less diminishes its imagined sense of self relative to other. It may then try to restore itself by somehow diminishing, criticizing, or belittling the value of other person’s possessions, knowledge or abilities. Or the ego may shift its strategy, and instead of competing with the other person, it will enhance itself by association with that person, if he or she is important in the eyes of others.

Ego and Fame

A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. The three predominant states of egoic relationships are, wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining) and indifference.

Happiness as a Role vs. True Happiness

Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions you feel. See the link between your emotions and your thinking. Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now. By facing what is, rather than making up stories about it.

Ego Roles

Egoic patterns, even the long-standing ones, sometimes dissolve almost miraculously when you don’t oppose them internally. Opposition gives them renewed strength. But even if they don’t, you can accept the behavior of others with compassion, without needing to react to it, that is to say, without personalizing it.

Awareness means presence and only presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.

Conscious Suffering

Suffering has a noble purpose – the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego. The ego says that I should not need to suffer and that thought makes you suffer so much more. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it. The ego creates separation and separation creates suffering.

The Secret of Happiness

How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. Secret to art of living – One With Life. Being one with life is being one with now.

Work With and Without Ego

The stronger the ego in you, the more likely it is that in your perception other people are the main source of problems in your life. It is also more than likely that you will make life difficult for others. The sense of being victim, of being wronged by so many people, makes a person’s ego feel very special.

The ego’s unconscious core feeling of not enough causes it to react to someone else’s success as if that success had taken something away from me. It doesn’t know that your resentment of another person’s success curtails your own chance of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.

The Birth of Emotion

An instinctive response is body’s direct response to an external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is body’s response to thought. Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it was a reality. To body, a worrisome fearful thought means, “I am in danger.” and it responds accordingly even though it may be lying in a warm comfortable bed at night.

Pain Body

All the emotions leave a residue of pain in you. It accumulates as negative field which occupies your body and mind. It’s the emotional pain body. It does not matter what proportion of your pain body belongs to your nation or race and what proportion is personal. In either case, you can only go beyond it by taking responsibility for your inner state now. Even if the 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. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet – human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves and your true power emerges – the power of presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

Breaking Free of Pain Body

When you feel the pain-body, don’t fall into the error of thinking that there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into a problem – ego loves that, The knowing needs to be followed by accepting. Anything else will obscure it again. Accepting means that you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the now. Through allowing, you become what you are – vast, spacious.

Abundance

Abundance comes only to those who already have it. It sounds almost unfair but of course it isn’t. It is a universal law. Both abundance and scarcity are inner states that manifest as your reality.

The Ego and the Present Moment

You need to ask what kind of relationship you have with the present moment. Do you want the present moment to be your friend or enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life. Once you decide that you want present moment to be your friend, it’s up to you to make the first move. Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your reality but you have to make this decision again and again till it becomes natural to live that way.

The Joy of Being

The joy of being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person or event, through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.

Allowing the Diminishment of the Ego

If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.

Another aspect of this practice is to refrain from attempting to strengthen the self by showing off, wanting to stand out, be special, make an impression, or demand attention. It may include occasionally refraining from expressing your opinion when everybody is expressing his or hers, and seeing what it feels like.

The Discovery of Inner Space

Nonresistance, non-judgement and non-attachment are the 3 aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

The words, This too will pass, brings detachment and with detachment another dimension comes into your life – inner space. These words are pointers toward reality. In pointing to the impermanence of all forms, by implication, they are also pointing to the eternal. Only the eternal in you can recognize the impermanent as impermanent.

Recognizing Inner Space

Here is another way of finding inner space – become conscious of being conscious. Say or think “I Am” and add nothing to it. Be aware of the stillness that follows I am. Sense your presence, the naked, unveiled, unclothed beingness. It is untouched by young or old, rich or poor, good or bad, or any other attributes. It is the spacious womb of all creation, all form.

Perceiving Without Naming

Choose an object around you. Without straining, relaxed but alert, give your complete attention to the object, every detail of it. If thoughts arise, don’t get involved in them. It is not the thoughts you are interested in, but the act of perception itself. Can you take the thinking out of perceiving? Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing or typing to figure something out? After a couple of minutes or so, let your gaze wander around the room or wherever you are, your alert attention lighting up each thing that it rests upon. Then, listen to any sounds that may be present in the same way. Allow each sound to be as it is without interpretation.

When you look or listen this way, you may become aware of a subtle and at first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm. Some people feel it as a stillness in the background, others call it peace.

The Breath

Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment – the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of the breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing at the same time. Conscious breathing stops your mind. But far from being in a trance or half asleep, you are fully awake and highly alert. And if you look closely, you will find that those two things – coming fully into the present moment and ceasing thinking without loss of consciousness, are actually one and the same – the arising of space consciousness.

Inner Body Awareness

Take 2 -3 conscious breaths. Now see if you can detect a subtle sense of aliveness that pervades your entire inner body. Can you feel your body from within, so to speak? Sense briefly specific parts of your body. Feel your hands, then your arms, feet and legs. Can you feel your abdomen, chest, neck and head? What about your lips? Is there life in them? Then become aware of the inner body as a whole. You can close your eyes in the beginning but once you feel your body, open your eyes, look around and continue to feel your body at the same time.

Your Inner Purpose

Your life has an inner purpose, concerning the being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary. Your inner purpose is to awaken. Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose.

Some changes may look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge. There may be a period of insecurity and uncertainty. What should I do? As the ego is no longer running your life, the psychological need for external security, which is illusory anyway, lessens. You are able to live with uncertainty, even enjoy it. 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. The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise. If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness and creativity.

Inner alignment with the present moment opens your consciousness and brings it into alignment with the whole, of which the present moment is an integral part. The whole, the totality of life, then acts through you.

The whole is made up of existence and being, the manifested and unmanifested, the world and God. So when you become aligned with the whole, you become a conscious part of the interconnectedness of the whole and its purpose – the emergence of consciousness in the world. As a result, spontaneous helpful occurrences, chance encounters, coincidences and synchronistic events happen much more frequently. Synchronicity means there is no casual connection between events on our surface level of reality. But we can be conscious participants in the unfolding of that intelligence, the flowering consciousness.

The Three Modalities of Awakened Doing

There are 3 ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do and thus through you into this world, 3 modalities in which you can align your life with the creative power of the universe. They are acceptance, enjoyment and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You have to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all – from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of acceptance, enjoyment or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

Acceptance

Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means, for now this is what this situation this moment, requires me to do and so I do it willingly. Performing an action in the state of acceptance means you are at peace with while you do it. That peace is the subtle energy vibration that then flows into what you do. If you can neither enjoy nor accept what you do, stop. Otherwise you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can take responsibility for, which is also the only thing that matters, your state of consciousness.

Enjoyment

The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing. When you make the present moment, instead of past or future, the focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do, increases dramatically. What is the relationship between something that you do and the state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. Here is a spiritual practice that will bring empowerment and creative expansion into your life. Be absolutely present in what you do, any menial chore, and sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the activity. You will soon find that what you do in such state of heightened awareness, instead of being stressful, tedious or irritating, is actually becoming enjoyable.

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward. When you add goal to the enjoyment, it turns into enthusiasm. Unlike stress, enthusiasm has a high energy frequency and it resonates with the creative power of the universe. Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do then is ride the wave.

Enthusiasm belongs to the outgoing cycle of life (cycle of expansion). It is only through acceptance that you can align yourself with the return movement (contraction of life, the journey home).Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor or writer, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Whatever you ask in a prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.

The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening.