Excerpts from best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth, Awakening Your Life’s Purpose”
The publishers summary: A NEW EARTH-Building on the astonishing success of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle presents listeners with an honest look at the current state of humanity: He implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity.
Tolle tells us there is good news, however. There is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one.
In illuminating the nature of this shift in consciousness, Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness. We will come to experience who we truly are, which is something infinitely greater than anything we currently think we are, and learn to live and breathe freely.
Excerpts from A New Earth
This excerpt is from chapter nine, called Awakening. Many people long for the freedom and expansion that prosperity promises. Others already enjoy the relative freedom that comes with prosperity and discover that even that is not enough to give meaning. There’s no substitute for finding true purpose, but the true or primary purpose can not be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do, but what you are. That is to say, your state of consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle Books
So the most important thing to realize, is this: Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose is concerned with being and is primary. Outer purpose is concerned with doing and is secondary.
In this elegant new card deck, Eckhart Tolle distills the wisdom of his bestselling book A New Earth into short, carefully chosen passages for contemplation and inspiration. Each selection reinforces the principles of the book, leading us toward personal and, ultimately, global transformation. Tolle’s sage guidance will help you transcend ego-based mind-sets to awaken to your life’s purpose and achieve a genuine state of peace.These powerful quotations will free you from the confines of the ego and help you experience your true essence as well as the true essence of the world.
This process is not only essential to personal happiness but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world. The box includes a prop-up frame that allows you to display a favorite card or a rotation of cards for ongoing, deeper reflection. With each card, Tolle guides you to embrace stillness and remain fully present in each moment, awakening to a new conscious.
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Excerpts from Chapter 9 of A New Earth,
A DIALOGUE ON INNER PURPOSE
I don’t know exactly what it is but I want some change in my life. I want expansion. I want to be doing something meaningful and yes, I want prosperity and the freedom that comes with it. I want to do something significant, something that makes a different in the world. But if you ask me exactly what I want, I would have to say I don’t know. Can you help me find my life purpose?
Your purpose is to sit here and talk to me because that’s where you are and that’s what you are doing. Until you get up and do something else, then that becomes your purpose.
So my purpose is to sit in my office for the next 30 years until I retire or get layed off?!
You are not in your office now, so that’s not your purpose. When you do sit in your office and do whatever you do, then that is your purpose. Not for the next 30 years, but for now.
I think there’s some misunderstanding here. For you, purpose means what you are doing now. For me it means having an overall aim in life, something big and significant that gives meaning to what I do. Something that makes a difference. Shuffling papers in the office is not it, I know that.
As long as you are unaware of being, you will seek meaning only within the dimension of doing and of future.
That is to say, the dimension of time. And whatever meaning or fulfillment you find will dissolve or turn out to have been a deception. Invariable it will be destroyed by time.
Any meaning we find on that level is true only relatively and temporarily. For example, if caring for your children gives meaning to your life. What happens to that meaning when they don’t need you and perhaps don’t even listen to you any more?
If helping others gives meaning to your life, you depend on others being worse off than yourself so that your life can continue to be meaningful and you can feel good about yourself.
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If the desire to excel, win, or succeed at this or that activity provides you with meaning. What if you never win, or your winning streak comes to an end one day, as it will. You will then have to look to your imagination or memories, a very unsatisfactory place to bring some meager meaning into your life. Making it in what every field, is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others that don’t make it. So you need other human beings to fail so your life can have meaning.
If you ignore your inner purpose, no matter what you do, even if it looks spiritual, the ego will creep into HOW you do it. So the means will corrupt the end.
Not your aims or your actions are primary, but the state of consciousness out of which they come. Fulfilling your primary purpose is laying the foundation for a new reality, a new earth. Once that foundation is there, your external purpose becomes charged with spiritual power because your aims and intentions will be one with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.
The separation of thinking and awareness, which lays at the core of your primary purpose happens through the negation of time.
We are not speaking here, of course, of the use of time for practical purposes, such as making an appointment or planning a trip. We are not speaking of clock time but of physiological time, which is the minds deep seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it can not be found and ignoring the only point of access to it, THE PRESENT MOMENT.
When you look upon what you do or where you are as the main purpose of your life, you negate time. This is enormously empowering! The negation of time in what you do, also provides the link in your inner and outer purposes, between BEING and DOING.
When you negate time, you negate the ego. Whatever you do, you will be doing extraordinarily well, because the doing itself become the focal point of your attention.
Your doing then becomes a channel from which consciousness enters this world. This means there’s quality in what you do, even in the most simple actions, like turning the pages in a phone book or walking across the room. The main purpose for the turning the pages is to turn the pages, the secondary purpose is to find a phone number.