A New Earth - Philosophers Notes Summary

A New Earth - Philosophers Notes Summary

Thereâ€™s a reason Oprah decided to team up with Eckhart Tolle to create an unprecedented 10-week course to teach the principles in A New Earth to hundreds of thousands of people: itâ€™s a remarkable book.

Tolle has a profound ability to take the complex ideas of spirituality and consciousness and boil them down into simple, powerful lessons easily grasped and applied to our lives.

Iâ€™m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas from his book but Iâ€™m barely going to scratch the surface of the depth of transformative ideas Tolle presents in this book.

If youâ€™re feelinâ€™ it, I recommend you take some time to curl up with this gem and dive deeper into understanding how we can transform our consciousness and create A New Earth.

First, letâ€™s start with some:

Good News & Bad News

â€œA significant portion of the earthâ€™s population will soon recognize, if they havenâ€™t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.â€

Tolle starts A New Earth with some good news and some bad news.

Weâ€™ll start with the bad news. Weâ€™ve inherited a collective dysfunction.

For the history of humanity, as Tolle bluntly states, we, as a collective society, have been acting like a criminally insane personâ€”with â€œchronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and crueltyâ€¦â€

Yikes.

According to Tolle, the cause of this state is simple: â€œFear, greed and the desire for power.â€

The great traditions have named this dysfunction of the mind. Hinduism calls it maya which means â€œveil of delusion.â€

Buddhism calls it dukkha which means â€œsuffering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain miseryâ€ and directly translated points to being stuck like a potterâ€™s wheel that screeches as it turns.

And, Christianity calls it â€œSinâ€ which, when stripped of all of itâ€™s cultural baggage and properly translated from its Greek origins, means â€œto miss the markâ€â€”as in an archer missing the target.

Tolleâ€™s point is simple: we carry a lot of inherited cultural baggage.

The good news?

Those same traditions point to the â€œotherâ€ side of the dysfunctionâ€”Hindusim juxtaposes maya with enlightenment; Buddhism juxtaposes dukkha with awakening and Christianity points from sin to salvation.

The first step?

To recognize our own insanity. As Tolle advises: â€œTo recognize oneâ€™s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.â€

Can you see it? Can you recognize your own fear, greed and desire for power?

And can you see how this results in your own mini-wars within your own consciousness and in relationships with your family, your friends, your colleagues and your community?

Pause for a moment and check in with your own embodiment of our inherited insanity.

Thatâ€™s a powerful step toward creating a new earth!

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
Edition	1.0
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	PhilosophersNotes
Manufacturer	PhilosophersNotes
NumberOfPages	13
PublicationDate	2009-11-01
Publisher	PhilosophersNotes
ReleaseDate	2009-11-01
Studio	PhilosophersNotes