A New Earth - Philosophers Notes Summary

Book Synopsis: There’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: it’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.I’m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas from his book but I’m barely going to scratch the surface of the depth of transformative ideas Tolle presents in this book.If you’re feelin’ 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, let’s start with some:Good News & Bad News

“A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.”

Tolle starts A New Earth with some good news and some bad news.We’ll start with the bad news. We’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 person—with “chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty…”

Yikes.According to Tolle, the cause of this state is simple: “Fear, greed and the desire for power.”

The great traditions have named this dysfunction of the mind. Hinduism calls it maya which means “veil of delusion.”Buddhism calls it dukkha which means “suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery” and directly translated points to being stuck like a potter’s wheel that screeches as it turns.And, Christianity calls it “Sin” which, when stripped of all of it’s cultural baggage and properly translated from its Greek origins, means “to miss the mark”—as in an archer missing the target.

Tolle’s point is simple: we carry a lot of inherited cultural baggage.The good news?Those same traditions point to the “other” side of the dysfunction—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: “To recognize one’s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.”

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.That’s a powerful step toward creating a new earth! Read more