A New Earth

On my recent trip to LA, I decided to join millions of Oprahites and read A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. The buzz around this book has been pretty intense. I know ever since Oprah recommended it that its been a mainstay on the New York Times best sellers list, and spawned a whole New Earth online community. And a friend at church, who has excellent taste in literature, kept hounding me to read it. So I did.

And it's not bad. Actually, it's really, really good. It's the kind of book that you can dog ear, underline passages and come back to, time and time again. I guess my only hesitation is that there has been SO much hype about this book that I think I expected to be instantly transformed into a fully enlightened, serene, spiritual guru. In hindsight, I guess that's too much to ask of any author.

There are plenty of paragraphs and chapters that were hard for me to understand. Not because they were poorly written. Quite the opposite. It's just that Eckhart writes about some concepts that are so far past what I'm able to process at this point in my life. Part of it is because he's this Ivy-League genius and, um, I'm not.

But there's plenty that really hit home. For example, here's a passage that was especially timely. I read this on the flight home, after being "wowed" by all the lights, glamor and "beautiful people" of LA:

The Joy of Being
Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet...It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego. People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. 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. The joy cannot come to you—ever. It emanates from within you."

So well put. Now I know what all the hype was about.