Favourite quotes from " A New Earth " # 1
I'm reading Eckhart Tolle's " A New Earth " and taking the series of seminars on line at www.oprah.com. One of the exercises is to write down favourite quotes.
" Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans , however briefly , to the beauty that is an essential part of their innermost being, their true nature." p 2
" So when you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal ,or bird without naming it mentally , it becomes a window for you into the formless." p 5
" You cannot fight against the ego and win , just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary . You are that light." p 8
"According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of " original sin" Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted . Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark , as an archer misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully , blindly and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again the term stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations , points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition." p.9
" The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies a the heart of the human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness . If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis , would have to be : chronic paranoid delusions , a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived " enemies "- his own unconsciousness projected outward . Criminally insane , with a few brief lucid intervals. " pp 11-12
" You do not become good by trying to be good , but by finding the goodness that is already within you , and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your consciousness. " p.11
" Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms." p.22.
" ' A new heaven ' is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and ' a new earth' is its reflection in the physical realm . " p. 23.
