Reflections from Chapter 2: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Author Eckhart Tolle writes in Chapter 2 of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, "When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about."--Page 26

In last Monday's web class with the author and Oprah Winfrey, the class began by taking ten seconds of silence. Ten seconds of silence in any televised or webcast media is not commonplace, yet it was a wonderful way to begin the class by serving to center ourselves from the thought processes of the day or tomorrow's concerns. Tolle explains that our thinking mind is usually thinking in the past or the future; whether it be about our past experiences (good or bad) or tomorrow's concerns (good or bad). This past and future thinking is not who we are, yet we have come to label ourselves by these thought processes. In other words, our identity has become these thought processes, and doesn't represent our true self. One can easily illustrate how we identify ourselves through these labels when we ask ourselves, "Who am I?" and the answers really are labels that represent "me and my story,"-- that personal story or history that we label ourselves.

Spiritually, this isn't who we are at all. Yet everywhere we look, we are labeling ourselves and everything and we attach labels everywhere: a tree, a parent, an accountant, a positive person, etc. So in order to get in touch with our true self by getting in touch with our inner processes, Tolle suggests that we ask ourselves, "Am I still breathing?" Our focus becomes our breath, the inhaling and exhaling and our attention turns inward. This creates a deeper awareness within us. Eventually, we will become better at these spiritual practices and be more present: to our surroundings, other people, and to ourselves.

So I invite you to try this technique, 10 seconds a day, for the next week and come back and record your reactions here.