Reflections on 'A New Earth' from Lake Three

“In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good or bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest.”

A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle

There never seems to be enough time. Even when I crawled out of my sleeping bag at six in the morning with the coffee pot ready and needing only heat. The birds had already been up for two hours. I read my breviary for ten minutes and put it down for the rest of the day. There is no internet at Lake Three, no DirecTV, no cell reception, no electricity, no running water, just a picnic table and a well-kept biffy provided by the Forest Service. I deliberately left my laptop at home. I scribbled in a leather-bound journal I’d not touched since the last time we were there. Two mornings we got up early enough to throw out fishing lines in hopes of a largemouth. No such luck.

I didn’t go to Lake Three just to read, but after fishing and hiking and Scrabble and being time, there still remained more time for reading than back home. I had big designs. I brought A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich. I didn’t plan to read them all, or in the case of the first two, re-read. I did plan to read generous segments of all of them. Instead I picked up Tolle’s book first, went through it cover-to-cover, and left Norman and Louise for another day.

Surely, Eckhart Tolle doesn’t need me to plug his book when he has Oprah; and there are probably more reviews of it than there are words in it. I’m not going to pretend to add anything new. In fact, the book itself adds very little to the main body of Tolle’s work which appears in The Power of Now, which I’ve also read and re-read and given copies of to my kids. However, in A New Earth he does explain his views of the ego and what he calls our “pain-body” in different ways, and suggests that through awakening (our first life purpose) will we find our secondary life purpose in the world of form. He further suggests that true hope for our planet lies in the collective awakening of human consciousness.

None of what Tolle offers us is terribly original. He draws deeply upon writings from the Bible, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, which he weaves into a very Zen-like approach to life. Be aware of your thoughts, he says. Your thoughts are not you. Be on the alert for signs of the ego and your pain-body (collective memory) in your thoughts and feelings. They are not you, and so on. You can read things like this elsewhere. So why do I read Tolle and why did I take A New Earth to the middle of the Chequamegon National Forest?

I think Tolle’s genius lies in his ability to take a very Eastern way of thinking and express it in ways we Westerners not only can understand but can relate to. The teachings of Jesus and Saint Paul often lend themselves very nicely to Tolle’s point of view. For instance, Jesus said you must lose your life to find it. To Tolle, that means losing our egoic way of thinking. Awakening to our life’s purpose.

The signs about the world are ominous. Slowing economies, rising unemployment, skyrocketing commodities prices, shrinking investments, climate change, vanishing species, terrorism, fear of nuclear proliferation. My 89-year old mother remarked to me the other day that people at her retirement complex were talking about “Armageddon.” A lot of people are wondering what life will be like for their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It’s tough stuff to ignore. What is so refreshing about escaping to Lake Three is its psychological remoteness from the world. Yes, there is radio reception, but I have little patience for listening to music there, much less the noise of the news. The sounds of the forest are enough. I can begin to forget. The trees don’t care about global warming; they’re doing their part. The birds don’t care about the price of oil. The fish don’t care about terrorism. I can begin to focus on the ego and identify the pain-body, and yes they are there. I can begin to focus on how they affect my thinking and emotions. I can at least begin, again, to learn how to live in the present. There is fishing meditation and walking meditation and even bug and noise meditation. There are challenges even at Lake Three, but one is not overwhelmed by them. I can begin to lose myself.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is the practice of nonresistance. According to Tolle, “nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.” The practice begins internally with accepting each situation as it is. When I read the headlines every morning, it is usually with a judgmental eye. God, are they really killing aid workers in Somalia? How can oil cost so much? How can we possibly balance the budget with the economy in the tank? I’m glad to get away from such stuff, so I can try to practice nonresistance on easier things. A chainsaw, mosquitoes, yapping dogs, a balky fishing line, a million little, almost-manageable things. Acceptance. Things are as they are. Tolle quotes Shakespeare too: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

It is not a matter of cultivating only pleasant, optimistic thoughts; Tolle is not into “the power of positive thinking.” In fact, he’s into thinking only insofar as it becomes necessary to live in a world of form. Tolle is into being without passing judgment. Of course, nonresistance does not mean doing nothing about the evil we perceive in the world. Inner acceptance does not mean indifference. It simply (or not so simply) means not squandering precious energy indulging in judgment.

I took A New Earth to Lake Three because I am a firm believer that survival of our planet is not primarily a matter of politics, economics or science. It is a matter of spiritual awakening that must begin with each one of us. Just today Pope Benedict XVI was quoted at CNN.com during his trip to Australia: "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." The pontiff advocated "a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships.” Tolle puts it another way. As we learn to identify our ego and our egoic thinking, we also begin to see the dissolution of our self-indulgent sense of separation from all things.

As a Christian, I am not necessarily offended by anything Eckhart Tolle has to say. When it comes to doctrine, I am decidedly open minded. However, if you wish to read a more strictly Christian assessment of Tolle’s book, well-written and erudite, I would commend you to a review at Greg Boyd’s blog, Random Reflections.

The battle for a New Earth has begun. It is not being fought in Afghanistan or Iraq or Washington or The Hague. It is being fought within each one of us, with each breath, with each moment of our awareness.