Eckhart Tolle “New Heaven: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose” A Book Review
sold in North America, alone, and it has been translated into 33 languages. In 2005 Eckhart wrote “New Heaven” and Eckhart Tolle is a brilliant mind that was sold 5 million copies by 2009. Of course, it on his way to a doctorate at Cambridge. doesn’t really matter to me whether he sold He, unfortunately, was also a tortured soul 5 copies or 5 billion; what matters is if it is who suffered greatly with depression and actually worth reading? My answer to that is contemplated suicide. One night in 1977, at probably yes, depending on who you are. the age of 29, Tolle says he experienced an “New Heaven” covers a variety of topics, “inner transformation.” That night he awoke but there is a basic theme that carries from his sleep suffering from feelings of through, with Eckhart’s insistence, that the depression that were “almost unbearable,” human mind is usually preoccupied with but then experienced a life-changing either the past or the future, and therefore epiphany. is rarely actually attentive to the present Tolle awoke the next day with a new moment. heart and mind, and he went out for a walk Of particular interest to me were the in London and found that everything was chapters on what Eckhart calls the “painmiraculous - deeply peaceful. Even the body.” This is Eckhart’s term for what he traffic. The feeling continued, and he began describes as an accumulation of your life’s to feel a strong underlying sense of peace in emotional pain. He writes about it as if it every situation. He stopped studying for his doctorate, and for a period of about two years were a demon that sometimes possess its human host: after this, he spent much of his time sitting “in a state of deep bliss” on park benches in “The pain-body is a semi-autonomous Russell Square, Central London, “watching energy form that lives within the world go by.” most human beings, an entity made Tolle eventually moved to Vancouver, up of emotion. It has its own primitive British Columbia, where he began writing intelligence, not unlike a cunning his first book “The Power of Now” and animal, and its intelligence is directed worked as a counselor/spiritual teacher. The primarily at survival. Like all lifefirst printing was 3,000 copies, with Eckhart forms, it periodically needs to feed – to personally delivering many to bookstores… take in new energy - and the food it since then over 3 million copies have been By Charles Van Drunen
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December 2018
requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally, painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body. That’s why it thrives on negative thinking, as well as drama in relationships. The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness. It may be shocking when you realize for the first time that there is something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person. Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you want to make others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reactions.” At this point of reading, I am a bit torn as it sounds rather crazy, but on the other hand, I could look back in my life and think of times where this intuition was very correct. Many times (and I think in most people), there were moments when I was taken over by some emotional force and became possessed by anger or fear that simply “wasn’t me” (see my “Thoughts From The West End” on page 4). Often my wife would look sideways at me and wonder “who was that?”
