Eckhart Tolle “New Heaven: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose”

A Book Review

By Charles Van Drunen

Eckhart Tolle is a brilliant mind that was on his way to a doctorate at Cambridge. He, unfortunately, was also a tortured soul who suffered greatly with depression and contemplated suicide. One night in 1977, at the age of 29, Tolle says he experienced an “inner transformation.” That night he awoke from his sleep suffering from feelings of depression that were “almost unbearable,” but then experienced a life-changing epiphany.

Tolle awoke the next day with a new heart and mind, and he went out for a walk in London and found that everything was miraculous - deeply peaceful. Even the traffic. The feeling continued, and he began to feel a strong underlying sense of peace in every situation. He stopped studying for his doctorate, and for a period of about two years after this, he spent much of his time sitting “in a state of deep bliss” on park benches in Russell Square, Central London, “watching the world go by.”

Tolle eventually moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he began writing his first book “The Power of Now” and worked as a counselor/spiritual teacher. The first printing was 3,000 copies, with Eckhart personally delivering many to bookstores… since then over 3 million copies have been sold in North America, alone, and it has been translated into 33 languages.

In 2005 Eckhart wrote “New Heaven” and sold 5 million copies by 2009. Of course, it doesn’t really matter to me whether he sold 5 copies or 5 billion; what matters is if it is actually worth reading? My answer to that is probably yes, depending on who you are.

“New Heaven” covers a variety of topics, but there is a basic theme that carries through, with Eckhart’s insistence, that the human mind is usually preoccupied with either the past or the future, and therefore is rarely actually attentive to the present moment.

Of particular interest to me were the chapters on what Eckhart calls the “painbody.” This is Eckhart’s term for what he describes as an accumulation of your life’s emotional pain. He writes about it as if it were a demon that sometimes possess its human host:

“The pain-body is a semi-autonomous energy form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of emotion. It has its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its intelligence is directed primarily at survival. Like all lifeforms, it periodically needs to feed – to take in new energy - and the food it 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?”

“In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together and preferably have signed a contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of your life. You don’t just marry your wife or husband, you also marry her or his pain-body – and your spouse marries yours. It can be quite a shock when, perhaps not long after moving in together following the honeymoon, you find suddenly one day there is a complete personality change in your partner. Her voice becomes harsh or shrill as she accuses you, blames you, or shouts at you, most likely over a relatively trivial matter. Or she becomes totally withdrawn. “What’s wrong?” you ask. “Nothing is wrong,” she says. . . When she speaks to you, it is not your spouse or partner who is speaking but the painbody speaking through them. Whatever she is saying is the pain-body’s version of reality, a reality completely distorted by fear, hostility, anger, and a desire to inflict and receive more pain.

At this point you may wonder whether this is your partner’s real face that you had never seen before and whether you made a dreadful mistake in choosing this person. It is, of course, not the real face, just the pain-body that temporarily has taken possession.”

Eckhart says that there is also a collective pain-body where individuals carry the hurts and sufferings of a particular culture:

The collective racial pain-body is pronounced in Jewish people, who have suffered persecution over many centuries. Not surprisingly, it is strong as well in Native Americans, whose numbers were decimated and whose culture all but destroyed by the European settlers. In Black Americans too, the collective painbody is pronounced. Their ancestors were violently uprooted, beaten into submission, and sold into slavery. The foundation of American economic prosperity rested on the labor of four to five million black slaves. In fact, the suffering inflicted on Native and Black Americans has not remained confined to those two races, but has become part of the collective American pain-body. It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality. For what you do to others, you do to yourself.

This collective pain-body concept made me think of Gallup and our surrounding area that may be harboring a very large collective pain-body from all the hurts and pain that Native culture has suffered in the relatively recent past.

Of course, the zillion dollar question for the pain-body is how to get rid of it, or at least minimize its possessing force in our lives? Eckhart answers this by simply stating that recognizing and realizing you have a pain-body is a powerful step in reducing it. Secondly, and ironically, he says that often we need to fully go into those emotions of the pain-body and surrender to them while not letting our minds identify with it and make up stories to support it. This watching and accepting he simply calls being “present,” and when you are present, Eckhart claims, then you are really forgiving everything past or future that contained the energy of pain. This is of course a great simplification of his words, and you will have to read the book for yourself to really grasp it.

In conclusion, I’ll say that even for me the book is a “bit out there,” but in its final conclusions, I didn’t find it contradictory, but rather complementary, to my traditional religious beliefs. I’ll end with a final Eckhart quote from the book:

The extent of the ego’s inability to recognize itself and see what it is doing is staggering and unbelievable. It will do exactly what it condemns others for and not see it. When it is pointed out, it will use angry denial, clever arguments, and self-justifications to distort the facts. People do it, corporations do it, governments do it. When all else fails, the pain-body will resort to shouting or even to physical violence. Send in the marines.

We can now understand the deep wisdom in Jesus’ words on the cross: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

May your holidays be joyful and bright.

Enjoy all the good moments that come with the season. Your friends at Allstate wish you the best this holiday season and look forward to serving you in 2019. Angela Biava 505-722-6900 196 E. Highway 66 angela.biava@allstate.com

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