Book Review: A New Earth

A guest post by Kate Walser. You can follow Kate on Twitter.

This was one of the best books I almost never finished.

And that’s saying something. I’m a book finisher – unless the book is just awful and making me bleed, I finish it. I choose carefully mind you, but I finish that book.

And Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth? Well, it took over 9 months. Why? Well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

First let me tell you how I wound up reading this book. The “how I wound up reading it,” the process of reading it, and how I finished it may actually tell you more about this book than anything I can ever say about its contents.

Besides being an avid book finisher, I’m also a big believer in signs. So when I saw this book on Amazon one day, and then seemed to see it each way I turned – in an ad in the weekend Parade section in the newspaper, in an ad for Oprah, and in another ad somewhere, I was convinced it was a sign. It looked good and the signs were there.

It was meant to be.

And yet I still didn’t get the book. Life got in the way for a while. I got caught up in the all the to-do lists and the making and finding and doing the to-do lists.

Then one day, it found me. We opened the mail one day to find that my husband’s fraternity brother, CJ, had sent us a copy of it. He’d included a great note to the effect that this book had affected him so positively that he wanted to share it with others.

Wow – that’s glowing praise. CJ’s a successful guy and has his stuff together, so if he gives it a thumbs up, it must be good.

So I started to read. I flew threw the first several chapters and thought, “this IS a great book. I’ll have to thank that CJ.”

Page after page quickly flew as I read about the stories of people who had evolved and set aside material things and the representations of themselves in this world to just be. And in just being, they had found bliss – heaven on earth, if you will.

Then came the chapter about ego.

When I reached the chapter on ego, it was if the mental brakes slammed on and all reading came to a screeching halt. Eckhart describes how it holds us back, ruins our relationships like a slow yet progressive cancer, infesting every aspect of our being, or at least the being we believe is us.

He gives specific examples which, for me, were so on target that it was like having your loving godmother suddenly slap you for all the things you didn’t think she knew you had done because you didn’t even realize you were doing them.

Eckhart’s very kind and objective about it – I can’t imagine him hurting a fly, yelling, or being anything but compassionate. But the examples and discussion of how they hinder our humanity and ability to relate to others is so apt that it truly was like being slapped, maybe more so by my own consciousness that seemed to be rising.

That’s when I put the book down. Stepped away quickly, not slowly. Shoved it in a closet as if hiding it somewhere out of sight would make it take back what it had just said about me. It sat there in the spot, calling loudly to me (it was hard to forget the very on-track target that almost seemed like I was Jim Carrey’s character in that movie where Jim Carrey’s every move is watched as his life is a movie), for a very long time.

About 6 months. I’m not sure I’d have finished it if my friend and I hadn’t had a heart-to-heart while away from the families at a conference one week.

I was telling my friend I wasn’t quite sure which direction my life was going as I felt I’d begun to lose sight of what was important. Sure I loved my family and knew they were the greatest, but beyond that, work, every day things were bringing me down. That’s when I mentioned this book, and the conversation took a profound and interesting direction. She’d read it too, or at least, was reading it.

My friend told me that if I just got through the chapter about ego, the rest of the book was really good, especially the chapter about children and families. She’d hit the same chapter and tossed the book aside. She’d had the good fortune to hear from other friends who’d read the book that that’s the chapter where, if you don’t stop, you sit incredibly uncomfortably, reading it, knowing that Eckhart’s nailed you.

So I picked the book back up and continued reading it and found she was right.

The gig is up – if someone’s calling you on these things you’re doing, you can no longer just do them unconsciously, since he ties these into how humanity is suffering, how we are screwing Mother Earth and our environment, and that to save ourselves from this hell we may be living, we need to change our attitudes.

The epiphany was that if my friend and her friends were having the same reaction, and if Eckhart Tolle was writing this book with such on-target examples, then it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just a few of us – this was something many, many, many of us are doing. When I realized that, it was if realizing that I had other partners in this crime made it a bit more tolerable and forgivable.

The title, “A New Earth,” always signaled eco, environmentalism, green green green to me. That was probably also why I was so caught off guard by the ego chapter. Eckhart lays out the current state of the world, or at least the world for most of us.

We’ve become lost in this idea of what success is – good job, family, stability, etc. – and what it means to be happy, both often characterized in our culture by wealth, things, and good health, that we’ve become lost. We no longer recognize who are, so we buy more, lose ourselves more in games / shopping / stimulants / etc., in hopes that the little bit of pleasure they bring will make us happy.

Instead, it’s a blip on the happy radar, and soon after finishing, we feel about the same or worse – just empty.

Eckhart is a very spiritual and philosophical writer. He offers up a suggestion that maybe this place we live now, this Earth, is our heaven or hell. We make it one or the other by how we treat each other, how we live our lives, whether we can get past our own ego and instead just be – breathe in and out without stopping to think too much. And in that suggestion alone, this book has affected me positively, as I imagine it did CJ who originally sent it to me.

It’s one thing if you think about “making it to heaven” or this mystical after-life place. Then it’s easy to set aside what really is important and “get to it eventually,” as many of us plan to do and never quite achieve. It’s a whole other thing when you think about making THIS place you live, this Earth, this you, heaven by being, living in this life, being present now, rather than distracted or trying to escape this hell you’ve set up for yourself.

Eckhart offers up suggestions for how to break free from pain bodies that hold us back, keeping us in a less heaven-ly existence, and prevent us from becoming our true selves and who we’re meant to be, versus who we think we should be or focusing on what represents us.

Read the book – and take your time when reading the ego chapter.

If you let yourself be open to the book and what he’s saying about how we live and how we can be present in the “now,” I suspect it will change your entire outlook and what you focus on and how you think about those things.

On a side note, if I could send people to a desert island with three books, I’d pick this one, Three Cups of Tea (see my review on TJCC), and Pride & Prejudice (just because I love it). All three give some perspective on how we treat others and how our own egos can make or break our happiness.

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Kate Walser works in user experience and interaction design most of the time. She also causes trouble by getting people to collaborate and share knowledge in large corporate and government agencies, using social media and “other ways of making them talk.”

Kate’s a graduate of Catholic University (Biomedical Engineering) and Robert H. Smith School of Business at UMD (MBA).

Kate’s cautious optimism is “shaped” by having been a lifeguard, waitress, Jesuit Volunteer, tutor, resident advisor, sea urchin embryologist, and sister to 5 brothers and 1 sister, before becoming a wife and mom.

You can find Kate on Twitter (@kwalser), her blog (http://katewalser.com), or at her company (http://cxinsights.com).

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Eckhart Tolle, Kate Walser, Motivation