by @anarchyroll
1/31/2014
Very few things have happened to me that I consider genuinely life changing. Listening to the audio book for A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is one of them.
There was immediate change as well in terms of how I viewed my own life, as well as the lives of others. That wore off after a few months, but the seeds for long lasting permanent change had been planted. Present moment awareness, resistance as an emotion, the ego, reading the sign posts of the universe, letting go, and mental noise are concepts taught in this book that I am eternally grateful and better for learning.
I know I would be lost without this book. It is no magic pill, because there is no such thing. It did fill in huge pieces of the puzzle of life for me. This book brought me to year zero in terms of being who I wanted to be and living the life I wanted to live. This book is the salt of the Earth. This book allowed me to feel calm, ready, and willing to accept I had to tear it down and start from scratch.
How I came by this book? It was thanks to The Game by Neil Strauss. The villain of that nonfiction book is a man named Owen Cook, who was going by Tyler Durden at that time (yes named after Fight Club Tyler Durden.) When Owen’s life came crashing down around him after The Game came out and painted him in a very negative light, and the negative financial repercussions that came with it, he started getting into spirituality. A New Earth turned his life around and his most successful piece of self help material he personally created The Blueprint Decoded was built on a foundation of the concepts in A New Earth.
A vast majority of the Blueprint stuff was deep level stuff. Well below the surface layer of pick up lines and traditional social dynamics material. An audience member at the four day seminar where Blueprint was recorded talked about changing his college major after reading A New Earth. I was in college at the time and figured I would check it out. Wow am I glad I did. My major didn’t change. But the way I perceived basically everything that happened to me did. How I looked at other human beings changed. How I looked at the world changed. How I looked at concepts like coincidence, serendipity, chance, luck, reaction, interpretation, breathing, the thought process all changed forever.
In the future I will detail those changes more specifically. The greatest gifts were a gift of calmness both in the face of adversity and good times. An awareness of where my thoughts come from. Better clarity on the human condition. The struggle of the ego versus the soul that is waged inside of all of us, all day, every day. A New Earth started the remodel by tearing it all down including knowing a new foundation had to be engineered. The Game by Neil Strauss gave me the idea change was needed. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey was what would serve as the new foundation. More to come on those next time.
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