THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

The world as it appears to us now is, as I said, largely a reflection of the egoic mind. As an unavoidable consequence of egoic delusion, it is a world dominated by fear. Just as the images in a dream are symbols of inner states and feelings, so our collective reality is largely a symbolic expression of fear and of the heavy layers of negativity that have accumulated in the collective human psyche.

We are not separate from our world so when the majority of humans become free of egoic delusion, this inner change will affect all of creation. You will literally inhabit a new world. It is a shift in planetary consciousness. The strange Buddhist saying that every tree and every blade of grass will eventually become enlightened points to the same truth.

According to St. Paul, the whole of creation is waiting for humans to become enlightened. That is how I interpret his saying that “the created universe is waiting with eager expectation for God’s sons to be revealed.” St. Paul goes on to say that all of creation will become redeemed through this: “Up to the present… the whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth.”

What is being born is a new consciousness and, as its inevitable re�ection, a new world. This is also foretold in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the €rst heaven and the €rst earth had passed away.”

But don’t confuse cause and effect. Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identi€cation with form. You are then no longer bound to this world, this level of reality. You can feel your roots in the Unmanifested and so are free of attachment to the manifested world. You can still enjoy the passing pleasures of this world, but there is no fear of loss anymore, so you don’t need to cling to them. Although you can enjoy sensory pleasures, the craving for sensory experience is gone, as is the constant search for ful€llment through psychological grati€cation, through feeding the ego. You are in touch with something in€nitely greater than any pleasure, greater than any manifested thing.

In a way, you then don’t need the world anymore. You don’t even need it to be different from the way it is.

It is only at this point that you begin to make a real contribution toward bringing about a better world, toward creating a different order of reality. It is only at this point that you are able to feel true compassion and to help others at the level of cause. Only those who have transcended the world can bring about a better world.

You may remember that we talked about the dual nature of true compassion, which is awareness of a common bond of shared mortality and immortality. At this deep level, compassion becomes healing in the widest sense. In that state, your healing in�uence is primarily based not on doing but on being. Everybody you come in contact with will be touched by your presence and affected by the peace that you emanate, whether they are conscious of it or not.

When you are fully present and people around you manifest unconscious behaviour, you won’t feel the need to react to it, so you don’t give it any reality. Your peace is so vast and deep that anything that is not peace disappears into it as if it had never existed. This breaks the karmic cycle of action and reaction. Animals, trees and �owers will feel your peace and respond to it. You teach through being, through demonstrating the peace of God. You become the “light of the world,” an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate unconsciousness from the world.

Adapted from The Power of Now, copyright 1999 by Eckhart Tolle. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 800-972-6657 (ext. 52). Visit www.eckharttolle.com.