How You Can Start Living With Your Soul

“A New Earth” is a spiritual book written by one of the best modern philosophers Eckhart Tolle. This book explores some of the deep insights into human life. The author of this book argues that we human beings make our life difficult, painful, stressful, chaotic and even impossible without knowing why we behave in such a manner. Here Eckhart Tolle expresses his deep insights that every single person can, or society as a whole, create inner chaos of the mind and human reality. Religions and spiritual teachings have not been enough to rampant human behaviour, not because they can not control human being frenzy but because very few have a profound realization about spirituality.

Eckhart Tolle identifies our lack of spiritual understanding as the root of most of our stress, pain, and frantic human activities such as raging war, rape, and violence. At the same time, it is the root of being unhappy, unsatisfied, living with stress, anger and all these emotional turbulences.

In Hinduism, there is a word called ‘Mana’. There is a similar equivalent word in Buddhism called ‘Dukkha’ which means to be in an unsatisfactory state whatever you do.

In Christianity, the word ‘sin’ is often misunderstood. It’s real meaning is missing the mark and missing the impact of what?

Here it means missing the point of living skillfully.

Religion could pacify human life, but its spiritual teachings have consistently been misrepresented; therefore, very few can grasp it. At the same time, being religious does not necessarily mean being spiritual.

In the process of living, Tolle first tells us to recognize our minds. If you stop doing activities and silently observe the reason, you will find an extra layer beneath. A part of you can not stand still there. It reacts to everything, tries to explain what it sees in front of it, it acts emotionally. When you try to calm yourself down, it certainly does not want to be stopped. It seems like your mind does not want to be calmed down. It needs relentless chattering, exhausting energy. But you do not drag all these thoughts. They come and go like the flow of a river.

Your spiritual begins when you recognize that you are not your mind. The mind creates a story; stick to it. It drags attention to the past and future. It behaves in its way incessantly.

There is a relation between emotion and body. Emotion is the reaction of thoughts you pay attention to. The body creates the sensation of emotions create.

Tolle explains the role of the ego. Ego is the identification of things with ‘I’. When you identify your wealth, career, religion, and nationality with yourself, a new layer is added. You start to think I am an American, a doctor, a rich person, etc.

The problem with this type of thinking is that you start to define yourself as something you are not. Your job, beliefs, and nationality can describe your life, but they can not be you. So if you put away these layers, what is lefts behind?

Adding these layers is the ego itself. When you identify your ego as yourself, you attract more mental chaos and noise. You become aware of your career, religion, money, objects and all other kinds of stuff. You become protective and aggressive surrounding your ego. Your ego becomes ‘I’ to you, creating a false reality. You get angry if your career does not go well, and you become depressed because you lost something. You stay anxious all the time, thinking about the future and past failures.

So, you should not identify yourself with your ego. When you remove this layer, the door to connect yourself with your life remains. You start to see the world from your soul. You do not get stressed to maintain the pseudo ego. It does not necessarily mean you cannot build your career or keep your business and otherworldly stuff. The point is you can connect yourself with the universe and not with the self-inflicted ego.