More From A New Earth

More from Eckhart Tolle's book. These two paragraphs in particular resonate powerfully with me:

"So while you are perhaps still waiting for something significant to happen in your life, you may not realize that the most significant thing that an happen to a human being has already happened within you: the beginning of the separation process of thinking and awareness.

Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel they inhabit a no-man's-land between two worlds."

I usually highlight books that I read, and occasionally draw an asterisk next to the most salient points. However, every great once in a while I scribble a big "YES!" next to a particular passage that seems to shout with intensity what I have felt inside for so long. This section garnered such an affirmation.

Often I have felt as if I am living on the "Island of Misfit Toys" (see Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). I don't seem to ever want a lot of the stuff the culture wants, or get caught up in the same anxieties concerning what seem to be very trivial matters. I get frustrated by group think and pressure to conform, to out-spend. I question the ending value of naked ambition.

I see, like a key theme in a book I helped write called Wide Awake Leadership, that often we "live in a world thoroughly committed to our mediocrity." Tolle's description of living between such a mediocre world, and the emerging world of deeper awareness that I cannot always wrap my arms around, speaks quite profoundly to me.