I finished reading A New Earth by Echart Tolle last week. Though I’ve been thinking a lot about this book, when I actually try to put it into words they fail. This, for the message of the book, is appropriate. I’m going to read the book again before I say any more about it. I have come to more fully understand things I already knew, some call this anamnesis or to remember was what forgotten.
Yesterday I found this book meme over at Querencia, and it seems an appropriate way to share a bit of Tolle’s words.
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
“Cooperation is alien to the ego, except where there is a secondary motive. The ego doesn’t know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or not help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe–in the form of people and circumstances–gives little or no help to you because you have cut your self off from the whole.” from A New Earth by Eckart Tolle
I don’t really like tagging folks, so if you’d like to participate please link to your answer in the comments. I’d love to see what random reading you divine.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Hi there! Ooh, I love stuff like this.
Here’s mine, from Against Depression by Peter Kramer (highly recommended):
“As in the Renaissance model, in our contemporary myth anatomy and physiology reflect — poetically — the symptoms and traits that characterize depression. Hypersensitivity to adversity, vulnerability in the face of stress, withdrawal of intimate connections, premature aging, sluggishness in recovery, deteriorating course, chronicity of impairment, failed resilience — these phrases might apply equally to depressives and their neurons. The beauty, the poetry, does not mask a horrifying quality to the findings — a demonstration in the body of the fragility, ’stuckness,’ and lack of reserve that blight the lives of the depressed.”