I felt obliged to read A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle, mainly because everybody and their aunt is reading it since Oprah created an on-line course related to the book. I had the same sense a few pages into this book as I had after reading The Power of Now - that is, “I get it, already”. We are not the forms to which our egos become attached and committed. Even our thoughts are forms that the ego clings to, having forgotten our formless, Absolute origin - our face before we were born. And I get as well that I don’t really get it. I am not as joyful, enthusiastic, accepting of my life as I could be because I don’t live out of this witnessing consciousness. I’m working on it. And Eckhart Tolle does a great service to humankind in trying to help us to awaken to our Higher Self.

 

Here’s my small quibble. He starts the book with an evolutionary insight that at some point rocks take an evolutionary leap and become crystals, coal turns into diamonds, reptiles grow wings and become birds, and plants begin to flower. The crystal, the flower, and the bird have become symbols that have captivated the human psyche for millennia because they presage an evolutionary leap in the human realm - to an awakened state.  They have an archetypal power to awaken us to the next stage of our development - awakening to consciousness, the divine intelligence that is the source and substance of our own life.

 

But then the rest of the book shelves the evolutionary perspective. This is because, I presume, once we have arrived at “enlightenment” there’s no more work to do. That’s it. End of journey. Bliss, peace, contentment, prosperity and freedom. I have attended lectures by Mr. Tolle and various other enlightened souls, and not be unkind, but I usually come away asking myself “Is that all there is?” Is that what enlightenment looks and sounds like? I’m not all that interested.

 

A much more intellectually and spiritually satisfying framework, I believe, is one that recognizes the “witnessing consciousness” as a state of consciousness that is available and has been available to all human beings from the beginning of time, but that this state of consciousness occurs within actual stages or structures of consciousness - tribal, warrior, traditional, modern, postmodern, integral and mystical, to use Don Beck’s developmental model called Spiral Dynamics. It is Ken Wilber’s brilliance that helped me to distinguish between states and stages of consciousness.

 

The states of consciousness, roughly speaking, are waking, sleeping, dreaming, deep sleep, and non-dual or formless consciousness (this is the one Mr. Tolle correctly points out that has gone missing in the world). This state of consciousness will be interpreted and concretized within the worldview/value system/belief system/ and institutions of that particular worldview. In other words, a  tribal shaman in the Amazon and a physicist in New York will have the same state experience (pure consciousness witnessing whatever it is that they are doing), but interpret and apply it completely differently. A fundamentalist may have an experience of the witnessing consciousness and use it to validate his belief that Jesus’ blood shed on the cross saves us from eternal damnation. We may not assume, in other words, that enlightenment necessarily lifts us out of our stage of consciousness. To use Ken Wilber’s phrase “perspective replaces perception”. What’s missing in A New Earth is a vertical, developmental/evolutionary perspective.

 

What is lacking for me is a vertical perspective - we evolve through structures or stages of consciousness with each emerging stage permitting a wider and deeper perspective than the previous stage. There is not simply “state enlightenment.” There is also “stage” or evolutionary enlightenment. Both are necessary, but here’s the point: we will never arrive as fully enlightened beings in an evolutionary universe, that is in the realm of the manifest world.

 

This may perhaps explain why Mr. Tolle seems relatively disinterested in any details about an emerging future - surprising given the title. What does the New Earth look like politically, institutionally?  All of reality is collapsed into the realm of the subjective. If we could just become enlightened, everything else would take care of itself, seems to be the thinking. Yes, there is an eternal “now” , but once we’ve tasted it, it’s back into the buzz and conflict that is an inevitable part of the emergent earth. Conflict, struggle, thesis-antithesis-synthesis is actually how the new reality emerges. Peace is just one pole of this dynamic emerging future. We may engage in this dynamic from a more or less enlightened place, and if we have tasted of the eternal now, we will be more effective - no question. But it just doesn’t work for me to reify “peace”. It is one pole in the ongoing evolution of this one earth community.

 

To be enlightened in an evolutionary paradigm is to feel from within the non-coercive pull from an as-of-yet indeterminate future (agape) and to feel from within the gentle nudge of an actual force (evolutionary eros) pushing on onwards. It is it know oneself to be a center of this evolutionary creative pressure, to become a center of creative emergence. We aren’t naive about the challenges and the roadblocks implicit in the human condition, but there is a genuine excitement about what is on the horizon. As we open ourselves to this power, we feel not merely bliss, and not simply “presence” - as important as these are - but the power of a 13.7 billion year universe manifesting in the realm of nature, self, and culture. This surging power transcends the ego, actually inviting us to surrender the ego in service to its unfolding. All of this is Spirit - the eternal, formless Spirit, and the surging, creative power of an emergent future.

 

I do think that Eckhart Tolle is in service of a new earth, and have benefited from his teaching of his form of enlightenment. But it is a partial enlightenment. I look for him to take his evolutionary intuition with which he begins the book and expand upon it.