A New Earth: Ch. 1 Quotes

FYI: Oprah is doing a 10 week bookclub online discussion about it, starting March 3rd.

Chapter 1. The Flowering of Human Consciousness

We have been preparing the ground for a more profound shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take place in the human species.

The messengers–Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known–were humanity’s early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings.

To sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to life unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.

The human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very intelligence is tainted by madness. Science and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other life-forms, and upon humans themselves.

By the end of the century, the number of people who died a violent death at the hand of their fellow humans would rise to more than one hundred million.

Driven by green, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction.

If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived “enemies”–his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.

The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideals, clearly illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality–create a new earth–without any prior change in their inner reality, their state of consciousness.

Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight–that our “normal” state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect.

The good news of the possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to describe this transformation.

Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival–this is humanity’s challenge now.

A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.

Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality–and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality–this is also its definition: complete identification with form–physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every “other” as well as with the Source.

The inspiration for the title of this book came froma Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occus in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of “a new heaven and a new earth.” We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is its meaning in the teachings of Jesus.

“A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm.