Exerpt from A New Earth by
Eckhart Tolle, page 13 to 19
THE ARISING NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the same
common insight that our normal state of mind is marred by a
fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of
the human condition we may call it the bad news arise a second
insight: 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 sufferings.
Liberation and awakening are other terms used to
describe this transformation.
The greatest achievement of humanity is not the works of art,
science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction,
its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came
to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived
2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with
absolute clarity. Later, the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha
means the awakened one. At about the same time, another of
humanitys early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was
Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the
most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching.
To recognise ones own insanity is, of course, the arising of
sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension
of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first
tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their
contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They
said, Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you
create. They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the
collective nightmare of normal human existence. They showed the
way.
The world was not yet ready for them, and yet they were a vital and
necessary part of human awakening. Inevitably they were mostly
misunderstood by their contemporaries as well as by subsequent
generations. Their teachings, though both simple and powerful,
became distorted and misinterpreted, in some cases even as they
were recorded in writing by their disciples. Over the centuries,
many things were added that had nothing to do with the original
teachings, but were reflections of a fundamental misunderstanding.
Some of the teachers were ridiculed, reviled, or killed; others
came to be worshiped as gods. Teachings that pointed the way beyond
the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the collective
insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the
insanity.
And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than
unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an end of violence and
hatred through a realisation of the fundamental oneness of all
life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between
people as well as between different religions and even within the
same religion. They became ideologies; belief systems people could
identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self.
Through them, they could make themselves right and others wrong
and thus define their identity through their enemies, the others,
the nonbelievers or wrong believers who not infrequently they
saw themselves justified in killing. Man made God in his own
image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a
mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as my god or
our god.
And yet
. And yet
in spite of all the insane deeds perpetrated in
the name of religion, the Truth to which they point still shines at
their core. It still shines, however dimly, through layers upon
layers of distortion and misinterpretation. It is unlikely;
however, that you will be able to perceive it there unless you have
at least already had glimpses of that Truth within yourself.
Throughout history, there have always been rare individuals who
experienced a shift in consciousness and so realised within
themselves that toward which all religions point. To describe that
nonconceptual Truth, they then used the conceptual framework of
their own religions.
Through some of those men and women, schools or movements
developed within all major religions that represented not only a
rediscovery, but in some cases an intensification of the light of
the original teaching. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism came
into existence in early and medieval Christianity, Sufism in the
Islamic religion, Hasidism and Kabala in Judaism, Advaita Vedanta
in Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. Most of these schools
were iconoclastic. They did away with layers upon layers of
deadening conceptualisation and mental belief structures, and for
this reason most of them were viewed with suspicion and often
hostility by the established religious hierarchies. Unlike
mainstream religion, their teachings emphasised realisation and
inner transformation. It is through these esoteric schools or
movements that the major religions regained the transformative
power of the original teachings, although in most cases, only a
small minority of people had access to them. Their numbers were
never large enough to have any significant impact on the deep
collective unconsciousness of the majority. Over time, some of
those schools themselves became too rigidly formal or
conceptualised to remain effective.
