Forgiveness, Wholeness and A New Earth

Just about everyone I know is abuzz about the Eckhart Tolle book, A New Earth.  Apparently, he has teamed up with Oprah, and they’re doing a book study project.  Even though I don’t watch her show or subscribe to her website, I appreciate Oprah’s overall work.  And I’m excited that Tolle is able to partner with her to reach a larger bandwidth. 

Tolle’s first book, The Power of Now and then A New Earth both affected me deeply.  What he says is nothing really new, of course, but his direct style, which cuts through the clutter to state truth and wisdom with amazing clarity, really has resonated with me for the past five years since I’ve become acquainted with his work.  Since it’s become so popular recently, I’ve been planning to say something about how A New Earth influenced me, but back in 2005, when I read it, there was so much profoundness, I haven’t known where to start.

Then this last week, a friend and I were talking about how she has let go of a painful past experience with someone she knows professionally.  She decided how she might tell a new story about it if she is ever asked.  We talked about forgiveness and what that means to us.  I told her that to me forgiveness means personal healing – that by forgiving you don’t necessarily have to condone the behavior of the person who wronged you, but that in forgiving you restore your own wholeness.  Then I remembered a quote from M. Scott Peck that explains this so very well, “The reason to forgive is for our own sake.  For our own health.  Because beyond that point needed for healing, if we hold onto our anger we stop growing and our souls begin to shrivel”.

But then I remembered that in 2005, I’d journaled some thoughts about forgiveness when I read A New Earth, and suddenly, I knew what I wanted to say here today.  Below is an entry that I’d like to share.  Thank you to the angels that inspired my memory to find this!

December 21, 2005 Wednesday
Contemplating forgiveness:  Tolle says something in his new book, A New Earth, which resonates:  “At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people… somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconscious that is ego.”  Nonreaction, he goes on to say, is forgiveness, and “To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through… You look through he ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.”

Then he speaks of resentments and grievances:  “A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story… of ‘what someone did to me’ or ‘what someone did to us’… One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego… Don’t try to let go of the grievance.  Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work.  Forgiveness happens naturally when you see it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.  The seeing is freeing.”

And he adds:  “The past has no power to stop you from being present now.  Only your grievance about the past can do that.  An what is a grievance?  The baggage of old thought and emotion.”