How Does A New Earth Compare To The Power Of Now?

Reading 'A New Earth' after 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle is like entering into a more developed dialogue. 'The Power of Now' is a short but very intense and focused book on the subject of mindfulness. 'A New Earth' develops the views expressed in 'The Power of Now' and constitutes a more solidly structured and more developed housing for the view that Tolle expresses of the need for a new earth. The book has a less urgent but more complex style and while 'The Power of Now' simply told the reader to 'be here now' (which in itself is not easy to do) 'A New Earth' explores why it is that we are not able to do this. One of the chapters in particular was excellent – the chapter on the ego and war/Conflict. It provided a good amount of insight into why people behave the way they do and how this could be applied to arguments that occur on a very petty level.

I should note that while ‘The Power of Now’ is a short, intense work that can be read in a sprint of a few hours, ‘A New Earth’ is a marathon. There are many passages that require repeated perusing, not because they lack clarity, but because they outline out mental models for human behavior that I had not previously even entertained. And that is exactly the point of ‘A New Earth’ – that waking up is not a single event, but rather a long, unfolding process, and I return again and again to the clencher chapters of ‘The Power of Now’ for their instant centroing, while ‘A New Earth’ resides on my nightstand for longer, more chewy nights.

A few years ago, I lent a copy of The Power of Now to a friend in the midst of a work-induced breakdown. Her response? The Power of Now is a life jacket. Later, I lent her a copy of A New Earth, and she noted that this book was more like learning to swim. In other words, while The Power of Now pulls us out of the water in an instant, A New Earth teaches us how to float on our own even when the waters are rough. The voice of the book is, I think, gentler than that of The Power of Now.

I was even more surprised by how the book seemed to resonate with my love of stories and how “myths” as well as examples of how the ego functions in pop culture are so abundantly used to explain abstract concepts to bring home their relevance to one’s own life. While “The Power of Now” had affected how I “breathe”, “A New Earth” affected how I would argue, how I would parent, how I would “binge-watch” a TV series. The insights are not limited to bring about a sense of inner peace; they enable one to recognize the ego’s prints everywhere.

I read ‘The Power of Now’ during a time of great change in my life when I was going through a breakup. It was so direct and profound. ‘A New Earth’ on the other hand found me at a time in my life when I was battling with career envy. It was a very targeted intervention that really focused on ego and all of the different stories we tell ourselves, and how they are all just mental fabrications that we believe in order to make sense of our lives. It’s not about feeling urgent about something, it’s about gradually realising how we’ve been deceived by our illusions about life.

While The Power of Now can function as a flashlight in the dark, A New Earth functions as a blueprint to rewire your entire house to begin living instead of doing. It is much slower reading than The Power of Now (the coffee-table book of spiritual chance to the complex herbal tea of great depth) but far richer. As I’ve said before, my copy of A New Earth is dog-eared at almost every page with notes in the margins (not as pretentious as it sounds, most of the notes are simply “good.”).