I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Not all unhappiness is of the pain­-body. Some of it is new unhappiness, created whenever you are out of alignment with the present moment, when the Now is denied in one way or another. When you recognize that the present moment is always already the case and therefore inevitable, you can bring an uncompromising inner ‘yes’ to it and so not only create no further unhappiness, but, with inner resistance gone, find yourself empowered by Life itself.” Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet. What pollution is on the outer level is negativity on the inner. It is everywhere, not just in places where people don’t have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.“

Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed form its imprisonment in form.” How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which he game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.” If the egoic earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-­created, is in the end also ego­-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up.” A wake-up call for the entire planet . . . [ A New Earth] helps us to stopcreating our own suffering and obsessing over the past and what the future might be, and to put ourselves in the now.”—Oprah Winfrey I think this book should be required reading for everyone; the problem is, many people will read this book and see others in it, but not themselves. Today, more than ever, we are plagued by a culture where everyone is obsessed with being "right" and in the processing making everybody else "wrong." The level of hate that has become epidemic in modern society, particularly in politics, is a clear result of out-of-control egos clashing to reign supreme in self-righteous glory.

When you contemplate the unfathomable depth of space or listen to the silence in the early hours just before sunrise, something within you resonates with it as if in recognition. You then sense the vast depth of space as your own depth, and you know that precious stillness that has no form to be more deeply who you are than any of the things that make up the content of your life.”

The recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it ‘eternal life.'” Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?” Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness” In Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion. It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.” Okay so I had high expectations for this book. Normally I don't really go for Oprah selections but I heard so many great things about it plus I am totally into new agey type things, I thought it would be right up my alley.Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an indivisible whole in which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in isolation.“

It has been said ‘God is love’ but that is not absolutely correct. God is the One Life in and beyond the countless forms of life. Love implies duality: lover and beloved, subject and object. So love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.” Ten years ago, A New Earth was first published. Since that time, the book has been read in forty-four languages by countless people all over the world. The in-depth webinar I did with Oprah Winfrey, during which we explored the main themes of the book, has been watched thirty-five million time. So the question naturally arises: Ten years later —where are we? Is a “new earth” arising, a world where the egoic state of consciousness in its insanely dysfunctional manifestations, both individual and collective, has dissolved or at least subsided, and where humans no longer create unnecessary suffering for themselves, one another, as well as other life-forms on the planet? Or does a fundamental change in human consciousness remain an unrealistic utopian vision, as one reviewer of the book suggested? The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a relatively shallow and short-­lived one. Concealed within it remains a deep-­seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of ‘not enough.’ ‘I don’t have enough yet,’ by which the ego really means, ‘I am not enough yet.’“ a b c Whetsell, Martha V. (March 22, 2008). "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.(Book review)" (PDF). Journal of the New York State Nurses Association. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 27, 2010 . Retrieved August 4, 2013. When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed. The balance between enjoyment and structural tension is lost, and the latter has won. When there is stress, it is usually a sign that the ego has returned, and you are cutting yourself off form the creative power of the universe.”

If one wants more than a self help book, tired of Zen lyrics that seem to dissipate after reading them and wants a breath of fresh air to challenge your cynicism in the current state of humanity this book will satisfy. This book is soul food.