A New Earth

Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary spiritual teacher who travels around the globe sharing his insights. I actually purchased this book on Overstock.com a few months ago only to have Oprah put her big stamp of approval on it a week or two later! (I have a love/hate relationship with Oprah's power!) Oprah is now hosting a podcast class on this book. I never got around to registering for it, but I see on the show that people are raving about it and claiming that they are experiencing several "A-HA moments" from this book/class.

I have a never ending stack of books waiting for me to read and this one was one of them. So just this morning, I opened it up and started to read. I want an "A-HA moment" too! As I get older I find that I am more open to experiences that I think might offer clarity and enrichment to my life. Anyway, I was only two pages in and I was already smiling:

Jesus tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live. The Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.