New Earth...Same Old Crap, Pt. 6

Well, I finally finished A New Earth last night. This will be my last post on it. This picture is of my copy of the book. As you can see, I put my highlighter/flag pen to work on it. I flagged about 30-40 pages of clearly heretical teaching, but I could have flagged much more.

The last thing I want to touch on is Tolle's teaching about what he calls the "pain-body".

• The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. ... This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body. -pg. 142
• Why is the suffering body of Christ, his face distorted in agony and his body bleeding from countless wounds, such a significant image in the collective consciousness of humanity? Millions of people, particularly in medieval times, would not have related to it as deeply as they did if something within themselves had not resonated with it, if they had not unconsciously recognized it as an outer representation of their own reality - the pain-body. They were not yet conscious enough to recognize it directly within themselves, but it was the beginning of their becoming aware of it. Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence. -pg. 144
• It has been said that "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. -pg. 106

Here Tolle reduces the crucifixion to a symbol of the hurt in all of us. This is not the reason millions of people over the last 2,000 years have identified with the crucifixion. They identify with it because the Holy Spirit cries out to their spirit that the crucifixion is the only hope for mankind. Jesus death on the cross is the purest act of love the world has ever seen. To say that God is not love is to completely and totally misunderstand the truth of the Scriptures. In fact, to take portions of the gospel message and claim it as wise teaching (as Tolle does repeatedly), but discard the rest as false, is lunacy. The Bible is either God's revelation to man and His blueprint for restoring man to God, or it's the insane rantings of very misguided men. You can't have it both ways.

Tolle writes that the name of the book, A New Earth, is from the Bible's teaching about a new heaven and a new earth. In his mind the "new earth" is humanity becoming Present, Conscious, and ridding themselves of ego. This is his predicted next phase of human evolution. He closes the book with this sentence:

• A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it! -pg. 309

There will be a new heaven and earth someday, but not the one Tolle speaks of. It will be one ruled by Jesus, our risen Savior. A world free of sin and death, a world restored to God's original design. A world where God will give us new bodies and all things will be set right. This world will be brought about by God alone - not by anything we do. Pure and simple, Tolle teaches a works salvation and a false God.