A New Earth: Create a Better Life

For Tolle, words represent man’s attempt to control and limit what is “ultimately unknowable,” and their predominance in our world speaks to the human intolerance of uncertainty (25). Most humans are uncomfortable with the fact that objects in the world have “unfathomable depth” that we cannot see due to our ability to perceive only the “surface layer of reality” (25). Whereas words separate, by identifying one object apart from all the others, the truth of existence is that “everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came” (25-26). Tolle illustrates the arbitrary, approximating quality of language, by exposing that it consists of the “basic sounds” that human vocal cords are capable of (27). He then puts a rhetorical question to the reader, challenging them to think about whether “some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe” (27). Here, the reader has space to redress their estimation of words and their power.

Tolle’s desire to disrupt the centrality of words extends to the structure of his book, which begins with a meditation on a silent object, a flower.