Critical Thinking English- A New Earth Chapters One to Ten - Essay Example

These emotions are therefore borne out of our reaction to things, and thus, these emotions can be evil. Nevertheless, from Tolle’s book and from this class, one learns that nonreaction is the more spiritual way and that it can be learned only through the view that change is inevitable. From Chapter 3, I particularly like: “Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through…the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence” (Tolle 41).

Oftentimes, when I react to my boyfriend’s comments or to how he behaves, I would normally react with tantrums. However, after that, I somehow realize that I have acted in a stupid way or that something was not right and that no matter how valid the emotion was, it did not seem to be helping the relationship. Afterwards, I would also feel selfish and thus apologize to my boyfriend for my reaction no matter how much I did not want to apologize. Before I became a part of this class and before I read Tolle, I thought long and hard about how to appropriately react to the many different hurts that I expect I would get from my boyfriend or from the relationship itself.

Little did I know that the flaw was not in the method of reacting to the hurt or to the situation but it is in the whole concept of reaction itself. I believe people, especially I, would normally react to situations because they do not understand the spiritual principle about nonreaction. True strength, according to Tolle, is not reaction but nonreaction. Moreover, nonreaction happens in us when we see only the ego of another person and not his essence. When we begin to see the essence, we forgive almost automatically and we lose the natural tendency to react.

In my case, I particularly like the quote from Tolle not because I follow it but because this is something I still have to go through. Ever since we were young, we were always told to react, and everything that we have learned is based on the idea of human emotion – that certain things can trigger specific emotions in a human being. Somehow, this concept indirectly also teaches us that we are at the mercy of our emotions, and that we cannot do anything except react. Our society has also taught us to react to political matters as well as anything else that happens in the world of fashion, in the news, and even in science and technology, where our emotions do not actually matter or where our emotions would somehow make us feel justified, recognized and vindicated.

Our religions have also taught us the same feeling of being vindicated when we have proven others wrong and ourselves morally right and upright. This is true in my case. I feel the vindication whenever I shout at my boyfriend after he does something I did not particularly like. It is the time that I feel I am right, and I feel I am superior and lofty, and most of all – right. Nevertheless, as long as we rely on our emotions to vindicate us, we will forever react to things around us and we will forever be subject to sorrow and suffering.

The key therefore is change. If we are to experience strength from nonreaction, then we have to free ourselves from our emotions, and therefore we have to change. From Chapter 8, the line that appeals to me is: “Once you see and accept the transience of all things and the inevitability of change, you can enjoy the