The pace of life is forever speeding up. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries. Calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. In almost every area of life, change is occurring faster and faster.

Yet, this acceleration is not confined to modern times. Medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times. Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years.

Some politicians love to say that this is the information age. They believe that processing information in such large scale as we are capable of today is the ultimate in our achievement and, therefore, the information age is the golden age of our civilization. This is a very narrow view of the human potential.

What is information?
If you don’t have any information about the answers to a problem, then all answers are equally probable, a not-sodesirable situation. With information, the probability of particular answers grow, and your chance of the getting the appropriate answer improves. So information is certainly useful. But information does not make you happy. Sure it can be exciting to use the e-mail to communicate extensively around the world and gather a large amount of information in a short time. And that may help to keep our worrying mind at bay. It is also an occasionally effective medicine against boredom to go surfing on the internet for information that may come in handy later.

In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo’s crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

In his insightful look into humanity’s ego-based thinking, Eckhart Tolle provides practical teachings for waking up to a new, enlightened mind-set. If you’re seeking a more loving self and a more loving planet, A New Earth has the tools to begin your transformation.

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?