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Among the many antidotes to sinful behavior that Tolle describes in A New Earth, he writes, “You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge” (p 13, A New Earth). The book gives an entire method for doing this by recognizing and controlling false ego, but today I just want to comment on finding the goodness already within you.

I can be pretty hard on myself, and many of the people I like best are the same way. For the most part, I think we do this with the best intentions: modesty, high standards, a desire to excel.

But it’s also very important to appreciate the strengths good qualities we already display and those that are latent within us. My parents taught me that God finds all of us loveable.

I’ll remind you. God loves you. Happiness starts there.

Eckhart Tolle, the best-selling spiritual author of The Power of Now, has written a great new book called A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. A New Earth promotes a method to end personal suffering, find happiness, and help end suffering and conflict in the world.

Early in the book, Tolle gives a great description of the term “sin”:

Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and mistinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.

His book moves froward from this premise to describe ways to identify the point of human existence, to reduce suffering by overcoming misconceptions about the ego.

Cloud9000 intends to foster this approach to living, as well as any others that achieve the same thing.

Buy the book. It’s a great read.

OK, so I’m writing about Groundhog Day again. You must have seen it coming. One of the points that Christopher Lydon and his guests made on the show about the movie Groundhog Day is that repetition in our lives tends to deaden us, and we have two basic choices to fight it, one external and one internal.

The external solution to monotony in repetition is to seek out new experiences, to pursue adventure. The internal solution is to change one’s outlook so that the ordinary repetition can be experienced through new eyes. One external solution might be travel to some place you’ve never been. An internal solution might be meditation. They call meditation “practice,” and what you’re practicing on some level is how to get the moment right.

Some people are happy with their routine. Maybe they love to garden, to see what has sprung up that wasn’t there yesterday. I find my routine suffocating, but not so suffocating that I abandon it. This is the question I ask myself all the time, what would it take to leave my job, which I like and find challenging? It would take a completely different kind of experience, like giving seminars or researching organizational behavior in a business school.

But work for me is a practice. It would be great to keep going to work until I figured out how doing that could change the world or the people in it.

How much better can I be? Do you ask yourself that question? What answer do you give?

Michael and I talked yesterday about the importance of keeping promises, starting with promises you make to yourself. He takes these very seriously, and I had to admit that I have tended for years to disregard the promises to myself. Every time I do, it makes me feel rotten. Not only because I want to take myself seriously, but also because I don’t want to undermine my confidence that I will keep my promises to others.

Michael asked me to start with a promise to blog yesterday, and I’ve almost kept it by writing today. In fact, I plan to blog twice today, so that I really feel caught up.

I suppose the point of writing about this is to remind myself that the future, my future, is in my hands, and it begins with the next thing I think and do. How much more would I like where I’m headed if I’m the one who decides what to do and where to go? Writing, meditating, reading. All things I love to do. My promises will start with these.

Stay tuned.