Oprah Winfrey selected Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose as the latest pick for her book club, making it the first title ever to be featured twice.
Tolle’s book, published in 2005 by Dutton, is a spiritual guide that urges people to live in the present and transcend their egos. Winfrey is a longtime fan of the self-help author and picked A New Earth for her book club in 2008, partnering with Tolle on several webinars based on the book.
Winfrey announced the book’s selection on CBS Mornings, explaining why she decided to pick the book for a second time.
“I think it will be relevant forever because, as we live in a world where there is consistent chaos, it’s more important than ever before to find your own inner peace and to be aware of your own contribution to what makes peace in the world,” she said. “And you can only do that through truly understanding yourself—versus your ego—and not acting out of your ego.”
On the show, Tolle said that his book was inspired after he struggled with suicidal depression in his 20s.
“I discovered there’s the self, which is the ego, conditioned by the past, with many dysfunctions, making me unhappy,” he said. “But there was a different identity…that’s consciousness itself, and when you step back from your ego, which is identification with thinking, you realize that you are not your thoughts, that there’s a deeper dimension in you.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
