When Eckhart Tolle appeared with Oprah in ten weekly online sessions that explored each of the chapters of A New Earth, one question came up again and again:

How does the teaching in A New Earth fit with the teachings of Jesus and my Christian faith?

Eckhart had thought about writing a book about Jesus. But when he read Your Forgotten Self shortly before it went to press and offered a couple of suggestions, he told David, “Maybe I don’t need to write a book about Jesus after all.”

People everywhere are saying this is the book they have been waiting for—the book that so fundamentally changes our understanding of Jesus that we see him as a symbol of our own deepest being.

At the dawn of the 21st century, we are realizing that Jesus speaks with a relevance that’s life-changing.

In Jesus we are learning from a Master how to truly be ourselves.

If you have difficulty staying present during your workday, Jesus shows exactly how a person can become so conscious that they no longer slip back into anxious thought.

If you find yourself in conflict with someone you care about, Jesus demonstrates how to stay out of the pitfall of emotional reactivity.

Although 2,000 years and a drastically different culture stand in our way of hearing many of Jesus’ teachings in the meaningful sense the people of his own time heard them, extensive research by historians, archaeologists, and linguists is helping us break through this barrier. As a result, we are now poised hear Jesus afresh.

For example in Jesus’ day people didn’t use expressions such as be yourself, true self versus false self, the egoic mind, the pain-body, consciousness, authenticity, present-moment awareness, or being in the "now."

But they had their own version of such terms, because consciousness isn't new to the planet. They spoke of walking in the light instead of in darkness, of being blind and having their eyes opened, and of being lost and found (just like we talk about finding our true self).

They didn’t talk about discovering our potential, journeying toward wholeness, pursuing our dreams, or following our bliss.

But their equivalents were expressions such as being born again, salvation, and seeing themselves as a whole new creation.

So many of Jesus’ statements, for instance about entering into eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, have been pushed back to an after-death experience, which isn’t what Jesus had in mind.

They are about the quality of life we lead each and every day right now. 

Eternal life is to live in the now moment, so fully present in whatever we are doing that we are unaware of the passage of time. It's as if time stands still. It's about the quality of our experience of this lifetime, not just quantity.

Heaven is something we can already experience right here, right now. As Jesus put it, we begin to live in a state of restful ease with a lightness we never imagined possible.

Most of us don’t experience the inner peace and sense of joy that Jesus did. Why? Because we think of Jesus as fundamentally different from ourselves.

We think there's something "wrong" with us that needs fixing, whereas Jesus recognized there's nothing wrong with us other than that we believe we are fundamentally flawed, then live out of this faulty notion instead of accepting that we are beings in progress of evolving into our potential.

To not believe in our essential goodness as those who derive our being from the divine Presence is humanity's original sin.

It's this self-doubt, lack of worth, and even self-hatred that we begin picking up from the world around us the moment we are conceived that's the cause of all our dysfunction. This is why we "miss the mark," like an archer missing the bull's eye, which is the original meaning of that horribly distorted word "sin."

As long as we don’t recognize that Jesus is a reflection of our own wonderful essence, we won’t enjoy the tremendous sense of Presence he exuded.

We’ll always be searching for something, seeking outside of ourselves for an elusive fulfillment that can only come from within.

We even proudly create an identity for ourselves of "seekers," whereas Jesus said that if we truly seek, we find. We don't spend a lifetime seeking.

We enter into all the bliss of a heavenly life now, a life in which we never feel needy again (never "thirst" again, to use Jesus' expression).

In the view of Jesus’ early followers, we have no hope of enjoying the fulfilling life Jesus lived as long as we regard him as essentially different from us. To Peter, John, Mary, and Paul, Jesus was the embodiment of our true nature—a reflection of who we really are until the process of growing up shuts us down to this awareness.

To become a believer is to see yourself mirrored in Jesus. To have faith is to understand yourself as Jesus understood himself.

When this happens, the power of the Christ consciousness floods our everyday life. We begin to live as Jesus in the present moment.