You have a name, a past, a life situation, a future. But in one essential respect, you are not the same person you were before ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
fear, greed, and the desire for power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of, but are themselves created by the dysfunction, which is a deep-seated collective delusion that lies within the mind of each human being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All artists, whether they know it or not create from a place of inner stillness, a place of no mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When life becomes too complicated and we feel overwhelmed, it's often useful just to stand back and remind ourselves of our overall purpose, our overall goal. When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon, or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and then reset our priorities on the basis of that. This can put our life back in proper context, allow a fresh perspective, and enable us to see which direction to take.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death [of the ego].
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
we've come to understand sin as a kind of moral failing, but that interpretation actually comes from the power structures of the church and religious authorities. If you can convince somebody that they are inherently impure and that there is a mistake at the center of their being, then sin becomes a wrongdoing that deserves blame.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
This collective dysfunction has created a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has become a threat not only to itself but also to all life on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It's important that meditation is not seen as something that only happens when you are seated in a quiet place. Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That's the primary illusion—that there is something called "my spiritual life," and something called "my daily life." When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It's all one seamless expression of spirit.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
You might say, "I know I am an immortal spirit," or "I am tired of this mad world, and peace is all I want"—until the phone rings. Bad news: The stock market has collapsed; the deal may fall through; the car has been stolen; your mother-in-law has arrived; the trip is cancelled, the contract has been broken; your partner has left you; they demand more money; they say it's your fault. Suddenly there is a surge of anger, of anxiety. A harshness comes into your voice; "I can't take any more of this." You accuse and blame, attack, defend, or justify yourself, and it's all happening on autopilot. Something is obviously much more important to you now than the inner peace that a moment ago you said was all you wanted, and you're not an immortal spirit anymore either. The deal, the money, the contract, the loss or threat of loss are more important. To whom? To the immortal spirit that you said you are? No, to me. The small me that seeks security or fulfillment in things that are transient and gets anxious or angry because it fails to find it. Well, at least now you know who you really think you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity. Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Often, if we are not careful, these ancient traditions and techniques—many of which I myself was taught, and which have great value—become an end instead of a means to an end. People end up with what is simply a discipline. They end up watching their breath for years and years and years, becoming perfect at watching their breath. But in the end spirituality is not about watching the breath. It's about waking up from the dream of separateness to the truth of unity. That's what it's about, and this can get forgotten if we adhere too closely to technique.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Who was responsible for this fear of the feminine that could only be described as acute collective paranoia? We could say: Of course, men were responsible. But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Celtic were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. It is that awareness that says "I AM ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the "madness" in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation. Every moment, hold the knowing of that moment, particularly of your inner state. If there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right, an inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain of any kind—whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing. The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice. If you observe unconscious behavior in your partner, hold it in the loving embrace of your knowing so that you won't react. Unconsciousness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Feel yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid "wall" inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't look for peace.Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being peace.The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.This is the miracle of surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot—even for a moment—free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Do you want an easy death? Would you rather die without pain, without agony? Then die to the past every moment, and let the light of your presence shine away the heavy, time-bound self you thought of as "you".
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego is always on guard against any kind of perceived diminishment. Automatic ego-repair mechanisms come into effect to restore the mental form of "me." When someone blames or criticizes me, that to the ego is a diminishment of self, and it will immediately attempt to repair its diminished sense of self through self-justification, defense, or blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one's self through "more than" and diminishment through "less than" is neither right nor wrong—it is the ego. The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Are you defending your right to be unconscious, your right to suffer? Don't worry. Nobody is going to take that away from you. Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So if you inhabit the inner body, the outer body will grow old at a much slower rate, and even when it does, your timeless essence will shine through the outer form, and you will not give the appearance of an old person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
when Legion says, "for we are many," what are the many? Our modern interpretation would be that Legion has a completely fractured psyche. When the psyche fractures, it's like a pane of glass dropped on the ground; it shatters into many bits and pieces. Someone to whom this has happened is literally lost in the unconscious; that becomes their reality.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
With a true and authentic awakening, who and what we are becomes clear. There's no longer a question about it; it is a done deal. In this way, one of the hallmarks of a true awakening is the end of seeking. You no longer feel the momentum, the push and the pull. The seeker has been revealed as the virtual reality it always was, and as such it disappears. The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"This is beautifully expressed in the Zen saying "The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I can see the truth of what you are saying, but I still think that we must have purpose on our life's journey; otherwise we just drift, and purpose means future, doesn't it? How do we reconcile that with living in the present? When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don't forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is. Your life's journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey's inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In general, if we carefully examine any given situation in a very unbiased and honest way, we will realize that to a large extent we are also responsible for the unfolding of events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is—no matter what form it takes—you are still, you are at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you feel the pain-body, don't fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into the problem -- the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The great secret that lies at the heart of all the main religious and spiritual traditions is the understanding that the peace and happiness for which all people long can never be delivered via objective experience. It can only be found in our self, in the depths of our being.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Who am I? Meditate on that. Seek the Seeker.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
So break the old pattern of present-moment denial and present-moment resistance. Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Both these people illustrate the essential point that happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The energy form that lies behind hostility and attack finds the presence of love absolutely intolerable. If ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example, when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself—do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner speciousness that feels intensely alive. You haven't been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute non-reaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image. Through becoming less (in the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." [Gospel of Thomas 70] ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet. What pollution is on the outer level is negativity on the inner. It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, "Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create." They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of "normal" human existence. They showed the way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever I associate with someone, may I think myself the lowest among all and hold the other supreme in the depth of my heart! ... When Isee beings of wicked nature, pressed by violent sin and affliction, may I hold these rare ones dear as if I had found a precious treasure! ... When others, out of envy, treat me badly with abuse, slander and the like, may I suffer the defeat and offer the victory to others! ... When the one, whom I have benefited with great hope, hurts me very badly, may I behold him as my supreme Guru! In short may I, directly and indirectly, offer benefit and happiness to all beings; may I secretly take upon myself the harm and suffering of all beings! ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Accept your parents' behavior with compassion, without needing to react to it, that is to say, without personalizing it. Be aware also of your own unconscious assumptions or expectations that lie behind your old, habitual reactions to them. 'My parents should approve of what I do. They should understand me and accept me for who I am.' Really? Why should they? The fact is they don't because they can't. Their evolving consciousness hasn't made the quantum leap to the level of awareness yet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event—through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you—ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The word parable comes from a Greek word meaning "comparison or analogy" and is essentially a very brief story that conveys a spiritual truth. A parable is a bit like a riddle: it has a meaning you can't completely understand with the logical, conditioned mind. A parable is meant to present your mind with something that pushes you to go beyond your current level of understanding in order to comprehend it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
I don't know' is not confusion. Confusion is: 'I don't know, but I should know' or 'I don't know, but I need to know.' Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In the last chapter we discussed the importance of accepting suffering as a natural fact of human existence. While some kinds of suffering are inevitable, other kinds are self-created. We explored, for instance, how the refusal to accept suffering as a natural part of life can lead to viewing oneself as a perpetual victim and blaming others for our problems—a sure-fire recipe for a miserable life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Should a situation arise that you need to deal with now, your action will be clear and incisive if it arises out of present-moment awareness. It is also more likely to be effective. It will not be a reaction coming from the past conditioning of your mind but an intuitive response to the situation. In other instances, when the time-bound mind would have reacted, you will find it more effective to do nothing—just stay centered in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"the present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not "this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Built into the very structure of the egoic self is a need to oppose, resist, and exclude to maintain the sense of separateness on which its continued survival depends. So there is "me" against the "other," "us" against "them." The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone. That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long. You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness. Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
someone else is because it is easier to see the faults of others than to see your own faults. So, using your imagination, do this meditation and visualization for a few minutes.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize "At this moment I am creating suffering for myself" it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Those who are free don't want anything. They don't want anything from their mind, they don't want anything from their emotions, they don't want anything from anyone, and they don't want anything from life. They don't want anything. If you don't want, all that's left is an incredible sense of being free.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self—because it never existed in the first place.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
We should come to know that there is more Reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about Reality.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
What did Jesus tell his disciples? "Heaven is right here in the midst of you."6 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, (and if you are reading this, you almost certainly have), you are able to decide what kind of a relationship you want to have with the present moment. Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you see the dysfunction, it begins to dissolve. Some people laugh out loud when they see this. With ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your primary purpose is now to enable consciousness to flow into what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is most people's reality: As soon as something is perceived, it is named, interpreted, compared with something else, liked, disliked, or called good or bad by the phantom self, the ego. They are imprisoned in thought forms, in object consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whether we have happiness or not depends on the seeds in our consciousness. If our seeds of compassion, understanding, and love are strong, those qualities will be able to manifest in us. If the seeds of anger, hostility and sadness in us are strong, then we will experience much suffering. To understand someone, we have to be aware of the quality of the seeds in his consciousness. And we need to remember that his is not solely responsible for those seeds. His ancestors, parents, and society are co-responsible for the quality of the seeds in his consciousness. When we understand this, we are able to feel compassion for that person. With understanding and love, we will know how to water our own beautiful seeds and those of others, and we will recognize seeds of suffering and find ways to transform them.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them—while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No thought can encapsulate the vastness of the totality. Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments. This gives rise to fundamental misperceptions, for example, that there are separate things and events, or that this is the cause of that. Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by its very nature, implies limitation, which ultimately means that it is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought. Seen from beyond the limitation of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And what is it that experiences our self? Only our self! There is only one substance in experience and it is pervaded by and made out of knowing or awareness. In the classical language of non-duality this is sometimes expressed in phrases such as, 'Awareness only knows itself', but this may seem abstract. It is simply an attempt to describe the seamless intimacy of experience in which there is no room for a self, object, other or world; no room to step back from experience and find it happy or unhappy, right or wrong, good or bad; no time in which to step out of the now into an imaginary past or into a future in which we may become, evolve or progress; no possibility of stepping out of the intimacy of love into relationship with an other; no possibility of knowing anything other than knowing, of being anything other than being, of loving anything other than loving; no possibility of a thought arising which would attempt to frame the intimacy of experience in the abstract forms of the mind; no possibility for our self to become a self, a fragment, a part; no possibility for the world to jump outside and for the self to contract inside; no possibility for time, distance or space to appear.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Die to the past every moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into effect between two human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
hatred can be the greatest stumbling block to the development of compassion and happiness. If you can learn to develop patience and tolerance towards your enemies, then everything else becomes much easier—your compassion towards all others begins to flow naturally.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
"The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: "The Sufi is the son of time present." And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it—don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identification with form. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence—your deeper self—behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says "I am." If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love—even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
we now confuse these new states of mind for enlightenment.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life—as opposed to imaginary mind projections—is this moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future—nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"St. Paul expressed this universal principle beautifully: "Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
H.L. Mencken's definition of a wealthy man: one whose income is $100 a year higher than his wife's sister's husband.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering—and free of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Do not seek after what you yearn for; seek the source of the yearning itself.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Our true self is known in a more intimate and direct way, simply through being. In fact, we discover that the only way to know our self is to be our self and not to mistake our self for any kind of an object.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
You are here to enable the divinepurpose of the universe to unfold.That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Next time you say "I have nothing incommon with this person," remember that you have a great deal in common: A few yearsfrom now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you willhave become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering andhumbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and everyother creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear. If you take any action—leaving or changing your situation—drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case, you are free. Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is as it is. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Surrender comes when you no longer ask, "Why is this happening to me? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection. We spoke about this earlier.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is required is the willingness to let life impact you; to let yourself see when life impacts you; to see if you go into any sort of separation about it, if you go into judgment, if you go into blame, if you go into "should" or "shouldn't," if you start to point the finger somewhere other than at yourself.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there is: this one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The term ego—or ego-self—is frequently used to describe the self-centered, fabricated outer layer of self, and we often speak of letting go of the ego, or dissolving it, or transcending it. I myself had thought of adding wood to the fire as an ego-suicide mission. However, the common usage of ego, both within Buddhist teachings and in the world at large, makes ego sound like an entity that has a shape and a size, and that can be extracted like a tooth. It doesn't work that way.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems. Although it is a simple choice, it is also very radical. You won't make that choice unless you are truly fed up with suffering, unless you have truly had enough. And you won't be able to go through with it unless you access the power of the Now. If you create no more pain for yourself, then you create no more pain for others. You also no longer contaminate the beautiful Earth, your inner space, and the collective human psyche with the negativity of problem-making.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it's about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't ask your mind for permission to enjoy what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There's only one guarantee that Jesus gave: if you can receive and awaken and embody what he is speaking about, then your life will never be the same again. Then you will realize that you're already living in the Kingdom of Heaven.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms and circumstances, but you won't be identified with them. You do not need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life—only your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born. Likewise, in order to claim legitimately that awareness dies, something would have to be present to experience its disappearance. Have we ever experienced the disappearance of awareness? If we think the answer is, 'Yes', then what is it that is present and aware to experience the apparent disappearance of awareness? Whatever that is must be aware and present. It must be awareness. When we are born or when we wake in the morning, we have the experience of the appearance of objects. When we die and when we fall asleep at night, we have the experience of the disappearance of objects. However, we have no experience that we, awareness, appear, are born, disappear or die. That ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
But in the Gospel of Thomas, the whole point of Jesus' teaching is to discover your true identity, to realize who and what you really and truly are here and now.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
dissolving quality rather than their ability to formulate something ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
"Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. "I don't know," I said. "They all look so interesting. But I do know this," I added. "Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you can't stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken. So the pain-body too has its necessary place in the larger picture.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Our duck's lesson is this: Flap your wings—which translates as "let go of the story"—and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When I don't mind what happens, what does that imply? It implies that internally I am in alignment with what happens. "What happens," of course, refers to the suchness of this moment, which always already is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We are also learning that action, although necessary, is only a secondary factor in manifesting our external reality. The primary factor in creation is consciousness. No matter how active we are, how much effort we make, our state of consciousness creates our world, and if there is no change on that inner level, no amount of action will make any difference. We would only re-create modified versions of the same world again and again, a world that is an external reflection of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are in touch with something infinitely greater than any pleasure, greater than any manifested thing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This absence of otherness, objectness, selfness is love itself. It is what we are and all we know.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
"The Gospel of Thomas presents the Kingdom of Heaven as something that exists right here and right now. In fact, it's all about what's right here and right now. In it, we find Jesus saying, "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identifiedwith your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you learn to be the witness of your thoughts and emotions, which is an essential part of being present, you may be surprised when you first become aware of the background "static" of ordinary unconsciousness and realize how rarely, if ever, you are truly at ease within yourself. On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental projection away from the Now. On the emotional level, there will be an undercurrent of unease, tension, boredom, or nervousness. Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual resistance mode.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Know Thyself. What those words imply is this: Before you ask any other question, first ask the most fundamental question of your life: Who am I? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it truly is, infinite.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all—from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with the mind gives it more energy; observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Suffering ensues when we allow awareness of objects to eclipse awareness of being. Happiness is revealed when we allow awareness of being to outshine awareness of objects.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Some women who are already conscious enough to have relinquished their victim identity on the personal level are still holding on to a collective victim identity: "what men did to women." They are right—and they are also wrong. They are right in as much as the collective female pain-body is in large part due to male violence inflicted on women and repression of the female principle throughout the planet over millennia. They are wrong if they derive a sense of self from this fact and thereby keep themselves imprisoned in a collective victim identity. If a woman is still holding on to anger, resentment, or condemnation, she is holding on to her pain-body. This may give her a comforting sense of identity, of solidarity with other women, but it is keeping her in bondage to the past and blocking full access to her essence and true power. If women exclude themselves from men, that fosters a sense of separation and therefore a strengthening of the ego. And the stronger the ego, the more distant you are from your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal, and it is insane. "Problem" means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
PART TWO FACING DEATH AND DYING The issue of facing death in a peaceful manner is a very difficult one. According to common sense, there seem to be two ways of dealing with the problem and the suffering. The first is simply to try to avoid the problem, to put it out of your mind, even though the reality of that problem is still there and it is not minimized. Another way of dealing with this issue is to look directly at the problem and analyse it, make it familiar to you and make it clear that it is a part of all our lives. Illness happens. It is not something exceptional; it is part of nature and a fact of life. Of course we have every right to avoid illness and pain, but in spite of that effort, when illness happens it is better to accept it. While you should make every effort to cure it as soon as possible, you should have no extra mental burden. As the great Indian scholar Shantideva has said: 'If there is a way to overcome the suffering, then there is no need to worry; if there is no way to overcome the suffering, then there is no use in worrying.' That kind of rational attitude is quite useful. Death is a part of all our lives. Whether we like it or not, it is bound to happen. Instead of avoiding thinking about it, it is better to understand its meaning. We all have the same body, the same human flesh, and therefore we will all die. There is a big difference, of course, between natural death and accidental death, but basically death will come sooner or later. If from the beginning your attitude is, 'Yes, death is part of our lives', then it may be easier to face.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity—which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore. What cannot be heard with the ear but that whereby the ear can hear: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore…. What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore.7 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness is inherently whole, complete and fulfilled in itself. Thus its nature is happiness itself--not a happiness that depends upon the condition of the mind, body or world, but a causeless joy that is prior to and independent of all states, circumstances, and conditions.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret ...
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Right here, I thought, right now, is where the suffering arises. Between the sound and the projection, between things as-they-are and things as-we-want-them-to-be. This is what the Buddha taught: To misperceive reality is to suffer.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
happiness is the nature of our being, and we share our being ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
happen, and it's not uncommon for them to happen for some people. What people usually see, if their experiences are real, is what needs to be seen, what needs to be freed. As one great Buddhist abbess said to me, "You usually don't have a past life that shows you what a sterling example of enlightenment you were, because enlightenment leaves no trace; it is like a fire that burns clean. There's no karmic imprint it leaves behind." She said if you have any past lives, you're probably going to see what a grade-A jackass you were—which I loved, and which has corresponded to my experience. I didn't necessarily always see what a grade-A jackass I was, although in some cases, I saw that I was a lot more than a grade-A jackass. Most of the past lives I saw were moments of confusion, moments of unresolved karmic conflict.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you'll never have your freedom.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one. Whereas some of them do remain trapped in their heavy pain-bodies, many others reach a point where they cannot live with their unhappiness any longer, and so their motivation to awaken becomes strong. ... Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
She believed I had 'done something' to her, but I had done nothing. Instead of asking what I had done to her, perhaps she should have asked what I had not done. I had not reacted, not confirmed the reality of her story, not fed her mind with more thought and her pain-body with more emotion. I had allowed her to experience whatever she was experiencing at that moment, and the power of allowing lies in noninterference, nondoing. Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Satisfaction through gratification will always be short-lived, therefore it will always be projected again.You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You "get" there by realizing you *are* there already.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of "what someone did to me" or "what someone did to us." A grievance ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The breath and the body are both sensations. One sensation does not appear in another sensation, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The ego doesn't know that mind and mental positions have nothing to do with who you are because the ego is the unobserved mind itself. In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What does that mean? Let ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
when the Indian sage Atmananda Krishna Menon was asked how to know when one is established in one's true nature, he is said to have replied, 'When thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions can no longer take you away'.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Only thinking imagines that imaginary one! ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
through right nutrition and exercise. If you don't equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self. If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as the witness, and so initiate its transmutation ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Awakeness is not moving back from, trying to explain, trying to fix, or get rid of. Awakeness, when it's allowed to be experienced, is a deep love and caring for what is. Love is always throwing itself into the moment, here and now, fully abandoning itself into now. To be in relationship in this way is simple. It is humble. It is very intimate. Then you can meet another person in a whole different way.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In the original Greek, one of the meanings of sin [hamartia] is simply "to miss the mark.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world's system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
nothing can satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs your life, there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When the conventional world agrees that what the mind knows with its ordinary perception sums up all that can be known, then it becomes more difficult to pursue the truth.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater intensity. After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the functions of a spiritual teacher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey. It will free vast amounts of consciousness that previously had been trapped in useless and compulsive thinking. A very effective way of doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Of course different people fulfill different functions in this world. It cannot be otherwise. As far as intellectual or physical abilities are concerned—knowledge, skills, talents, and energy levels—human beings differ widely. What really matters is not what function you fulfill in this world, but whether you identify with your function to such an extent that it takes you over and becomes a role that you play. When you play roles, you are unconscious. When you catch yourself playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning of freedom from the role. When you are completely identified with a role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take yourself very seriously. You also automatically assign roles to others that correspond to yours. For example, when you visit doctors who are totally identified with their role, to them you will not be a human being but a patient or a case history.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Motivation included purifying the mind of any past disturbances, anything that might cast a shadow on the pure perception of luminous emptiness. It's not helpful to simply say, Everything is essentially empty, everything is essentially pure. Although that happens to be absolutely true, in order to know this absolute truth from the inside out, we must work with those thorns that cannot be plucked through intellectual reasoning or dharma philosophy. To be effective, working with subtle knots of guilt and remorse must be embodied experiences. Furthermore, these knots prevent the full expression of our compassion. In subtle ways, they keep us stuck on ourselves and hold us back from giving everything we have to the welfare of others.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body—in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans—all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is impossible to have the 'me' without the 'not me', and it is impossible to have the 'not me' without the 'me'.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enthusiasm brings an enormous empowerment into what you do, so that all those who have not accessed that power would look upon "your" achievements in awe and may equate them with who you are. You, however, know the truth that Jesus pointed to when he said, "I can of my own self do nothing."3 Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others. It does not need to use and manipulate people, because it is the power of creation itself and so does not need to take energy from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time: it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do then is "ride the wave.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. Wanting is structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental structure remains in place. Intense wanting that has no specific can often be found in the still-developing ego of teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and dissatisfaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Abiding means letting everything be as it already is—no matter what it is. If you're feeling good, let that be as it is. If you're feeling bad, let that be as it is. No matter what your emotional, physical, or mental state, let it be as it is and don't wish it to be otherwise. If you want it to be different from what it is, you're not abiding; you're picking and choosing and trying to control your experience.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about. In that state, all your attention is in the Now. There is none left for daydreaming, thinking, remembering, anticipating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?" Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way. There is no way to enlightenment; enlightenment is the way.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" ofego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We do not have to eradicate a separate self in order to be knowingly eternal, infinite awareness or God's infinite, self-aware being. There is no separate self to be eliminated. To attempt to dissolve or annihilate a separate self simply perpetuates its illusory existence. To discipline the separate self is to maintain the separate self.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form—it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. FOCUS ATTENTION ON THE FEELING INSIDE YOU. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"—and find that there is no death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the presence of awareness becomes increasingly our natural condition, until there is no longer a distinction between meditation and life.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In The Third Man, author Graham Green observes, "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they have brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The apparent separation of experience into two essential parts is similar to imagining that a screen is divided in two when two images appear on it side by side. If thinking imagines that the screen is only contained in only one of the images, then thinking will also have to imagine a substance that is 'not the screen', out of which the second image is made.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Seeking happiness in objective experience is the activity that defines the apparently separate self.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
"Emotion literally means "disturbance." The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning "to disturb.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer. Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
whenever there is inspiration, which translates as "in spirit," and enthusiasm, which means "in God," there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we are being sincere and honest with ourselves, there is an intuitive sense of what we are avoiding. If we can find the capacity to be honest, we'll start to feel in ourselves when we're being called to make effort.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
After all, the past determines who we are, as well as how we perceive and behave in the present. And our future goals determine which actions we take in the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Relinquishment is what spiritual teachers mean when they say, "die before you die.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The past lives in you as memories, but memories in themselves are not a problem. In fact, it is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes. It is only when memories, that is to say, thoughts about the past, take you over completely that they turn into a burden, turn problematic, and become part of your sense of self. Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There are many people who are always waiting for the next thing to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed about—and it never takes long before they find it. "This is an outrage," they say. "How dare you…." "I resent this." They are addicted to upset and anger as others are to a drug. Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen their feeling of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When I examined my difficulties with too much newness all at once, I could see ego-self as a process, not as a solid thing. I was not able to allow all my previous identities to die at once. I needed time. I needed to work through the layers. I accepted that the roles I wished to toss onto the pyre were fabricated, not inherent to my being. But they could not be extracted as if with a surgical procedure. I had grown into them, and I needed to grow out of them.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
The positive already contains within itself the as yet unmanifested negative.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, andnot enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all formsof nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you a immediate feeling of satisfaction but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes." GOSPEL OF THOMAS ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A Course in Miracles.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I feel that a genuine, affectionate smile is very important in our day-to-day lives.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
your dwelling place in the Now and pay ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Choice implies consciousness—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. Your friend is stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner, and not for the first time. Why? No choice. The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The German word for breathing—atmen—is derived from the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word Atman, meaning the indwelling divine spirit or God within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know that you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger—just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When Being becomes conscious of itself—that's presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time—that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word chaos means order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So whenever you feel negativity arising within you, whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a voice saying "Attention. Here and Now. Wake up." Even the slightest irritation is significant and needs to be acknowledged and looked at; otherwise, there will be a cumulative buildup of unobserved reactions. As I said before, you may be able to just drop it once you realize that you don't want to have this energy field inside you and that it serves no purpose. But then make sure that you drop it completely. If you cannot drop it, just accept that it is there and take your attention into the feeling, as I pointed out earlier.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Buddhism, for instance, there is a reference to the four factors of fulfillment, or happiness: wealth, worldly satisfaction, spirituality, and enlightenment.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
TS Was there a sense when you looked at each of these dreams that there was some kind of resolution occurring? ADYA Yes. Not only a resolution there, but also a resolution now. Because it's all one thing. Because anything that was unresolved in one of those dreams was unresolved now. Because it's the same; there's a connection. One of the reasons I haven't talked much about past lives is that some people who are extraordinarily awake have never seen a past life at all. Being aware of past lives is not a necessity. I'm not a particularly mystical person. There was a relatively short period of time, a few months, when I had these kinds of experiences happen occasionally, and since then, every now and then, but not with any great consistency. So they don't need to happen; it's just that they did ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Spiritual people always think the Truth is hidden from them. It is not hidden. What gets in the way is the idea of what it is going to be.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
When this unification occurs, there's a simplicity to life, a deep sense of freedom and essential well-being and also of fearlessness.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
In Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion. It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.The thinking mind cannot understand Presence and so will often misinterpret it. It will say that you are uncaring, distant, have no compassion, are not relating. The truth is, you are relating but at a level deeper than thought and emotion. In fact, at that level there is a true coming together, a true joining that goes far beyond relating. In the stillness of Presence, you can sense the formless essence in yourself and in the other as one. Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Everyone around us sees themselves as essentially different from others, and from life in general. So we move in a world where almost everyone we meet will be reflecting back to us this egoic sense of consciousness. To find liberation, we must wake up from this dream that our mind creates, that we're something separate than everything around us.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious). Even the men who wrote the Gospels did not understand the meaning of these parables, so the first misinterpretations and distortions crept in as they were written down. With subsequent erroneous interpretations, the real meaning was completely lost. These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Let me summarize the process. Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it—don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Life is Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Unhappiness is an ego-created mental-emotional disease that has reached epidemic proportions. It is the inner equivalent of the environmental pollution of our planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behaviour with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake *that* for who they are.If you are alert and present, you can point out behaviour without ego involvement (making the other person wrong).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say "no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don't need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
the notion that we are separate is not really true; it's all made up. It's all conjured up in our mind. It's one big dream that we have. The difficulty with this dream is that almost everybody around us is having the same dream. It's essentially the collective dream of humanity. So it's not just you or me that's dreaming; almost all human beings are also having this dream of being separate, of being completely other than the world around them. What this means is that we really have to look within ourselves quite deeply, because we're not only looking beyond our own deluded mind, our own misunderstanding; we're looking beyond the delusion of the entirety of humanity.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
That one step is called surrender. I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into inner peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Presence is pure consciousness—consciousness that has been reclaimed from the mind, from the world of form. The inner body is your link with the Unmanifested, and in its deepest aspect is the Unmanifested: the Source from which consciousness emanates, as light emanates from the sun. Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind. Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. So don't turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it—don't think about it! Express it if necessary, but don't create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it. Don't let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift. So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don't act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present—present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nature exists in a state of unconscious oneness with the whole. This, for example, is why virtually no wild animals were killed in the tsunami disaster of 2004. Being more in touch with the totality than humans, they could sense the tsunami's approach long before it could be seen or heard and so had time to withdraw to higher terrain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn't, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What we call the outside world is simply the absence of love.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
forgetting takes place in the mind alone. Presence never truly forgets itself.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
However, the irruption of disorder into a person's life, and the resultant collapse of a mentally defined meaning, can become the opening into a higher order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
accept it as if you had chosen it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do. And, of course, you cannot be present unless you become friendly with the present moment. That is the basis for effective action, uncontaminated by negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True Meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True Meditation is effortless stillness, abidance as primordial being. True Meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focusing on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning. In True Meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In True Meditation the emphasis is on being awareness—not on being aware of objects, but on resting as conscious being itself. In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience. As you gently relax into awareness, the mind's compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition. As you effortlessly rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive habit of control, contraction, and identification. Awareness returns to its natural condition of conscious being, absolute unmanifest potential—the silent abyss beyond all knowing.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
a belief in the fundamental gentleness and goodness of all human beings, a belief in the value of compassion, a belief in a policy of kindness, and a sense of commonality among all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous," says the ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable." What the ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to—alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person—you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You will be free to let go of unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. ... The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. ... Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The answer is obvious, is it not? Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Teachings that pointed the way beyond the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the insanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping stone to the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I have also met many others who may be technically good at what they do but whose ego constantly sabotages their work. Only part of their attention is on the work they perform; the other part is on themselves. Their ego demands personal recognition and wastes energy in resentment if it doesn't get enough—and it's never enough. "Is someone else getting more recognition than me?" Or their main focus of attention is profit or power, and their work is no more than a means to that end. When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible to you only through the portal of the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The seeing is freeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It [mind of absolute reality] is everywhere and nowhere. It's somewhat like sky—so completely integrated with our existence that we never stop to question its reality or to recognize its qualities.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In many cases you are not buying a product but an "identity enhancer." Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious. To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be quite a shocking realization. The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment. The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now—nobody else is—and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now. So identification prevents you from dealing with the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened—before you have freed yourself from your mind—you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is no knower of this experience and nothing that is known. There is just the knowing of it, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more. But you cannot be more than you are because underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being. In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same. THE PATHOLOGICAL EGO In a wider sense of the word, the ego itself is pathological, no matter what form it takes. When we look at the ancient Greek root of the word pathological, we discover just how appropriate that term is when applied to the ego. Although the word is normally used to describe a condition of disease, it is derived from pathos, which means suffering. This is, of course, exactly what the Buddha already discovered 2,600 years ago as a characteristic of the human condition. A person in the grip of ego, however, does not recognize suffering as suffering, but will look upon it as the only appropriate response in any given ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we can directly address our problem and focus our energies on finding a solution, for instance, the problem can be transformed into a challenge.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except in the mind's judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever. If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive. Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"This perpetual longing for happiness—which can, by definition, never be fulfilled because that very search itself denies the happiness that is present in our own being now—condemns us to an endless search in the future and thus perpetuates unhappiness. It is for this reason that the poet said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be— to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"I think the churches in this country need to be revitalized; they need that challenging presence of Jesus that says, "It's important that you realize the truth of your being. There are profound consequences to living in darkness." As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
a mind that is accustomed to repeatedly dissolving in its source or essence becomes progressively saturated with its inherent peace. When such a mind rises again from the ocean of awareness, its activity makes that peace available to humanity.Such a mind may also be inspired by knowledge that is not simply a continuation of the past but comes directly form its unconditioned essence. This inspiration brings creativity and new possibilities into whatever sphere of knowledge or activity in which that mind operates.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem. The ego, of course, loves that. It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self, and it will readily attach itself to your problems. This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Have you ever noticed that you have never left here, except in your mind? When you remember the past, you are not actually in the past. Your remembering is happening here. When you think about the future, that future projection is completely here. And when you get to the future, it's here. It's no longer the future.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Illness is not the problem. You are the problem—as long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything "bad" that happens in your life—use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness—and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God" - not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world -- relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself -- who you are.To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego. The man on the cross is an archetypal image. He is every man and every woman. As long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We need to learn how to want what we have NOT to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Now let your spiritual practice be this: As you go about your life, don't give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within. I have spoken about this already. Feel the inner body even when engaged in everyday activities, especially when engaged in relationships or when you are relating with nature. Feel the stillness deep inside it. Keep the portal open. It is quite possible to be conscious of the Unmanifested throughout your life. You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what happens out here. You become a bridge between the Unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the world. This is the state of connectedness with the Source that we call enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"—and find that there is no death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and depends upon whether you can become present enough to dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You do not need to wait for the world to become sane, or for somebody else to become conscious, before you can be enlightened ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once this recognition has taken place it is never possible to invest our desire for lasting peace and happiness in objective experience with quite the same conviction again. Although we may forget or ignore it and, as a result, repeatedly return to objective experience seeking fulfilment, our understanding will impress itself upon us with greater frequency and power, asserting its undeniable and unavoidable truth with ever-increasing clarity, demanding to be heard. We turn away from this intuition at our peril.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it—who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. That's another role. It's called "natural, spontaneous me." As soon as you are trying to be this or that, you are playing a role.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity - which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal ego mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won't be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter. ... The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. IN the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Death is not an anomaly or the most dreadful of all events as modern culture would have you believe, but the most natural thing in the world, inseparable from and just as natural as its polarity—birth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
demanding recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don't get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of your illnesses, or making a scene; giving your opinion when nobody has asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other person, which is to say, using other people for egoic reflection or as ego enhancers; trying to make an impression on others through possessions, knowledge, good looks, status, physical strength, and so on; bringing about temporary ego inflation through angry reaction against something or someone; taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself right and others wrong through futile mental or verbal complaining; wanting to be seen, or to appear important.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can't you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: "I" and "myself," subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life. In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself—"you" and "yourself" merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But I think that as time goes on, you can make positive changes. Everyday as soon as you get up, you can develop a sincere positive motivation, thinking, 'I will utilize this day in a more positive way. I should not waste this very day.' And then, at night before bed, check what you've done, asking yourself, 'Did I utilize this day as I planned?' If it went accordingly, then you should rejoice. If it went wrong, then regret what you did and critique the day. So, through methods such as this, you can gradually strengthen the positive aspects of the mind.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
"If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. You have "overcome the world," in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have "crossed over to the other shore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Imagine what it would be like if we went through life never encountering an enemy, or any other obstacles for that matter, if from the cradle to the grave everyone we met pampered us, held us, hand fed us (soft bland food, easy to digest), amused us with funny faces and the occasional 'goo-goo' noise. If from infancy we were carried around in a basket (later on, perhaps on a litter), never encountering any challenge, never tested—in short, if everyone continued to treat us like a baby. That might sound good at first. For the first few months of life it might be appropriate. But if it persisted it could only result in one becoming a sort of gelatinous mass, a monstrosity really—with the mental and emotional development of veal. It's the very struggle of life that makes us who we are. And it is our enemies that test us, provide us with the resistance necessary for growth.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Not projecting the old emotion into situations means facing it directly within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems. You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I think that in many cases people tend to expect the other person to respond to them in a positive way first, rather than taking the initiative themselves to create that possibility. I feel that's wrong, it leads to problems and can act as a barrier that just serves to promote a feeling of isolation from others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It's almost like catching onto a hidden secret—that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven. From the very beginning, there was only nirvana, as the Buddha would say. But we were misperceiving things. By believing the images in the mind, by contracting through fear, hesitation, and doubt, we misperceived where we were. We didn't realize we were in heaven; we didn't realize we were in the promised land. We didn't realize that nirvana is right here, right now, exactly where we are.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to feel and be in her body, so she is naturally closer to Being and potentially closer to enlightenment than a man.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling—mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore; spontaneous right action happens, and "you" are not doing it. Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
That is, only gradually, in most cases, will it become clear that meditation is what we are, not what we do, and that the separate self or finite mind is what we do, not what we are. Until this is recognised, meditation will seem to require an effort, and if this is the case, and for as long as it seems to be so, we should make the effort. In time it will become clear that we cannot make an effort to be or know our self—we can only make an effort to be or know something apparently other than our self—and at that point our effort will come spontaneously to an end.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
surrender, non-judgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the loving embrace of your knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I didn't realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot receive what you don't give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One of the hardest things for the apparently separate self to understand is that there is no real ignorance.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Nothing new needs to be added to experience for us to become aware that our self is always being ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
if you are truly concerned about the welfare of others and building a better world, it is your duty to be happy, or to do what you can to become happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Eternity, of course, does not mean endless time, but no time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
So let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities-warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful-happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To an onlooker, it may appear that you are under stress, but the intensity of enthusiasm has nothing to do with stress. When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Be an open space for whatever arises. Notice that you are the space in which everything arises. When everything is allowed to arise, you have the opportunity to perceive That which does not arise or subside. You Are That.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
The way of the cross is a complete reversal. It means that the worst thing in your life, your cross, turns into the best thing that ever happened to you, by forcing you into surrender, into "death," forcing you to become as nothing, to become as God—because God, too, is no-thing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
North America. In deep love and appreciation, I would like to thank those exceptional ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As we go through life, we eventually have enough experience to see that sometimes profound difficulty can also be profoundly heart opening. When you are in a tough position, when you are facing something hard, when you feel challenged, when you feel like you are at your edge, it is a gift to be willing to stop, to sit with those moments, and not look for the quick, easy resolution for that feeling. It is a kind of grace to be able and willing to open yourself entirely to the experience of challenge, of difficulty, and of insecurity.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing. We are simply acting out of deep programming. But once we have seen the true nature of things-- once Spirit has opened its eyes within us-- we suddenly know what we're doing. There's a much more accurate sense of whether we're moving or speaking or even thinking from truth or not. When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it's much more painful than we we didn't know our actions were untrue. When we say something to someone that we know is untrue, it causes an inner division that is vastly more painful than when we said the same thing and thought it was true.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
After you have tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points? It really is no more than an obsessive attachment ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So the pain-body doesn't want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the power of Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You say that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind says "no" while the emotion says "yes," or the other way around. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power—not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity manifests for you in various ways.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This clear mind of awareness is always with us, whether we recognize it or not. It coexists with confusion, and with the destructive emotions and cultural conditioning that shape our ways of seeing things. But when our perception shifts to meditative or steady awareness, it is no longer narrowed by memory and expectation; whatever we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear has greater clarity and sharpness, and enlivens our interactions.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Experience is too intimate to admit of two entities between which there might be relationship.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It's important to note, as well, that we do not become immune to misperception simply because we've had a glimpse of awakening. Certain fixations and conditionings will linger even after we perceive from the place of oneness. The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations—our hang-ups, you might say.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet—in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the "off" button? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No separate me loved the world. The world was love. My perfect home. Vast and intimate. Every particle was alive with love, fluid, flowing, without barriers.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no form. But then, it is not really a thing, and it is not of this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action-just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Generally speaking, you can have two different types of individuals. On the one hand, you can have a wealthy, successful person, surrounded by relatives and so on. If that person's source of dignity and sense of worth is only material, then so long as his fortune remains, maybe that person can sustain a sense of security. But the moment the fortune wanes, the person will suffer because there is no other refuge. On the other hand, you can have another person enjoying similar economic status and financial success, but at the same time, that person is warm and affectionate and has a feeling of compassion. Because that person has another source of worth, another source that gives him or her a sense of dignity, another anchor, there is less chance of that person's becoming depressed if his or her fortune happens to disappear. Through this type of reasoning you can see the very practical value of human warmth and affection in developing an inner sense of worth.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don't feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you. The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The moment you become aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean you have failed. It means that you have succeeded. Until that awareness happens, there is identification with inner states, and such identification is ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren't who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Just as the clouds are the veiling of the blue sky, so unhappiness is the veiling of happiness.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mental illness that is called paranoid schizophrenia, or paranoia for short, is essentially an exaggerated form of ego. It usually consists of a fictitious story the mind has invented to make sense of a persistent underlying feeling of fear. The main element of the story is the belief that certain people (sometimes large numbers or almost everyone) are plotting against me, or are conspiring to control or kill me. The story often has an inner consistency and logic so that it sometimes fools others into believing it too. Sometimes ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have a theory, it's not too hard to find evidence to substantiate it, at least until some other theory comes along.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"1 At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The smile is a very important feature of the human face.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
It is a mind-structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At some point after awakening—sometimes very soon, sometimes not for quite a while—you reach a stage that I call "trials and tribulations." In the Jesus story, this is symbolized by Jesus' forty days in the desert and his encounter with Satan in the desert immediately following his baptism. In Buddhism, this stage is mythically portrayed by the image of Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, assaulted by Maya, the force of illusion. Maya is an impersonal force of illusion, while Satan is a personification of what we think of as evil, but the source of evil is actually illusion, so these are really two different mythic representations of the same experience.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is awareness in you, you will be able to recognize that voice in your head for what it is: an old thought, conditioned by the past. If there is awareness in you, you no longer need to believe in every thought you think. It's an old thought, no more. Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The secret to my own happiness, my own good future, is within my own hands. I must not miss that opportunity! ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen. You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
person is a collection of thoughts, images, feelings, ...
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
In our society, we're inclined to see doing nothing as something negative, even evil. But when we lose ourselves in activities, we diminish our quality of being. We do ourselves a disservice. It's important to preserve ourselves, to maintain our freshness and good humor, our joy and compassion. In Buddhism we cultivate aimlessness, and in fact in Buddhist tradition the ideal person, an arhat or a bodhisattva, is a businessless person—someone with nowhere to go and nothing to do. People should learn how to just be there, doing nothing.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are awake enough, aware enough, to be able to observe how you interact with other people, you may detect subtle changes in your speech, attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are interacting with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Transformation is through the body, not away from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
unless you learn to recognize the false as false—as not you—there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In the timeless realm where God dwells, which is also your home, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, are one, and the essence of everything that ever has been and ever will be is eternally present in an unmanifested state of oneness and perfection—totally beyond anything the human mind can ever imagine or comprehend.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What difference does their approval or disapproval truly make to who you are? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When we look deeply at the nature of things, we see that in fact everything is impermanent. Nothing exists as a permanent entity; everything changes. It is said that we cannot step into the same river twice. If we look for a single, permanent entity in a river, we will not find it. The same is true of our physical body. There is no such thing as a self, no absolute, permanent entity to be found in the element we call "body." In our ignorance we believe that there is a permanent entity in us, and our pain and suffering manifest on the basis of that ignorance. If we touch deeply the nonself nature in us, we can get out of that suffering.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
"Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real. Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is—which is the only sane way to live—there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good—which includes the "bad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identity with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If we go deeply into the experience of whatever is known or loved we find no substance there other than Awareness itself.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Alienation means you don't feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get 'home' but never feel at home.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is my secret,' he said. 'I don't mind what happens.'... To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We have forgotten how to be—to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment—allow it to be as it is—then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you want others to be happy practice compassion; and if you want yourself to be happy practice compassion ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In most ancient cultures, people believed that everything, even so-called inanimate objects, had an indwelling spirit, and in this respect they were closer to the truth than we are today.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you are identified with the mind, you have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say, you get your sense of who you are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We have forgotten that we are the one that is aware of thoughts, feelings, images and sensations and instead believe and, more importantly, feel that we actually are those thoughts, feelings, images and sensations.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
No formulation of the reality of experience is completely true. Once we acknowledge this, we relieve words of the impossible burden of trying to express the nature of experience and, as a result, leave them free to be spoken and heard in playful and creative ways that evoke Reality itself without trying to frame or grasp it.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
I feel that the book has taken on a life and momentum of its own.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It's not your ego that realizes it's God, but your true essence. It might be more accurate to say God within you realizes it's God; the radiance realizes that you are the radiance.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
most activities are undertaken with a view to obtaining happiness.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Deep sleep is not the absence of awareness; it is the awareness of absence.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes,...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
She turned her heartbreak into wisdom.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Stillness is your essential nature. What is stillness? The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page are being perceived and become thoughts. Without that awareness, there would be no perception, no thoughts, no world. You are that awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Destructive and cruel wars, motivated by fear, greed, and the desire for power, had been common occurrences throughout human history, as had slavery, torture, and widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suffered more at the hands of each other than through natural disasters.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Will you become less when you let go of it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to the past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That's why Buddhists say "The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
no-mind and presence—external space and time continue to exist for you, but they become much less important. The world, too, continues to exist for you, but it will not bind you anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You think these thoughts in the same way that you dream your dreams when you are asleep. In other words, you don't know you are thinking those thoughts, just as the dreamer doesn't know he is dreaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you a immediate feeling of satisfaction but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now. So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What remains [when you deny the illusion of self] is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness. The only thing that ultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times? To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance. The ego loves its resentment of reality. What is reality? Whatever is. Buddha called it tatata—the suchness of life, which is no more than the suchness of this moment. Opposition toward that suchness is one of the main features of the ego. It creates the negativity that the ego thrives on, the unhappiness that it loves. In this way, you make yourself and others suffer and don't even know that you are doing it, don't know that you are creating hell on earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The highest happiness is when one reaches the stage of Liberation, at which there is no more suffering. That's genuine, lasting happiness. True happiness relates more to the mind and heart. Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it's there, the next day it may not be.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world. If they have any ambitions, they usually don't go beyond finding something to do that gives them a degree of independence. Some of them find it hard to fit into this world. Some are lucky enough to find a protective niche where they can lead a relatively sheltered life, a job that provides them with a regular income or a small business of their own. Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of a society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being. In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through "just being." In this way, they endow the seemingly insignificant with profound meaning. Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being absolutely present in whatever they do. There is consciousness and therefore quality in what they do, even the simplest task. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred manner. As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In many cases, you are not buying a product, but an "identity enhancer." Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived, and so you keep looking for more; you keep buying and keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"There is an Eastern saying: "The teacher and the taught together create the teaching.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The thinking mind cannot understand Presence ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Although my own experience may be very little, one thing that I can say for certain is that I feel that through Buddhist training, I feel that my mind has become much more calm. That's definite. Although the change has come about gradually, perhaps centimeter by centimeter," he laughed, "I think that there has been a change in my attitude towards myself and others. Although it's difficult to point to the precise causes of this change, I think that it has been influenced by a realization, not full realization, but a certain feeling or sense of the underlying fundamental nature of reality, and also through contemplating subjects such as impermanence, our suffering nature, and the value of compassion and altruism.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already another form of violence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence. Most humans are completely unconscious of this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They are out of balance. [...] They identify exclusively with their own physical and psychological form, unconscious of essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Religion's primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Oneness is when there isn't another. Oneness is—there is only this. There is no that over there, there is only this. And that's all there is. There is only this, and as soon as you say what this is, you've just defined what it's not. This is only realized in the utter demolition of everything that it's not. Then that awakening is an awakening outside of everything that comes and goes. It is a total waking up outside of time.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Many poets and sages throughout the ages have observed that true happiness—I call it the joy of Being—is found in simple, seemingly unremarkable things. Most people, in their restless search for something significant to happen to them, continuously miss the insignificant, which may not be insignificant at all. The philosopher Nietzsche, in a rare moment of deep stillness, wrote, ‘For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…. the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Looking at personal issues is like pulling just the top of the weeds out of your lawn: they pop right back up. You may have some relief from the trouble of the day, but the root is still there, totally untouched. But having experiences, even if they clear up problems or offer beautiful insights, is very different than finding the root of who you are. If you don't get to the root, you just get another weed.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
For anything to be known, its apparent 'thingness' must dissolve in Awareness and become pure knowing.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The underlying emotion that governs all the activity in the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free. Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside it appears confident.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What it doesn't say—but only points to—is more important than what it says.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True love has no opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, then one needn't be overwhelmed by it. The appropriate action is to seek its solution. It is more sensible to spend the energy focusing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no Possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can't do anything about it anyway. In that case, the sooner you accept this fact, the easier it will be on you. This formula, of course, implies directly confronting the problem. Otherwise you won't be able to find out whether or not there is a resolution to the problem.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self." These are just a few of the habitual ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.You are open to life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
If you are run by your mind, although you have no choice you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will eventually force you out of your unconscious state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not 'this moment".
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
constructs an image of a person moving around in space and time, being born, growing old and dying.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true—from ourselves to the world.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The true antidote of greed is contentment ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So, the first step in seeking happiness is learning. We first have to learn how negative emotions and behaviors are harmful to us and how positive emotions are helpful. And we must realize how these negative emotions are not only very bad and harmful to one personally but harmful to society and the future of the whole world as well. That kind of realization enhances our determination to face and overcome them.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
A moment of danger can bring about a temporary cessation of the stream of thinking and thus give you a taste of what it means to be present, alert, aware.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The ego's greatest enemy is the present moment, which is to say, life itself ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
After all, it continues to be true for millions of people that the greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But we cannot really honor things if we use them as a means to self-enhancement, that is to say, if we try to find ourselves through them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Knowing or experiencing is not what it does; it is what it is.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
who are you? Consciousness that has become conscious of itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as you needs and what matters to you in life - and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Allow your self to be coloured by experience temporarily, but do not become limited by it. To say and identify with the statements 'I am sad', 'I am lonely', 'I am tired', 'I am hungry', 'I am a man' or 'I am a woman' is to allow infinite being to become limited and personal.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Religion's primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence. As soon as religion forgets about its roots in the eternal, it fails in its central task. Jesus was so critical of the religion of his time because he saw that not only was it not connecting people to the mystery, but that it was actually an active participant in veiling the mystery of existence, in obscuring the Kingdom of Heaven. And so he was a critic from the inside; he didn't necessarily reject the religion he was brought up in, but he felt called to challenge it, to transform it. Jesus' keen insight into the potential for the corrupting influence of power in all institutions—whether they're political, economic or religious—is very relevant to the modern day. If Jesus existed here and now as a human being, what he'd have to say about these subjects would be as shocking now as it was two thousand years ago. I've talked to many people ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In True Meditation, we're in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself. And so, when you sit down to meditate, connect with your senses— connect with how you feel, what you hear, what you sense, what you smell. Your senses actually anchor you in the moment. When your mind wanders, anchor yourself in your senses. Start to listen. What are the sounds outside? Start to feel. How do you feel in your body? Enter into the felt sense, the kinesthetic sense of your being. Connect not only with what you feel in your body, but also with what you sense in the room. Start to smell. As you are sitting, what does it smell like? Through your senses, open to the whole world within and around you. This grounds you in a deeper reality than your mind, and it also helps focus you in a place other than your mind. Allowing everything to be is extraordinarily simple, but it's not as easy as people imagine. If you're actually doing it correctly, you'll find yourself vividly present to your five senses, vividly present to your body, vividly present to your experience. If, on the other hand, you find that you're in a hazy dream zone, then it's very important to come back to your senses. Your body is a beautiful tool to anchor consciousness in a deeper sense of reality.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body; ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply. If you cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your hands or feet. That's good enough for the moment. Just focus on the feeling. Your body is coming alive. Later, we will practice some more. Please open your eyes now, but keep some attention in the inner energy field of the body even as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The stronger the ego in you, the more likely it is that in your perception other people are the main source of problems in your life. It is also more than likely that you will make life difficult for others. But, of course, you won't be able to see that. It is always others who seem to be doing it to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Rather, genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration. On the basis of the recognition of this equality and commonality, you develop a sense of affinity and closeness with others. With this as a foundation, you can feel compassion regardless of whether you view the other person as a friend or an enemy. It is based on the other's fundamental rights rather than your own mental projection. Upon this basis, then, you will generate love and compassion. That's genuine compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
TS Part of the reason I am bringing up the topic of past lives is that I have heard several people say something like this about you: "Adya must have been a realized being in a past life, and that's why he's had such tremendous breakthroughs at such an early age and is able to articulate teachings on awakening in such an original way." What do you think about that comment? ADYA If you ask me point blank, then yes, I've seen myself doing something similar to what I'm doing in this lifetime many times before. But again, I don't know the whole metaphysics of past lives and how they work, and I don't see things happening in terms of linear cause and effect. In fact, my experience of past lives isn't that they are actually past. I call them that, because that's how people relate to them, but if I were to say what my real experience is, it's more like simultaneous lives.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the "me" is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Close the gap between what is and what you want it to be, between what is presenting itself and what you want to present itself. This gap of judgment is the separation you feel. You need to totally choose what is and lean into it with your whole being.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One thing you should remember is that mental transformations take time and are not easy. I think some people from the West, where technology is so good, think that everything is automatic.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
All it means it that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matter whether you are rich or poor—it certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don't matter absolutely.There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
There are no 'things' there in the first place to be transparent or otherwise.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It takes a long time to develop the behavior and habits of mind that contribute to our problems. It takes an equally long time to establish the new habits that bring happiness. There is no getting around these essential ingredients: determination, effort, and time. These are the real secrets to happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Every time you are present when the pain-body arises, some of the pain-body's negative emotional energy will burn up, as it were, and become transmuted into Presence. The rest of the pain-body will quickly withdraw and wait for a better opportunity to arise again, that is to say, when you are less conscious. A better opportunity for the pain-body to arise may come whenever you lose Presence, perhaps after you have had a few drinks or while watching a violent film. The tiniest negative emotion, such as being irritated or anxious, can also serve as a doorway through which the pain-body can return. The pain-body needs your unconsciousness. It cannot tolerate the light of Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare some change?" mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger. Then he asked: "What's that you are sitting on?" "Nothing," replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember." "Ever looked inside?" asked the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What's the point? There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"time is the fourth dimension of space. He calls it the "space-time continuum.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We believe that happiness is possible only in the future. That is why the practice "I have arrived" is very important. The realization that we have already arrived, that we don't have to travel any further, that we are already here, can give us peace and joy. The conditions for our happiness are already sufficient. We only need to allow ourselves to be in the present moment, and we will be able to touch them.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
"If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents." That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the premordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment. It represents the most profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To me, THE definition of hell is simple: it is a place where there is no understanding and no compassion.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Recognition of our true nature does not need studious reading of spiritual texts, years of meditation practice or deep devotion to a teacher. We need only the willingness to engage in a rigorously honest investigation into the nature of awareness itself—not an intellectual investigation, but a personal investigation into what we truly are.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
The Second Arrow the buddha speaks about the "second arrow." When an arrow strikes you, you feel pain. If a second arrow comes and strikes you in the same spot, the pain will be ten times worse. The Buddha advised that when you have some pain in your body or your mind, breathe in and out and recognize the significance of that pain, but don't exaggerate its importance. If you stop to worry, to be fearful, to protest, to be angry about the pain, then you magnify the pain ten times or more. Your worry is the second arrow. You should protect yourself and not allow the second arrow to come, because the second arrow comes from you.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
This diminishment of the ego gives rise to empathy and compassion beyond tribal, racial, national, or religious affiliations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That's the primary illusion -- that there is something called "my spiritual life," and something called "my daily life." When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It's all one seamless expression of spirit.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
It is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
An object is only an object from the point of view of the mind.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
"This (liberation) isn't something I can help you with. I can tell you what you need to do, but you have to do it. In the beginning, teachers can help a lot. But the deeper you go, all they can do is point, and clarify, and tell you what you need to do. Only you can take this step. Nobody can push you into this place. It's like Buddha's final night under the Bodhi tree. What did he do when confronted with this? He reached down and touched the ground and said, „I will not be moved." Finally—when everything that could be thrown at him was thrown, and he was still unmoved—it was done. He never looked back.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Likewise we cannot 'see' our own being and yet all we ever know, in all experience, is the light of our self. It knows only itself. All experience first and foremost announces the presence of awareness, the light of our own b ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The emotion is the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Watch the emotion. You are the watcher, not the emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The emotional or physical pain that for many women precedes and coincides with the menstrual flow is the pain-body in its collective aspect that awakens from its dormancy at that time, although it can be triggered at other times too.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I would say about 80 to 90 percent of people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunction and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will know this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them—while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't get attached to any one word. You can substitute "Christ" for presence, if that is more meaningful to you. Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now? ...
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute nonreaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and the state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn't the action you perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that flows into ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every "other" as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Where there was abiding tranquility, what awakens now is sense of an extraordinary vitality, of life-force. It's as if the fullness of your being is radiating, and from the tips of your toes to the top of your head, you feel this very deep and powerful radiance.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our days are numbered. At this very moment, many thousands are born into the world, some destined to live only a few days or weeks, and then tragically succumb to illness or other misfortune. Others are destined to push through to the century mark, perhaps even a bit beyond, and savor every taste life has to offer: triumph, despair, joy, hatred, and love. We never know. But whether we live a day or a century, a central question always remains: What is the purpose of our life? What makes our lives meaningful? ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Prior to the arising of mind, Consciousness is too completely full of itself for the dualising mind even to get a purchase ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enthusiasm "wants" nothing because it lacks nothing. It is at one with life and no matter how dynamic the enthusiasm-inspired activities are, you don't lose yourself in them. And there remains always a still but intensely alive space at the center of the wheel, a core of peace in the midst of activity that is both the source of all and untouched by it all. Through enthusiasm you enter into full alignment with the outgoing creative principle of the universe, but without identifying with its creations, that is to say, without ego. Where there is no identification, there is no attachment—one of the great sources of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Throughout history humans have inflicted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of? Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Sometimes the 'fault' you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Show your friend how to be the observing presence behind her thoughts and her emotions. Tell her about the pain-body and how to free herself from it. Teach her the art of inner-body awareness. Demonstrate to her the meaning of presence. As soon as she is able to access the power of the Now, and thereby break through her conditioned past, she will have a choice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment contains both past and future. The only material that the future is made of is the present. If you know how to handle the present in the best way you can, that's all you can do for the future. Handling the present moment with all your attention, all your intelligence, is already building a future.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
In identifying one's mental state as the prime factor in achieving happiness, of course that doesn't deny that our basic physical needs for food, clothing, and shelter must be met. But once these basic needs are met, the message is clear: we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate—right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save you. Is this not the core error that we have been talking about? Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stay with the pause between these two thoughts. When we remain in this pause before the answer formulates itself, what takes place 'there' is the most valuable and, at the same time, the most underrated or overlooked experience that one can have.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm by being there fully. Be still. Look. Listen. See how every animal and every plant is completely itself. Unlike humans, they have not split themselves in two. They do not live through mental images of themselves, so they do not need to be concerned with trying to protect and enhance those images. The deer is itself. The daffodil is itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn't realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
... next time you say, «I have nothing in common with this person,» remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. [... ] In that sense , there is total equality between you and every other creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Jesus said: "I am the light above everything. I am everything. Everything came forth from me, and everything reached me." [Gospel of Thomas 77] Now, that's as clearly as the enlightened state can be put into words. I am the light of everything, the light of divine being, the light of consciousness. I am what lights up the world, I am what sees the world, and that seeing, that consciousness is actually what gives rise to the world. In some spiritual traditions, just to be the divine, eternal witness of all of life is enough; it's the goal. But in the spirituality of Jesus, that's not the goal. He doesn't say only, "I am the light above everything," but "I am everything; everything came forth from me.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you were able to observe the physiological changes that take place inside your body when possessed by such negative states, how they adversely affect the functioning of the heart, the digestive and immune systems, and countless other bodily functions, it would become abundantly clear that such states are indeed pathological, are forms of suffering and not pleasure. Whenever ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Before I wonder why I am here, maybe I should find out who this "I" is who is asking the question. Before I ask "What is God," maybe I should ask who I am, this "I" who is seeking God. Who am I, who is actually living this life? Who is right here, right now? Who is on the spiritual path? Who is it that is meditating? Who am I really? ...
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself. Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no "I" apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say, "What voice?" or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an entity that has taken possession of them. Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants. It believes that through it, it can attract a desirable condition or dissolve an undesirable one. A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you"—the mind—did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So who is the experiencer? You are. And who are you? Consciousness. And what is consciousness? This question cannot be answered. The moment you answer it, you have falsified it, made it into another object. Consciousness, the traditional word for which is spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
we can see that the social fabric is pasted together by consensus. The more people who share the consensus, the more real it becomes, and the harder it is to change or dismantle it.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming" with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness" of that moment? Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"There's really no avoiding the fact that suffering is part of life. And of course we have a natural tendency to dislike our suffering and problems. But I think that ordinarily people don't view the very nature of our existence to be characterized by suffering ..." The Dalai Lama suddenly began to laugh, "I mean on your birthday people usually say, 'Happy Birthday!,' when actually the day of your birth was the birth of your suffering. But nobody says, 'Happy Birth-of-Sufferingday!" he joked.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
there are no enlightened individuals, there is only enlightenment. Enlightenment wakes up. Not you or I. You and I are rendered insignificant and nonexistent. Enlightenment wakes up. That's why it is said that everybody is inherently enlightened. But that statement is misleading because it implies that everybody is a separate, special, unique little somebody who is inherently enlightened, and that misses the point. An illusion can't be enlightened. So it's not really true that everybody is enlightened. It's only true that enlightenment is enlightened.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
"Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus said, "for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven."1 What does "poor in spirit" mean? No inner baggage, no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a sense of self in them. And what is the "kingdom of heaven"? The simple but profound joy of Being that is there when you let go of identifications and so become "poor in spirit." This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient spiritual practice in both East and West.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God"—not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. They didn't become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself—"you" and "yourself" merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Furthermore, any teaching that puts the spotlight of attention on the workings of the ego will necessarily provoke egoic reaction, resistance, and attack.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you are. Even if people agree with it, it is ultimately a fiction. Many people don't realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It is always of something that *might* happen, not of something that is happening now. *You* are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. You cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a fragrance from the realm of spirit. Using the word "enlightenment" in a wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
as long as you are run by the egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity. Perhaps you haven't looked very deeply into the human condition in its state of dominance by the egoic mind. Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Being is the very Intelligence whose visible manifestation is the physical universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Nietzsche, in a rare moment of deep stillness, wrote, "For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How easy it is for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons. The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth. It says: this is how it is. You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret "your life" or someone else's life or behavior, however you judge any situation, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many possible perspectives. It is no more than a bundle of thoughts. But reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself. Thinking fragments reality—it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces. The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
It is the self-aware screen of awareness, upon which the drama of experience is playing and out of which it is made, that becomes so intimately involved with the objective content of its experience that it seems to lose itself in it and, as a result, overlooks or forgets its own presence, just as a dreamer's mind loses itself in its own dream at night.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
"As I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As we approached the property, long overgrown with trees and all kinds of magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: danger. all structures are unstable. I said to my friend, "That's a profound sutra [sacred scripture]." And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it "eternal life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Spiritual autonomy is knowing who and what you are—knowing that you are divine being itself, knowing that the essence of you is divinity. You are moving in the world of time and space, appearing as a human being, but nonetheless you are eternal, divine being, the timeless breaking through and operating within the world of time. To Jesus, spirit is everything. Nothing matters more than spirit or, as I like to say, divine being. Divine being is what Jesus is here for; it is the vitality source from which he moves, from which he speaks, from which his critique arises. He is the living presence of divine being. He's a human being too, but he's here to convey divine being, and that comes out most clearly in the Gospel of Mark. This gospel uniquely conveys Jesus' search for himself. Mark's Jesus is a Jesus who is very much a searcher: he's looking for his identity, he's looking for his role, he's experimenting, he's finding out what works and what doesn't. He's on a journey, and he's inviting all of us along for that journey with him as if we were also the disciples.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The simplest thing one can say about the experiential knowledge of awakening is that it is a shift in one's perception. This is the heart of awakening. There is a shift in perception from seeing oneself as an isolated individual to seeing oneself, if we have a sense of self at all after this shift, as something mush more universal—everything and everyone and everywhere at the same time.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
kind of thing. I don't want to talk to a lot of people about past lives, especially the radical nondualists who say that there is nobody who was born, there is nobody who has past lives, there are no incarnations, and so on. Of course, that is all true; it's all a dream, even past lives. When I talk about them at all, I talk about them as past dreams. I dreamed I was this person; I dreamed I was that person. Personally, I've never tried to gather experiences of past lives and wrap them all up in some sort of metaphysical understanding. I don't have a clear understanding about what a past life is, except that it seems clear to me that it also has the nature of a dream; it doesn't have objective, actual existence. Nonetheless, the experience I had happened. Since it happened, I can't say it didn't happen. But in my own mind, I don't try to figure it all out. All I know is what happened.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past. Die ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Surrender—the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is—also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are bound to the world of form, the harder and more impenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat "transparent," as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The quality of emptiness that we are referring to was never born; likewise, it cannot die. This essential nature of our lives is unborn—like space itself. Space provides no place to abide, no foothold in which to secure our steps. In skylike emptiness, we cannot be stuck. Yet here we are, alive in this wondrous world of appearances, which can always benefit from wise discernment. With particularity as fine as flour, we discriminate between actions that intend to relieve suffering for ourselves and others and those that intend to cause harm.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence. This is something that many people are looking for without even knowing it. Almost everybody is looking for intimacy—a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union. When we open to life in this way, we begin to find an inner stability simply because we're no longer at odds with our experience.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute. It would be even more accurate to say that the illusion is defending itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the fate of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
With meditative awareness, we try to remove these filters and reduce the projections. We face inward and recognize awareness as a quality of mind itself. When we look at the mountain, there is less mental traffic between us and the mountain, fewer concepts and ideas.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
this idea of the witness is also seen to be a limitation superimposed on Awareness by a mind ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Jesus points to this when he says, "Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole."1 The New Testament's "Be ye perfect" is a mistranslation of the original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won't be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter.... The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your life situation may be full of problems—most life situations are—but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" 1 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Yes, happiness is possible—in fact, we can train in happiness in much the same way that we train in any other skill, directly cultivating it through effort and practice.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And so I was sitting in the back of the church and watching people go through the communion. Reading the mystics, who wrote so eloquently about their own profound experiences, I had felt a deep sense of connection, as if I'd reached back hundreds of years and connected with the living presence of another person. So I had an unconscious expectation that I was going to have the same feeling when I walked into this church and watched the mass. But when the priest started to talk, it was extraordinarily disappointing. He talked about abortion, about how families should be, about intimate issues having to do with sexuality and how you should live your life, and as he talked, I felt that he had taken the presence created by this ritual of communion and thrown it on the floor and stepped on it. I had a sense that he had completely missed the Christian message.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you're doing, you become stressed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If in your relationships you experience both "love" and the opposite of love—attack, emotional violence, and so on—then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash—one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone. To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought. To you, it is liberating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
And it is from inner space, the unconditioned consciousness itself, that true happiness, the joy of Being, emanates.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, don't you agree? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
our identity is not even shared—there are not two entities there in the first place to share it. It is, I am, all alone.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect towards others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The Buddha image shows us abiding tranquility amidst the turning wheel of life.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind—its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now—problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To complain is always nonacceptance to what *is*.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever it is that is feeling the chair is the substance of the chair.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Don't look for peace.Don't look for any ther state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being peace.The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peaceAnything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.This is the miracle of surrencer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In fact, in one sense one could define compassion as the feeling of unbearableness at the sight of other people's suffering, other sentient beings' suffering. And in order to generate that feeling one must first have an appreciation of the seriousness or intensity of another's suffering. So, I think that the more fully one understands suffering, and the various kinds of suffering that we are subject to, the deeper will be one's level of compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
unbridled devotion to sensual pleasures could sometimes lead to pain instead. In the closing years of the ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Each person's life, each life-form infact, represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself. And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end - one of countless worlds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Can you be aware of your mind racing to defend its position, justify, attack, blame? In other words, can you awaken at that moment of unconsciousness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love as a continuous state is as yet very rare—as rare as conscious human beings.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
is only seemingly veiled by this imagining; it is never actually veiled. It is the ever-present knowing of itself alone.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I didn't make the calling happen, I couldn't pretend it didn't happen, and I couldn't have turned it off even if I'd wanted to. It was disconcerting. And sure enough, my intuition was true: the entire trajectory of my life had changed at that instant.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Can you give some more examples of ordinary unconsciousness? See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming"with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness"of that moment? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. It will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.In the state of enlightenment, you *are* yourself. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stay present, stay conscious. Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space. You need to be present enough to be able to watch the pain-body directly and feel its energy. It then cannot control your thinking. The moment your thinking is aligned with the energy field of the pain-body, you are identified with it and again feeding it with your thoughts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in Consciousness.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and the senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the "body" of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space - it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At this moment, this is what you feel," I said. "There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We've become trapped in a world of dreams, a world in which we live primarily in our minds.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
All utopian visions have this in common: the mental projection of a future time when all will be well, we will be saved, there will be peace and harmony and the end of our problems. There have been many such utopian visions. Some ended in disappointment, others in disaster.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is no need to investigate the unconscious past in you except as it manifests at this moment as a thought, an emotion, a desire, a reaction, or an external event that happens to you. Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreactor if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The sense of contentment is a key factor for attaining happiness. Bodily health, material wealth and companions and friends are three factors for happiness. Contentment is the key that will determine the outcome of your relations with all three of these factors.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form—or a species—will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of-body experience. Although such an experience can be fascinating and can give you a glimpse of the state of liberation from the material form, in the end you will always have to return to the body, where the essential work of transformation takes place. Transformation is through the body, not away from it. This is why no true master has ever advocated fighting or leaving the body, although their mind-based followers often have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I would sit for hours refusing the conventional labels that thinking superimposes on experience, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Both the experiencer and the experienced are made of experiencing, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
we do not really see trees, fields, hills and the sky; we always see only the screen. The screen is their reality.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In awakening, what's revealed to us is that we are not a thing, nor a person, nor even an entity. What we are is that which manifests as all things, as all experiences, as all personalities. We are that which dreams the whole world into existence. Spiritual awakening reveals that that which is unspeakable is actually what we are.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This reminds me of one of the Tibetan Kadampa masters, Potowa, who said that for a meditator who has a certain degree of inner stability and realization, every event, every experience you are exposed to comes as a kind of a teaching. It's a learning experience. This I think is very true.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Some people get angry when they hear me say that problems are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself. Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you look and listen in this way, you may become aware of a subtle and at first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm. Some people feel it as a stillness in the background. Others call it peace. When consciousness is no longer totally absorbed by thinking, some of it remains in its formless, unconditioned, original state. This is inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
there are simply no things, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Always say "yes" to the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unfortunately, when we turn to religion, often the churches box us in even more. They tell us that we are inherently flawed, that we need to be forgiven for this sin, this stain that we carry. The first and most important function of religion is to connect you with the mystery of life and the mystery of your own being. When religion fails to do this, it has betrayed its primary mission, and all we are left with is dogma and belief.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body's direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body's response to a thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Of course, there are those churches today that are inspired by the real living presence of Christ, but as a whole, Christianity needs new life breathed into it. It needs to be challenged to awaken from the old structures that confine spirit, so that the perennial spirit of awakening can flourish once again.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind. Nonforgiveness is the very nature of the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive. Only you can. You become present, you enter your body, you feel the vibrant peace and stillness that emanate from Being. That is why Jesus said: "Before you enter the temple, forgive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you an immediate feeling of satisfaction but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
whatever you fight, you strengthyen. What you resist, persists. "A New Earth":War is a mind set ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The beginning of the spiritual journey is what I call "life after awakening".
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain. Even if both of your parents were enlightened, you would still find yourself growing up in a largely unconscious world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We are given a glimpse of that same happiness, which we now call awakening or enlightenment, ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions! ...
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
basic or underlying nature of human beings is gentleness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In accepting that suffering is a part of your daily existence, you could begin by examining the factors that normally give rise of feelings of discontent and mental unhappiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Take responsibility for your life. Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant inner Being nor the Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego is not an object; it's more like a process that follows through on the proclivity for grasping, and for holding on to fixed ideas and identities. What we call ego is really an ever-changing perception, and although it is central to our narrative story, it is not a thing. It therefore cannot really die, and cannot be killed or transcended. This tendency for grasping arises when we misperceive the constant flow of our body and mind and mistake it for a solid, unchanging self. We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self— because it never existed in the first place. The key point is that there is no ego to kill.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
For the ego to survive, it must make time -- past and future -- more important than the present moment. The ego cannot tolerate becoming friendly with the present moment, except briefly just after it got what it wanted. But nothing can satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs your life, there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Due to a complete lack of self-awareness, they cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the event.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
every person carries the seed of enlightenment within, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever. That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite for any authentic relationship. The ego always either wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it is in a state of utter indifference: It doesn't care about you. And so, the three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining), and indifference.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I am convinced that happiness is not possible unless it is based on freedom.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock time" - but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment means rising above thought, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer. It's not obvious until you look at it, but when we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in the world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn't actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. At that moment, we begin to experience a sense of isolation, where we no longer feel connected to each other in a very rich and human way, but we find ourselves receding more and more into the world of our minds, into the world of our own creation.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is self-created - some form of unconscious resistance to what *is*. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True inquiry is experiential ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Women are regaining the function that is their birthright and, therefore, comes to them more naturally than it does to men: to be a bridge between the manifested world and the Unmanifested, between physicality and spirit.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego cannot distinguish between a situation and its interpretation of and reaction to that situation. You might say, "What a dreadful day," without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance. In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."2 What is more, suffering or negativity is often misperceived by the ego as pleasure because up to a point the ego strengthens itself through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Because ego is frequently identified in negative terms, especially among Buddhists, my father made a point of reminding me that we also have a healthy ego—or a healthy sense of self. This relates to aspects of self that intuitively know right from wrong, that can discern between protection and harm, that instinctively know what is virtuous and wholesome. We trip ourselves up only when we become attached to these basic instincts and create inflated stories around them. For example, I had used ego in a positive way to explore, and then maintain, monastic discipline. But if I were to think, Oh, I am such a pure monk, I maintain my vows so perfectly, then I would be in trouble. When I examined my difficulties with too much newness all at once, I could see ego-self as a process, not as a solid thing.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever. The Spanish language is the most honest in regard to conventional notions of love: Te quiero means "I want you" as well as "I love you." The other expression for "I love you," te amo, which does not have this ambiguity, is rarely used—perhaps because true love is just as rare.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we're willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that's really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don't insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it's just an image, it's just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They'll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we're not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
So with awakening, the stakes go up. The more awake we get, the higher the stakes get. I remember when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery for a while. The abbess there, a wonderful woman, talked about this process of awakening as climbing a ladder. With each step you go, you have less and less tendency to look down. You have less tendency to act in ways you know aren't true or to speak in ways you know aren't true or do things you know aren't coming from truth. You start to realize that the consequences have become greater; the more awake we get, the greater the consequences are. Finally, the consequences of acting outside of truth become immense; the slightest action or behavior that's not in accordance with the truth can be unbearable to us.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
There is a place for mind and mind knowledge. It is in the practical realm of day-to-day living. However, when it takes over all aspects of your life, including your relationships with other human beings and with nature, it becomes a monstrous parasite that, unchecked, may well end up killing all life on the planet and finally itself by ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Rather, genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness has no experience of its own appearance, beginning, birth, duration, disappearance or death.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
there is another source of worth and dignity from which you can relate to other fellow human beings. You can relate to them because you are still a human being, within the human community. You share that bond. And that human bond is enough to give rise to a sense of worth and dignity. That bond can become a source of consolation in the event that you lose everything else.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Here is the key: End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I want you to achieve what I never achieved; I want you to be somebody in the eyes of the world, so that I too can be somebody through you. Don't disappoint me. I sacrificed so much for you. My disapproval of you is intended to make you feel so guilty and uncomfortable that you finally conform to my wishes. And it goes without saying that I know what's best for you. I love you and I will continue to love you if you do what I know is right for you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate—right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
What "I" could there be apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as "my life," and I don't have a life. I am life. I and life are one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace. The ego doesn't like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[...]in a true awakenin, it is realized very clearly that even the awakening itself is not personal. It is universal Spirit or universal consciousness that wakes up to itself. Rather than the "me" waking up, what we are wakes up from the "me". What we are wakes up from the seeker. What we are wakes up from the seeking.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We can only start to allow consciousness to wake up from its identification with thought and feeling, with body and mind and personality, by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The usual pattern of thought creating emotion is reversed in the case of the pain-body, at least initially. Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative. The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda - the bliss of Being. Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background without which these experiences would not be possible.Whenever there is beauty, kindness, the recognition of the goodness of simple things in your life, look for the background to that experience within yourself. But don't look for it as if you were looking for something. You cannot pin it down and say, "Now I have it," or grasp it mentally and define it in some way. It is like the cloudless sky. It has no form. It is space; it is stillness, the sweetness of Being and infinitely more than these words, which are only pointers. When you are able to sense it directly within yourself, it deepens. So when you appreciate something simple - a sound, a sight, a touch - when you see beauty, when you feel loving kindness toward another, sense the inner spaciousness that is the source and background to that experience.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You don't have to wait for something "meaningful" to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The "waiting to start living" syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
…you don't die; the illusion of a separate self dies. Still, it may feel like you are going to die. Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents' pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead."
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Paul Cézanne referred when he said, 'The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will trigger a revolution.'* It is the revolution to which Max Planck, developer of quantum theory, referred when he said, 'I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
Aspiration is not so much a matter of the mind as of the heart, in that it is a reflection of what you cherish, love, and value most. You do not need to be reminded of what you truly love, only of what you do not love. And what you actually love is most truly reflected in your actions, not in what you feel, think, or say.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
awareness of the inner body has other benefits in the physical realm. One of them is a significant slowing down of the aging of the physical body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is an incredible diversity among human lives, infinite variations among people with respect to how they can experience a sense of closeness. This realization alone offers us a great opportunity. It means that at this very moment we have vast resources of intimacy available to us. Intimacy is all around us. Today, so many of us are oppressed by a feeling of something missing in our lives, intensely suffering from a lack of intimacy. This is particularly true when we go through the inevitable periods in our life when we're not involved in a romantic relationship or when the passion wanes from a relationship. There's a widespread notion in our culture that deep intimacy is best achieved within the context of a passionate romantic relationship—that Special Someone who we set apart from all others. This can be a profoundly limiting viewpoint, cutting us off from other potential sources of intimacy, and the cause of much misery and unhappiness when that Special Someone isn't there. But we have within our power the means to avoid this; we need only courageously expand our concept of intimacy to include all the other forms that surround us on a daily basis. By broadening our definition of intimacy, we open ourselves to discovering many new and equally satisfying ways of connecting with others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment—the observing consciousness—cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists—all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm—and yet all worlds are ultimately one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn't know it is just a thought. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means "I am in danger," and it responds accordingly, even though you may be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, breathing becomes rapid. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. Part of it is fed back to the mind and generates even more anxious thought. The rest of the energy turns toxic and interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
they are no more than unconscious players in the egoic game, a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose. It is, in the words of Shakespeare, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."1 Amazingly, Shakespeare arrived at this conclusion without having the benefit of television. If the egoic ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But isn't a life based on seeking personal happiness by nature self-centered, even self-indulgent? Not necessarily. In fact, survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are often socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative and are able to tolerate life's daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The only factor that can give you refuge or protection from the destructive effects of anger and hatred is your practice of tolerance and patience.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges--the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... the ego is a derived sense of self...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign that the ego has returned, as are negative reactions when we encounter obstacles.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
ENLIGHTENMENT: RISING ABOVE THOUGHT Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world? Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there. When you inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to enter.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
occur. I have noticed with concern, for example, that not only certain politicians, but also some commentators in respectable publications are increasingly portraying Russia and/or China as the "enemy." Thoughts can spread like a virus, and if thoughts proliferate in the collective psyche, they distort our perceptions and cause us to act as if they were true, and so subsequently they manifest as our reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The history of humanity, on both the individual and the collective scales, is the drama of this loss of our true identity and the subsequent search to regain it.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn't anything that isn't made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training, we can change; we can transform ourselves. Within Buddhist practice there are various methods of trying to sustain a calm mind when some disturbing event happens. Through repeated practice of these methods we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down. And, although my own experience may be very little, I have found this to be true in my own small practice. So, if I receive some tragic news, at that moment I may experience some disturbance within my mind, but it goes very quickly. Or, I may become irritated and develop some anger, but again, it dissipates very quickly. There is no effect on the deeper mind. No hatred. This was achieved through gradual practice; it didn't happen overnight.'Certainly not. The Dalai Lama has been engaged in training his mind since he was four years old.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honoured, but nothing matters.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As I watched and observed, day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, one day I had an epiphany: "Oh my gosh! Adults believe what they think! That's why they suffer! That's why they get into conflict. That's why they behave strangely, in ways that I don't understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head."What I realized was that adults spent a lot of time thinking, and more important than that—and more odd, it seemed to me—they actually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one's thinking and beliefs.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
The human being is what links consciousness to its own infinite expressions in form. Through the form of an awake human being, consciousness becomes conscious of itself as both formlessness and as all forms. This is why, to the true sage, everything is divine, whole, and complete. Everything is God, the Self.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you hate what you are doing, complain about your surroundings, curse things that are happening or have happened, or when your internal dialogue consists of shoulds and shouldn'ts, of blaming and accusing, then you are arguing with what is, arguing with that which is always already the case. You are making Life into an enemy and Life says, "War is what you want, and war is what you get." External reality, which always reflects back to you your inner state, is then experienced as hostile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the "normal" state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or even madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react to someone else's success as if that success had taken something away from "me." It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is no substitute for finding true purpose. But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it." [Gospel of Thomas 113] ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
It is our suffering that is the most basic element that we share with others, the factor that unifies us with all living creatures. We ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down. Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes's statement "I think, therefore I am" very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, "The consciousness that says ‘I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says "I am." If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[T]he moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In order to find what the concept of God is pointing to, you must let go of your image of God and every concept you have about God. You must dare to be void of all concepts and enter into perfect Emptiness, perfect stillness, and perfect silence. You must forget everything you have ever learned about God. It won't help you. It may comfort you, but such comfort is imaginary; it is an illusion. Let go of all the false comforts of the mind. Let them all come to an end. The end must be experienced fully in Stillness. When you let all images, all concepts, all hopes, and all beliefs end, Stillness is experienced. Experience the core of Stillness. Dive into it and surrender fully. In full surrender to Stillness, you directly experience That to which the concept of God points. In that direct experience, you awaken from the dream of the mind and realize that the concept of God points to who you truly are...
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
see the sameness of being in every human.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What could be more heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and some heavy minerals into other precious stones.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When there is stress, it is usually a sign that the ego has returned, and you are cutting yourself off from the creative power of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And then, just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you"—the mind—did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
aware Presence loses its apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure Awareness alone, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as the screen does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of any of the objects or characters in a movie, although it is their sole reality, so the knowing with which all knowledge and experience are known does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of whatever is known or experienced. Thus, it is unlimited or infinite.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One of the positive side-effects of maintaining a very high degree of awareness of death is that it will prepare the individual to such an extent that, when the individual actually faces death, he or she will be in a better position to maintain his or her presence of mind. Especially in Tantric Buddhism, it is considered that the state of mind which one experiences at the point of death is extremely subtle and, because of the subtlety of the level of that consciousness, it also has a great power and impact upon one's mental continuum. In Tantric practices we find a lot of emphasis placed on reflections upon the process of death, so that the individual at the time of death not only retains his or her presence of mind, but also is in a position to utilize that subtle state of consciousness effectively towards the realization of the path. From the Tantric perspective, the entire process of existence is explained in terms of the three stages known as 'death', the 'intermediate state' and 'rebirth'. All of these three stages of existence are seen as states or manifestations of the consciousness and the energies that accompany or propel the consciousness, so that the intermediate state and rebirth are nothing other than various levels of the subtle consciousness and energy. An example of such fluctuating states can be found in our daily existence, when during the 24-hour day we go through a cycle of deep sleep, the waking period and the dream state. Our daily existence is in fact characterized by these three stages. As death becomes something familiar to you, as you have some knowledge of its processes and can recognize its external and internal indications, you are prepared for it. According to my own experience, I still have no confidence that at the moment of death I will really implement all these practices for which I have prepared. I have no guarantee! Sometimes when I think about death I get some kind of excitement. Instead of fear, I have a feeling of curiosity and this makes it much easier for me to accept death. Of course, my only burden if I die today is, 'Oh, what will happen to Tibet? What about Tibetan culture? What about the six million Tibetan people's rights?' This is my main concern. Otherwise, I feel almost no fear of death. In my daily practice of prayer I visualize eight different deity yogas and eight different deaths. Perhaps when death comes all my preparation may fail. I hope not! I think these practices are mentally very helpful in dealing with death. Even if there is no next life, there is some benefit if they relieve fear. And because there is less fear, one can be more fully prepared. If you are fully prepared then, at the moment of death, you can retain your peace of mind. I think at the time of death a peaceful mind is essential no matter what you believe in, whether it is Buddhism or some other religion. At the moment of death, the individual should not seek to develop anger, hatred and so on. I think even non-believers see that it is better to pass away in a peaceful manner, it is much happier. Also, for those who believe in heaven or some other concept, it is also best to pass away peacefully with the thought of one's own God or belief in higher forces. For Buddhists and also other ancient Indian traditions, which accept the rebirth or karma theory, naturally at the time of death a virtuous state of mind is beneficial.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
full attention means full acceptance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever behavior the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"This is not to say that all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become "I.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"As Jesus says, "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon earth, and men do not see it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman's best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son's death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and on life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you Are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you have a liberating effect on others.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
If we use the brilliant human mind in the wrong way, it is really a disaster.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect towards the other.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish—that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of a dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made a separate entity out of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking cannot itself go to the heart of experience; it can only go to an imaginary past or future.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One's whole sense of passion and of drive belongs to the self, to the ego, even when it's very positive or for the benefit of all beings. It's very hard to convey what moves you when all of that is gone. It comes from a place that is very, very simple. In the Zen tradition, they say, when you're hungry you eat, and when you're tired you sleep. That doesn't sound very exciting, but it's pointing to the simplicity of a life no longer driven by the inner forces of desire and aversion—by wanting to accomplish, or to escape, or even to convey something.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
About 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The word "identification" is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning "same" and facere, which means "to make." So when I identify with something, I "make it the same." The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my "identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every object of the mind is itself mind.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In ancient times, people having this experience entered protected environments such as monasteries—places where those around them would understand. They'd be put in a nice little cell and left alone to let the process happen. They were fortunate to experience awakening in a context in which it was understood, seen as normal, and given the space it required. In today's society, most of us having these realizations are not living in monasteries; we are not in a particularly supportive environment. In fact, in our society it is possible to have an amazing realization on Saturday and be back in the office on Monday morning. If your mind is still blown out in bliss, this can be very disorienting! Yet it's the reality of the situation we live in. Most modern people do not have the luxury of sitting in a cave for a few months and letting things shake down naturally. This is the state of our world, and it can be a challenge for some people.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
mind is awareness in motion; awareness is mind at rest.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
And I think that if that human ability, that human intelligence, develops in an unbalanced way, without being properly counterbalanced with compassion, then it can become destructive. It can lead to disaster.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When instead of reacting against a situation, you merge with it, the solution arises out of the situation itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
In reality, which means in our actual experience, all experience is one seamless substance. The duality between the inside self and the outside object, world or other is never actually experienced. It is always imagined.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course. Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you walk through a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life all around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life. Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work. Molecules are rearranging themselves. So death isn't to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms. What can you learn from this? Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
... the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions -- as they happen. This is not really a 'doing,' but an alert 'seeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[...]in a true awakening, it is realized very clearly that even the awakening itself is not personal. It is universal Spirit or universal consciousness that wakes up to itself. Rather than the "me" waking up, what we are wakes up from the "me". What we are wakes up from the seeker. What we are wakes up from the seeking.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an indivisible whole in which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in isolation....... mental labels of 'good' and 'bad' are ultimately illusory. They always imply a limited perspective and so are true only relatively and temporarily.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So, despite the fact that the process of relating to others might involve hardships, quarrels, and cursing, we have to try to maintain an attitude of friendship and warmth in order to lead a way of life in which there is enough interaction with other people to enjoy a happy life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
There *are* no problems. Only situations - to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the 'isness' of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It's good to be reminded that hubris, left unchecked, can have serious consequences in our lives. If we don't notice soon enough, we might just realize too late that we've lost some very important things in our lives. The beauty of this story is that it reminds us: keep your feet firmly planted on the soil, keep your consciousness and your heart open, and stay available to this relative world and all the human beings within it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
But generally speaking, one begins by identifying those factors which lead to happiness and those factors which lead to suffering. Having done this, one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness. That is the way.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we ask, "Who am I without the me-concept? What am I without the me?" instantly the wordless can open up, the concept-less can open up. Allow the experience of that, because that is the living answer to the questions, "What am I? Who am I?" This is not the dead conceptual answer, but the living answer. It is alive! In this moment of radiant awakeness there's a mystery unfolding unto itself, moment to moment to moment. This living state of being, call it what you will, is the only thing that you always have been, always will be, and are right now. You are not a human being, you are being appearing as human.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Studying the complexities of the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won't take you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you don't recognize those thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not finding—because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place, person, or condition will ever satisfy you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something goes seriously "wrong"—illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, breakup of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death—know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So what happens if you withdraw attention from the objects in space and become aware of space itself? What is the essence of this room? The furniture, pictures, and so on are in the room, but they are not the room. The floor, walls, and ceiling define the boundary of the room, but they are not the room either. So what is the essence of the room? Space, of course, empty space. There would be no "room" without it. Since space is "nothing," we can say that what is not there is more important than what is there. So become aware of the space that is all around you. Don't think about it. Feel it, as it were. Pay attention to "nothing." As you do that, a shift in consciousness takes place inside you. Here is why. The inner equivalent to objects in space such as furniture, walls, and so on are your mind objects: thoughts, emotions, and the objects of the senses. And the inner equivalent of space is the consciousness that enables your mind objects to be, just as space allows all things to be. So if you withdraw attention from things—objects in space—you automatically withdraw attention from your mind objects as well. In other words: You cannot think and be aware of space—or of silence, for that matter. By becoming aware of the empty space around you, you simultaneously become aware of the space of no-mind, of pure consciousness: the Unmanifested. This is how the contemplation of space can become a portal for you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Although I speak from my own experience, I feel that no one has the right to impose his or her beliefs on another person. I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable for you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Questioner: What's the best thing I can do for my awakening? Adyashanti: Be with an enlightened teacher and listen.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. "How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thoughts that trigger emotional responses in the body may sometimes come so fast that before the mind has had time to voice them, the body has already responded with an emotion, and the emotion has turned into a reaction. Those thoughts exist at a preverbal stage and could be called unspoken, unconscious assumptions. They have their origin in a person's past conditioning, usually from early childhood. "People cannot be trusted" would be an example of such an unconscious assumption in a person whose primordial relationships, that is to say, with parents or siblings, were not supportive and did not inspire trust.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet—in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous. Although such an image can help you temporarily, pay more attention to the feeling than to any image that may arise. An image, no matter how beautiful or powerful, is already defined in form, so there is less scope for penetrating more deeply.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
acquired states of mind bring the spiritual search to a temporary end.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future. Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now. Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret. It is certainly not taught in churches and temples. If you go to a church, you may hear readings from the Gospels such as "Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," or "Nobody who puts his hands to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God." Or you might hear the passage about the beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now and are provided for abundantly by God. The depth and radical nature of these teachings are not recognized. No one seems to realize that they are meant to be lived and so bring about a profound inner transformation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When our minds start to open, we're no longer in a constant state of evaluation and judgment. Naturally, then, our senses open—and we can really see what is before us. Our eyes open in a different way, our hearing opens in a different way, our emotions open, our hearts open to all of existence. We see how judging and condemning actually close our hearts and harden us to our experience of life and others.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events. Success ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now, and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
From the perspective of the mind, this non-practice of abiding or resting in the experience of being aware or awareness itself seems to be a blank or dull state. However, in time, awareness's innate qualities of imperturbable peace and causeless joy emerge, in most cases gradually.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Meditation is what we are, not what we do; the separate self is what we do, not what we are.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
reading The Power of Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You need to be alert and honest to find out, for example, whether your sense of self-worth is bound up with things you possess. Do certain things induce a subtle feeling of importance or superiority? Does the lack of them make you feel inferior to others who have more than you? Do you casually mention things you own or show them off to increase your sense of worth in someone else's eyes and through them in your own? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You teach through being, through demonstrating the peace of God. You become the "light of the world," an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you realize that what you react to in others is also in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28) ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness. Not only your psychological form but also your physical form—your body—becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause—the resistance pattern—has not been dissolved.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As the great Indian scholar Shantideva has said: 'If there is a way to overcome the suffering, then there is no need to worry; if there is no way to overcome the suffering, then there is no use in worrying.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Can anxious thought add a single day to your life? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are! —Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Flap your wings -- which translates as 'let go of the story' -- and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react tosomeone else's success as if that success had taken something away from"me." It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's successcurtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need towelcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind that seeks awareness is like a current in the ocean in search of water. Such a mind is destined for endless dissatisfaction.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies"—his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is a scripture in the Buddhist tradition called the Heart Sutra, which says that there is no birth, no old age, and no death, and no end to birth, old age, or death. This is a very important part of the sutra. There is no birth, no old age, and no death. This is true from the absolute point of view. But unless we've also realized, simultaneously, that there is no end to birth, old age, and death, then our realization is not complete.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The apparently separate self or finite 'I' around whom all experience revolves is the true and only 'I' of eternal, infinite awareness—the 'I' of God's infinite, self-aware being that shines in each of our minds as the knowledge 'I am'—temporarily coloured by thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions but never being or becoming anything other than itself.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Unhappiness, which is simply the veiling of ever-present underlying happiness, is the result of this artificial separation.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Nor have we, aware presence, ever become sad, angry, anxious, depressed, in need, agitated, jealous, etc. At the same time, we are intimately one with all such feelings when they are present. Although we are the substance of all such feelings, just as the screen is the substance of all images, we are inherently free of them. Unhappiness is made out of our self, but our self is never unhappy.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is nothing that you need to understand before you can become present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This adult world has an insane quality to it. Everybody's going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what's real and what's not, pretending they know what's right, pretending they know who's wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we're afraid of. We don't really want to admit that nobody really knows.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
As you become more conscious of your present reality, you may suddenly get certain insights as to why your conditioning functions in those particular ways—for example, why your relationships follow certain patterns—and you may remember things that happened in the past or see them more clearly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We can see making breakfast as mundane work or as a privilege—it just depends on our way of looking.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
"I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind." When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair—and one step away from enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are not the ego, so when you become aware of the ego in you, it does not mean you know who you are - it means you know who you are not. But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
One of the most common of these traps is a sense of meaninglessness. From our new view of reality, we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego's desire to find meaning in life is actually a substitute for the perception of being life itself. The search for meaning in life is a surrogate for the knowledge that we are life. Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone disconnected from life will look for purpose.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Nothing ever happens to the knowing with which all experience is known.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
It may then seem that you had something very precious, and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power is a very dangerous aphrodisiac to the ego; many people are deeply attracted to power. Even in our ordinary everyday world, issues of power arise. If you lead a company or you're a manager, you're exercising power over people's lives; they have to fit in with the structure and power dynamics that were put in place by the people above them. Power at any level, whether its an intrinsic power or a relative power due to your position in the world, can really bring to light and activate desire, because power begets the desire for more power. In every esoteric spiritual tradition there are grave warnings about indulging in these kinds of powers and seeking out the psychic abilities that may come with awakening. The usual counsel is neither to push away or deny these powers, nor to grasp or desire or indulge in them. In Jesus' case, what we get through the story is a vital reflection of what it means to use power wisely. Jesus is a man of great authority, great inner power, and great charisma, and people are deeply attracted to him, whether for healing or spiritual transformation or simply to be in his presence. In example after example, he wields this power with wisdom and love. Throughout the Gospels we see how Jesus utilizes power, when he utilizes it and when he pulls back and leaves things as they are. He's a master of the wise use of power.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
It's just natural. It's not better than or higher than anything or anybody. It's simply the natural state of being. It's totally democratic. It's the inheritance of everybody.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"A similar question in the Zen tradition is this: "If not now, when? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being can be felt as the ever-present I am that is beyond name and form. To feel and thus to know that you are and to abide in that deeply rooted state is enlightenment, is the truth that Jesus says will make you free.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
natural state of felt oneness with Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune—that is, highly conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But I think the main thing is motivation—to have a sincere motivation to help. Then you just do the best you can, and you don't have to worry about it.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
inner state. You need to be extremely alert and absolutely present to be able to detect them. Whenever you do, it is a moment of awakening, of disidentification from the mind. Here is one of the most common negative states that is easily overlooked, precisely because ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Egos are drawn to bigger egos. Darkness cannot recognize light. Only light can recognize light. So don't believe that the light is outside you or that it can only come through one particular form. If only your master is an incarnation of God, then who are you? Any kind of exclusivity is identification with form, and identification with form means ego, no matter how well disguised. Use the master's presence to reflect your own identity beyond name and form back to you and to become more intensely present yourself. You will soon realize that there is no "mine" or "yours" in presence. Presence is one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And the miracle is that when you are no longer placing an impossible demand on it, every situation, person, place, or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"When I obtain this or am free of that—then I will be okay." This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Making it" in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to "fail" so that your life can have meaning.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
most humans see only the outer forms, unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their own essence and identify only with their own physical and psychological form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality. For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you feel your life lacks significance or is too stressful or tedious, it is because you haven't brought that dimension into your life yet. Being conscious in what you do has not yet become your main aim. The new earth arises as more and more people discover that their main purpose in life is to bring the light of consciousness into this world and so use whatever they do as a vehicle for consciousness. The joy of Being is the joy of being conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Part of being awake is being willing to be crucified. If we think that to be awake means the whole world will agree with us, then we are in a total delusion.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love is the experience of our shared being. When we love another person we feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that the separation between us dissolves.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between where you don't want to be (now) and where you want to be (the projected future). Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting, snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself. Imagine your birth as an act of pouring yourself forth into life as a loving means of redemption. Imagine your human life as what you have come to redeem. And when you've fully awakened to all of it, then you've fully redeemed your human incarnation.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is a freedom that can be discovered in relationship, whether it be with spiritual community or with another individual, where something much bigger than any individual is born. What I am speaking about is an intimacy that flowers in the presence of Truth. The depth of this intimacy can be a vehicle through which oneness is experienced. For some, this degree of intimacy is positive beyond belief; for others, it is the cause of mistrust and fear. True intimacy always threatens the sense of separateness. ...
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Do not fight against the body, for in doing so you are fighting against your own reality. You are your body. The body that you can see and touch is only a thin illusory veil. Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into Being, into Life Unmanifested. Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life—birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner body, you are forever one with God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course, means "have no enemies.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be predictably preceded by vast upheavals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you'll see that a thought simply occurs on its own—it arises without any intention on your part.In response to this, we're taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"fed up with being unhappy." Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is never possible to love a person or an object. Love is defined precisely by its unconditional quality.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Kasan, a Zen teacher and monk, was to officiate at a funeral of a famous nobleman. As he stood there waiting for the governor of the province and other lords and ladies to arrive, he noticed that the palms of his hands were sweaty.The next day he called his disciples together and confessed he was not yet ready to be a true teacher. He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human. He then left and became the pupil of another master. He returned to his former disciples eight years later, enlightened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The law that outflow determines inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: "Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap."1 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So don't seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody "fails" sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now—nobody else is—and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself is being yourself, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that is to say, what is or what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self. You could then move to a simple cabin, give up your wealth, and regain an identity by seeing yourself and being seen as more spiritual than others. How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others. You need others to give you a sense of self, and if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought—or the emotion or sense perception ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
ADYA I will try to explain what happened experientially. At the moment of awakening, it was as though I was completely outside who I thought I was. There was a vast, vast, vast emptiness. In that vast emptiness, in that infinite emptiness, there was the smallest, smallest, smallest point of light you could imagine. And ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that determines the future, then what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So the only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more you make your thoughts and beliefs into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In order to find what the concept of God is pointing to, you must let go of your image of God and every concept you have about God. You must dare to be void of all concepts and enter into perfect Emptiness, perfect stillness, and perfect silence. You must forget everything you have ever learned about God. It won't help you. It may comfort you, but such comfort is imaginary; it is an illusion. Let go of all the false comforts of the mind. Let them all come to an end. The end must be experienced full yin Stillness. When you let all images, all concepts, all hopes, and all beliefs end, Stillness is experienced. Experience the core of Stillness. Dive into it and surrender fully. In full surrender to Stillness, you directly experience That to which the concept of God points. In that direct experience, you awaken from the dream of the mind and realize that the concept of God points to who you truly are....
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current state of mind dominance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is experience itself. Experience is not a collection of objects known by an inside self. 'Experience' is just another name for our self, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
"I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." That's the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every word on this page is in fact only made of paper. It only expresses the nature of the paper, although it may describe the moon.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What the world doesn't tell you—because it doesn't know—is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful. Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This one question -- "What do I know for certain?"-- is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-- things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
how close is the knowing element in any experience to the experience itself? Closer than close! They are one and the same thing.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself. For many people, a large part of their mentalemotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that. By doing this, you make others or a situation "wrong" and yourself "right." Through being "right," you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego. Can you observe those patterns within yourself and recognize the complaining voice in your head for what it is? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachingspoint. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your needs and what matters to you in life -- and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a criterion to find out how deeply you know yourself. What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you. So you may want to ask yourself the question: What are the things that upset and disturb me? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Even in the presence of thinking, there may be the belief in time but never the actual experience of time. There is just the current experience, appearing now. Age is never an experience; it is always a concept.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always 'with you'.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The thought is not the thing that it represents. Try to get that right down to your core, right down to the marrow in your bones and into the blood that flows through your veins: the thought is not the thing. Then embrace that intermediary step of unknowing things, and as you enter the unknown, you'll see it is not a place; it is the living reality of things underneath the idea of the unknown. The point is not to spend the rest of your life saying, "I do not know" to everything; it is to step out of the known and directly perceive. You do this by entering the lived reality of not knowing, which takes you out of the known, out of the idea and into the reality of you, of anything, and of anyone. It's a place where words are useful tools, but you are no longer trapped by them.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind-dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt threatened by them and often ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As I listened to this priest, all the presence and mystery disappeared from the room and everything returned to the relative world.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The world as it appears to us now is, as I said, largely a reflection of the egoic mind. Fear being an unavoidable consequence of egoic delusion, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Dogmas—religious, political, scientific—arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know." Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A complete stranger seems to be looking back at you, and in her eyes there is hatred, hostility, bitterness, or anger. When she speaks to you, it is not your spouse or partner who is speaking but the pain-body speaking through them. Whatever she is saying is the pain-body's version of reality, a reality completely distorted by fear, hostility, anger, and a desire to inflict and receive more pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love—even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Again, the only way to know that we've seen into the true nature of something is that the story we're telling ourselves releases.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy.The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, "Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Doing is never enough if you neglect Being. The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing. If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough 'doings' to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won't. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This explosion may be fierce, but it may just as well be a gentle, almost imperceptible dissolving.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity—which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
there is a reference to the four factors of fulfillment, or happiness: wealth, worldly satisfaction, spirituality, and enlightenment. Together they embrace the totality of an individual's quest for happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It is much like when you have a dream at night and are identified with some character and think you are different from all the others. When you wake up from your dream in the morning, you realize that you are not the character in the dream. You are the dreamer. Everything in the dream came from you. This is a metaphor for spiritual awakening, because when you wake up spiritually, you realize you are not the body-mind. But what is usually missed is that you are the ultimate source of the entire dream. I think this is pretty easy to understand. In one sense, you see that you are not anyone, but in the other, you realize that you are the source of all.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
You are still seeking outside, and you cannot get out of the seeking mode. Maybe the next workshop will have the answer, maybe that new technique. To you I would say: Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of identification the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn't mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity. Anticonsumerism or antiprivate ownership would be another thought form, another mental position, that can replace identification with posessions. Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong. As we shall see later, making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of deductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords of the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" is identified with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But the utter intimacy of the knower and the known is a well-known and familiar experience.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And then I noticed there were all sorts of other points, points, and I could enter each one of those points, and each one of those points was a different world, a different time, and I was a different person, a totally different manifestation in each one of those points. I could go into each one of them and see a totally different dream of self and a totally different world that was being dreamed as well. For the most part, what I saw was anything that was unresolved about the dream of "me" in a particular lifetime. There were certain confusions, fears, hesitations, and doubts that were unresolved in particular lifetimes. In certain lifetimes, what was unresolved was a feeling of confusion about what happened at the time of death. In one lifetime, I drowned and did not know what was happening, and there was tremendous terror and confusion as the body ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
"The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious. Sometimes it even seems as if those who are not highly educated, those who are less sophisticated in terms of their educational training, are more innocent and more honest. Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This tendency seems to support H. L. Mencken's definition of a wealthy man: one whose income is $100 a year higher than his wife's sister's husband.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you want others to be happy practice compassion; and if you want yourself to be happy practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing or being aware is never modified by experience. It never moves or fluctuates. It is the only ...
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of consciousness now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I think the person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Since patience or tolerance comes from an ability to remain firm and steadfast and not be overwhelmed by the adverse situations or conditions that one faces, one should not see tolerance or patience as a sign of weakness, or giving in, but rather as a sign of strength, coming from a deep ability to remain firm. Responding to a trying situation with patience and tolerance rather than reacting with anger and hatred involves active restraint, which comes from a strong, self-disciplined mind.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness. The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As I often tell my students, the person you'll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."3 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All of a sudden there I was, standing there, holding my plate my of food at this wedding, and there was the realization that even though I don't see things the way most people around me see them, this is it. This is life, and it is absolutely wonderful, amazingly beautiful. The only thing left for me to do was to walk back into the world.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can't get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind always wants to categorize and compare, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations,you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
I've been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would 'let go of them' is itself simply one such pattern. These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens, so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and naturally realign themselves with this new understanding. In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self. What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object. To say 'I am', (in other words to assert that we are present), we must know that 'I am'. Being and knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience. But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are our self. That being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining in all experience. This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find ourselves as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes obvious we discover that it is not just the background but also the foreground. In other words, it is not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience. Completely relax the desire to find yourself as an object or to change your experience in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate, familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it. As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being), it is known as freedom and, as the substance of all things, it is known as beauty. However, more simply it is known just as 'I' or 'this'. Who Is? Q: All these questions about consciousness ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. ... Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality.... Things, bodies and egos, events, situations, thoughts, emotions, desires, ambitions, fears, drama... they comes, pretend to be all-important,...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future—which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is what occurs at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, when John the Baptist baptizes Jesus in the River of Jordan. "Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove." [Mark 1:10, NIV] When you awaken, when spirit descends, the veil of your dream state is torn apart, and all of a sudden you're awakened to a new reality.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The person who is talking and making promises, however, is not the entity that commits the violence, and so you can be sure that it will happen again and again unless he becomes present, recognizes the pain-body within himself, and thus disidentifies from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There's no way to become happy. We simply need to stop doing the things that make us unhappy.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If we are absorbed in a movie it may seem at first that the screen lies behind the image. Likewise, if we are so captivated by experience that we overlook the simple experience of being aware or awareness itself, we may first locate it in the background of experience. In this first step, being aware or awareness itself is recognised as the subjective witness of all objective experience. Looking more closely we see that the screen is not just in the background of the image but entirely pervades it. Likewise, all experience is permeated with the knowing with which it is known. It is saturated with the experience of being aware or awareness itself. There is no part of a thought, feeling, sensation or perception that is not infused with the knowing of it. This second realisation collapses, at least to a degree, the distinction between awareness and its objects. In the third step, we understand that it is not even legitimate to claim that knowing, being aware or awareness itself pervades all experience, as if experience were one thing and awareness another. Just as the screen is all there is to an image, so pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is all there is to experience. All there is to a thought is thinking, and all there is to thinking is knowing. All there is to an emotion is feeling, and all there is to feeling is knowing. All there is to a sensation is sensing, and all there is to sensing is knowing. All there is to a perception is perceiving, and all there is to perceiving is knowing. Thus, all there is to experience is knowing, and it is knowing that knows this knowing. Being all alone, with nothing in itself other than itself with which it could be limited or divided, knowing or pure awareness is whole, perfect, complete, indivisible and without limits. This absence of duality, separation or otherness is the experience of love or beauty, in which any distinction between a self and an object, other or world has dissolved. Thus, love and beauty are the nature of awareness. In the familiar experience of love or beauty, awareness is tasting its own eternal, infinite reality. It is in this context that the painter Paul Cézanne said that art gives us the 'taste of nature's eternity'.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end. You live for the future, and when you achieve your goals, they don't satisfy you, at least not for long. When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning. Your doing then becomes not only a great deal more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
there is no need to go elsewhere for the truth. Let me show you how to go more deeply into what you already have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the greater scheme of things, human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings, and those who don't will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To see one's predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That is why the most sacred thing in life is death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You can relate to them because you are still a human being, within the human community. You share that bond. And that human bond is enough to give rise to a sense of worth, and dignity. That bond can become a source of consolation in the event that you lose everything else.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
THE EGO IS NOT PERSONAL On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative,"3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It read: 'Danger. All structures are unstable.' I said to my friend, 'That's a profound sutra [sacred scripture].' And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment depends to a large extent on believing that you are born for Freedom in this lifetime, and that it is available now, in this moment. The mind, which creates the past and future, keeps you out of the moment where the Truth of your Being can be discovered. In this moment, there is always Freedom and there is always peace. This moment in which you experience Stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
See clearly that we have no knowledge of our self ever having been born, changing, evolving, growing up or growing old and that we can never have the experience of death.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
I think that if one is seeking to build a truly satisfying relationship, the best way of bringing this about is to get to know the deeper nature of the person and relate to her or him on that level, instead of merely on the basis of superficial characteristics.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Be present as the watcher of your mind- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens—and it happens continuously for most people—you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self—your invisible and indestructible reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you think that people should be nice to one another, then byall means be nice. But when you project that belief onto thepeople and the world around you as if it were an objective reality,or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you putyourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Sincere students find sincere teachers, and sincere teachers find sincere students. The two go together like a box and its lid.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank. An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don't empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is a Possibility of freedom from suffering. By removing the causes of suffering, it is possible to attain a state of Liberation, a state free from suffering. According to Buddhist thought, the root causes of suffering are ignorance, craving, and hatred. These are called the 'three poisons of the mind.'These ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A Buddhist monk once told me: "All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know." What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The inability or rather unwillingness of the human mind to let go of the past is beautifully illustrated in the story of two Zen monks, Tanzan and Ekido, who were walking along a country road that had become extremely muddy after heavy rains. Near a village, they came upon a young woman who was trying to cross the road, but the mud was so deep it would have ruined the silk kimono she was wearing. Tanzan at once picked her up and carried her to the other side. The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn't restrain himself any longer. "Why did you carry that girl across the road?" he asked. "We monks are not supposed to do things like that." "I put the girl down hours ago," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans - all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea... . Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self—beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is; these are all portals you can use—but you only need to use one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
its 'outsideness', its 'not-me-ness', its 'somethingness'—that dissolves.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Yet the true meaning of in-between has nothing to do with physical references but is about the anxiety of dislocation, of having left behind a mental zone of comfort, and not yet having arrived anywhere that restores that ease.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The first stage of the awakening journey is the calling. The calling arrives when we first feel that spiritual impulse that galvanizes our attention. All of a sudden we sense a greater mystery to life that we seek to experience more deeply; it literally calls us.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
disappeared into the water. Seeing this lifetime and the confusion at the moment of death, I immediately knew what I had to do. I had to rectify the confusion and explain to the dream of me that I died, that I fell off a boat and drowned. When I did this, all of a sudden the confusion from that lifetime popped like a bubble, and there was a tremendous sense of freedom. Many past life dreams appeared, and each one of them seemed to focus on something that had been in conflict, something that was unresolved from a different incarnation. I went through each one of them and unhooked the confusion. TS Were you lying on a carpeted floor with your eyes closed, or something? ADYA No, actually, the strangest thing was that ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost. When I quote from the ancient religions or other teachings, it is to reveal their deeper meaning and thereby restore their transformative power—particularly for those readers who are followers of these religions or teachings. I say to them: there is no need to go elsewhere for the truth. Let me show you how to go more deeply into what you already have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is only thinking which seemingly reduces pure Awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and localisation, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness is not trying to change things; awareness is not trying to fixing anything. You can start to notice that there is this presence of awareness within you, which is not trying to change your humanness. It's not trying to alter you. Just as important, it's not trying to alter others. This awareness is totally inclusive. It is a state of being where everything is okay simply the way it is.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now - nobody else is - and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something—anything—and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the "isness" of all things. Move deeply into the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Now consider this: If there were nothing but silence, it wouldn't exist for you; you wouldn't know what it is. Only when sound appears does silence come into being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 8o to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself. At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much "noise.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Thinking comes to an end and our own being tastes itself as it is, as the experience of beauty.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Dalai Lama clearly has a set of basic beliefs that act as a substrate for all his actions: A belief in the underlying goodness of all human beings. A belief in the value of compassion. A policy of kindness. A sense of his commonality with all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Acute crises and dysfunction always precede or coincide with any evolutionary advancement or gain in consciousness. All life-forms need obstacles and challenges in order to evolve. In the case of the ego, most of the challenges it encounters are self-created through its unconscious patterns. Eventually, the ego brings about its own demise. In that sense, it can be considered a necessary precursor for the next stage in human evolution, which is the awakening of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: "The Sufi is the son of time present." And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire." Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it's necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source..
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Whatever the present moment contains,accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, "What a pretty flower," but that's just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don't truly see the flower, don't feel its essence, its holiness—just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own essence, their own holiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The opportunity that is concealed within every crisis does not manifest until all the facts of any given situation are acknowledged and fully accepted. As long as you deny them, as long as you try to escape from them or wish that things were different, the window of opportunity does not open up, and you remain trapped inside that situation, which will remain the same or deteriorate further.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Truth loves. It does not judge. It holds a big sword in its hands and can ruthlessly discern what is false and what is true, but it does not hold grudges. If you are not telling the truth to yourself, you will suffer. If it was not ruthless, there would be no learning. Truth doesn't spoon feed you.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The experience of being aware is in exactly the same condition now as it was two minutes ago, two days ago, two months ago, two years ago or twenty years ago. The awareness with which our experience as five-year-old girls or boys was known is exactly the same awareness with which our current experience is known. Thus, our essential nature of knowing, being aware or awareness itself has no age. It is for this reason that as we get older, we feel that we are not really getting older. The older we get, the more we feel that we have always been the same person. The sameness in ourself is the sameness of awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, dishonesty, propensity to violence, or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making. Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But there is another source of worth and dignity from which you can relate to other fellow human beings. You can relate to them because you are still a human being, within the human community. You share that bond. And that human bond is enough to give rise to a sense of worth and dignity. That bond can become a source of consolation in the event that you lose everything else.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Since time immemorial, flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds have held special significance for the human spirit. Like all life-forms, they are, of course, temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life, one Consciousness. Their special significance and the reason why humans feel such fascination for and affinity with them can be attributed to their ethereal quality. Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." [John 1:1, NIV, ESV] ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not. Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real. Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is—which is the only sane way to live—there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good—which includes the "bad." Seen from the perspective of the mind, however, there is good-bad, like-dislike, love-hate. Hence, in the Book of Genesis, it is said that Adam and Eve were no longer allowed to dwell in "paradise" when they "ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Then, I try to remind myself as far as my own motivation is concerned, I am sincere, and I tried my best.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
"I think" is just as false a statement as "I digest" or "I circulate my blood." Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This forgetting or overlooking of our most intimate being, although apparently such a small thing, in fact initiates almost all of our thoughts, feelings, activities and relationships and turns out to be the source of all unhappiness.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
"Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The truth, I would suggest, is that you poured yourself willingly into form out of infinite love in order to redeem the entirety of this life. When seen from that perspective, all of a sudden life looks very different. You stop holding back from life, your inner life or the life around you, because the kingdom of heaven is within and all around you. That's the message of the Jesus story.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
On the other hand, if you can maintain a calm, peaceful state of mind, then you can be a very happy person even if you have poor health.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You may have heard the Buddhist saying: "If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment." It is through the world and ultimately through you that the Unmanifested knows itself. You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mystery is always for thought, never for our self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how complaining, say, about a traffic jam, about politicians, about the "greedy wealthy" or the "lazy unemployed," or your colleagues or ex-spouse, men or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why. When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our true nature of eternal, infinite awareness is never completely forgotten or eclipsed by objective experience. However agitated or numbed objective experience may have rendered our mind, the memory of our eternity shines within it as the desire for happiness, or, in religious language, the longing for God.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is only one absolute Truth, and all other truths emanate from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"—and find that there is no death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is illogical to expect smiles from others if one does not smile oneself. Therefore, one can see that many things depend on one's own behaviour.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
If you stop investing it with "selfness," the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate—in love—or move ever more deeply into the Now together—into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it seeks is sympathy or pity or others' interest in my problems, "me and my story." Seeing oneself as a victim is an element in many egoic patterns, such as complaining, being offended, outraged, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Abundance comes only to those who already have it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system, becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
unclouded Awareness, knowing-being-loving itself. It is not known by someone.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness. When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative. In any thought activity, make it a habit to go back and forth every few minutes or so between thinking and an inner kind of listening, an inner stillness. We could say: don't just think with your head, think with your whole body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you approach others with the thought of compassion, that will automatically reduce fear and allow an openness with other people. It creates a positive, friendly atmosphere. With that attitude, you can approach a relationship in which you, yourself, initially create the possibility of receiving affection or a positive response from the other person. And with that attitude, even if the other person is unfriendly or doesn't respond to you in a positive way, then at least you've approached the person with a feeling of openness that gives you a certain flexibility and the freedom to change your approach as needed.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In fact, we don't know objects; we just know 'knowing'. And who is it that knows 'knowing'? 'Knowing' is not known by something or someone outside or other than itself. 'Knowing' is known by 'knowing'. In other words, all that is experienced in the experience of an object, other or world is 'knowing'.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What the world doesn't tell you—because it doesn't know—is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
India, a country considered by many to be the birthplace of humanity's quest for spiritual enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
She said she was ready to listen. I asked: "Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss?" There were a few minutes of silence after the last question.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In this exploration the deeper layers, such as feelings of fear, guilt, shame, inadequacy, unlovableness, etc. are allowed to surface without resistance or agenda and slowly reveal the sense of separation that lies at their heart.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities are needed: surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is not about life everlasting. It is about eternal life.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
There exists only the present instant … a Now which always and without end is itself new. MEISTER ECKHART ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"Become at ease with the state of "not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you add a goal to the enjoyment of what you do, the energy-field or vibrational frequency changes. A certain degree of what we might call structural tension is now added to enjoyment, and so it turns into enthusiasm. At the height of creative activity fueled by enthusiasm, there will be enormous intensity and energy behind what you do. You will feel like an arrow that is moving toward the target—and enjoying the journey.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We can see how a calm, affectionate, wholesome state of mind has beneficial effects on our health and physical well-being. Conversely, feelings of frustration, fear, agitation, and anger can be destructive to our health.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When the dimension of space is lost or rather not known, the things of the world assume an absolute importance, a seriousness and heaviness that in truth they do not have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"But I don't know who I am. I don't know what it means to be myself." If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are—the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In other words, in reality, there are not two things—one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen. Two things (or a multiplicity and diversity of things) only come into apparent existence when their true reality—the screen—is overlooked. Experience is like that. All we know is experience but there is no independent 'we' or 'I' that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you're willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.‘I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with.' ‘Maybe,' I thought, ‘only one of them is real.'I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing,' as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marvelling at the beauty and aliveness of it all. That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Humility involves having the capacity to take a more confrontation stance, having the capacity to retaliate if you wish, yet deliberately deciding not to do so. That is what I would call genuine humility.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In order to fulfil the desire for happiness, most people engage in a relentless search in the realm of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to wake.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you contemplate the big, full sunrise, the more mindful and concentrated you are, the more the beauty of the sunrise is revealed to you. Suppose you are offered a cup of tea, very fragrant, very good tea. If your mind is distracted, you cannot really enjoy the tea. You have to be mindful of the tea, you have to be concentrated on it, so the tea can reveal its fragrance and wonder to you. That is why mindfulness and concentration are such sources of happiness. That's why a good practitioner knows how to create a moment of joy, a feeling of happiness, at any time of the day.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as the space of a room cannot be agitated by any of the people or objects within it, so our being cannot be disturbed by anything that takes place in experience.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born. This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Large-scale waiting" is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place—from the Unmanifested itself. It is "the peace of God, which passes all understanding." Compared to that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant peace comes the realization—not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being—that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
that smallest point of light was a thought, just floating out there. And the thought was: "I." And when I turned and looked at the thought, all I had to do was become interested in it, in any way interested, and this little point of light would move closer and closer and closer. It was like moving close to a knothole in a fence—when you get your eye right up to it, you don't see the fence anymore; you see what's on the other side. So as this little point of "I" came closer, I started to perceive through this point called "me." And I found that in that point called "me" was the whole world. The whole world was contained within that "I," within that little point called "me." There wasn't really an I, but an emptiness that could go into and out of that point, in and out of it, and it's like the whole world could flicker on and off, and on and off, and on and off.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Such grace is never held in abeyance, never earned or deserved. It is not given to some and not to others. Grace is ever present; it is only our openness to it that comes and goes. In one sense, The Way of Liberation is a means of opening up to grace.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dreamof ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The heavenly state is the context of eternity in which the world resides.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don't really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every human being emanates an energy field that corresponds to his or her inner state, ... Some people are most clearly aware of it when they first meet someone, even before any words are exchanged. A little later, however, words take over the relationship and with words come the roles that most people play. Attention then moves to the realm of mind, and the ability to sense the other person's energy field becomes greatly diminished.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The Dalai Lama has repeatedly emphasized that inner discipline is the basis of a spiritual life. It is the fundamental method of achieving happiness. As he explained throughout this book, from his perspective inner discipline involves combating negative states of mind such as anger, hatred, and greed, and cultivating positive states such as kindness, compassion, and tolerance. He also has pointed out that a happy life is built on a foundation of a calm, stable state of mind.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not create or participate in drama anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents." That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once we become familiar with steady awareness, we still often move between this state and normal awareness. Despite the difference between them, both types of awareness exist within a dualistic construct: There is something watching and something being watched—the experience of awareness recognizing itself.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
most ordinary, intimate and familiar experience there is. Everybody can say from their own direct experience, 'I know that I am', irrespective of the condition of their mind or body, or whatever is taking place in their environment. It is our experience that I am. 'I am' refers to our knowledge of our self before it is qualified by experience. Before we know that I am a man or a woman, of such-and-such an age, married or single, a mother, father or friend, before we know anything about our self, we simply know that I am. Before we know what I am, we know that I am. Everything we know about our self is added to the simple knowledge 'I am'. If we feel that our self is not clearly known as it essentially is, it is not because we do not know it but because we have forgotten or ignored it in favour of objective experience. We have become so accustomed to giving our love and attention to the content of experience that we have simply overlooked that which is closest and most familiar to us. To remedy this, we first make a distinction between the knower and the known, the experiencer and the experienced, the witness and the witnessed. Later on we will collapse this distinction, but for one who is lost in experience, who identifies with every passing thought, feeling, activity and relationship, it is first necessary to make the distinction.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place - from the Unmanifested itself. It is "the peace of God, which passes all understanding." Compared to that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant peace comes the realization - not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being - that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Giving space to others—and to yourself—is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Happiness is our very nature and lies at the source of the mind, or the heart of ourself, in all conditions and under all circumstances. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
the human body appreciates peace of mind. Things that are disturbing to us have a very bad effect upon our health. This shows that the whole structure of our health is such that it is suited to an atmosphere of human affection.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future—which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That is, only gradually, in most cases, will it become clear that meditation is what we are, not what we do, and that the separate self or finite mind is what we do, not what we are.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within (...) ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We can see that there are many ways in which we actively contribute to our own experience of mental unrest and suffering. Although, in general, mental and emotional afflictions themselves can come naturally, often it is our own reinforcement of those negative emotions that makes them so much worse. For instance when we have anger or hatred towards a person, there is less likelihood of its developing to a very intense degree if we leave it unattended.However, if we think about the projected injustices done to us, the ways in which we have been unfairly treated, and we keep on thinking about them over and over, then that feeds the hatred. It makes the hatred very powerful and intense. Of course, the same can apply to when we have an attachment towards a particular person; we can feed that by thinking about how beautiful he or she is, and as we keep thinking about the projected qualities that we see in the person, the attachment becomes more and more intense. But this shows how through constant familiarity and thinking, we ourselves can make our emotions more intense and powerful.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
reveal themselves as none other than the shape that our self is taking from moment to moment.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event--through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you ---ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I was walking across the living room when all of this happened. I can't tell you how long I was walking. It could have been five seconds—because all of this is outside of time—I don't actually know. I could have been walking across the living room floor for five hours, but I was, literally, just walking across the living room. And it's not like I stood still; I was walking, and it all happened right in the midst of what I was doing. I walked across the living room, I went into the backyard, I was doing something, I don't even remember what I was doing, and simultaneously this whole other thing was happening, too. I know it sounds odd. This didn't happen in a moment of meditation; it was completely mixed in as a part of ordinary life. As you know, I haven't talked much about this ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
"How dare you serve me cold soup…." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want change so that it can go on complaining.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The playfulness and joy of a dog, its unconditional love and readiness to celebrate life at any moment often contrast sharply with the inner state of the dog's owner—depressed, anxious, burdened by problems, lost in thought, not present in the only place and only time there is: Here and Now. One wonders: living with this person, how does the dog manage to remain so sane, so joyous? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond—awake and present, here and now already.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Attachment to the false view of the self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities that exist on their own.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The more honest you are, the more open, the less fear you will have, because there's no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that insecurity, and all wisdom will be yours.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
My body is moving…changing…this breath is coming in and going out…changing. I am breathing in new air, changing, I am breathing out old air, changing. I am part of this universe. This air is part of this universe. With each breath, the universe changes. With each inhale, the universe changes. With each exhale, the universe changes. Each inhale fills my lungs. Each inhale brings oxygen to my blood. Changing. Body changing. Each sensation is temporary. Each breath temporary, each rising and falling temporary. All changing, transforming. With each exhale, the old me dies. With each inhale, a new me is born. Becoming, renewing, dying, rebirth, change. As my body is changing, so are those of everyone I know. The bodies of my family and friends are changing. The planet is changing. The seasons are changing. Political regimes are changing. My monasteries are changing. The whole universe is changing. In. Out. Expansion, contraction ...
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
A range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into effect between two human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become. You have a mental image not only of who the other person is, but also of who you are, especially in relation to the person you are interacting with. So you are not relating with that person at all, but who you think you are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Each person's life—each lifeform,in fact—represents a world, aunique way in which the universe experiences itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When we speak of this inner discipline, it can of course involve many things, many methods. But generally speaking, one begins by identifying those factors which lead to happiness and those factors which lead to suffering. Having done this, one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness. That is the way.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow. Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present. Accusing, defending, attacking—all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to others—and to yourself—is vital. Love cannot flourish without it. When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships—when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions—and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship. Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As much as possible in everyday life, use awareness of the inner body to create space. When waiting, when listening to someone, when pausing to look at the sky, a tree, a flower, your partner, or child, feel the aliveness within at the same time. This means part of your attention or consciousness remains formless, and the rest is available for the outer world of form. Whenever you "inhabit" your body in this way, it serves as an anchor for staying present in the Now. It prevents you from losing yourself in thinking, in emotions, or in external situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As soon as you break your fidelity to Truth, you kick yourself out of the freedom of Truth. As soon as anything—power, praise, person, place, thing, outward love, respect, acknowledgment—becomes more important than Truth, you will begin to suffer and feel separate. There is only room for Truth in the Truth. This means there is only room for seeing the Truth, choosing the Truth, and loving the Truth. A fierce commitment to Truth is a moment-to-moment choice.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
As a spiritual teacher, I've met a lot of people who have meditated for many, many years. One of the most common things I hear from many of these people is that, despite having meditated for all this time, they feel essentially untransformed. The deep inner transformation—the spiritual revelation—that meditation offers is something that eludes a lot of people, even those who are longtime practitioners. There are actually good and specific reasons why some meditation practices, including the kind of meditation that I was once engaged in, do not lead to this promised state of transformation. The main reason is actually extraordinarily simple and therefore easy to miss: we approach meditation with the wrong attitude. We carry out our meditation with an attitude of control and manipulation, and that is the very reason our meditation leads us to what feels like a dead end. The awakened state of being, the enlightened state of being, can also be called the natural state of being. How can control and manipulation possibly lead us to our natural state? ...
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the negative and the positive polarities are faces of the same coin, are both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from the mind-identified egoic state of consciousness. There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain—this is what I want to talk about now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In many of these discussions, the Dalai Lama's primary method of overcoming anger and hatred involved the use of reasoning and analysis to investigate the causes of anger, to combat these harmful mental states through understanding. In a sense, this approach can be seen as using logic to neutralize anger and hatred and to cultivate the antidotes of patience and tolerance. But that wasn't his only technique. In his public talks he supplemented his discussion by presenting instruction on these two simple yet effective meditations to help overcome anger. Meditation on Anger: Exercise 1 "Let us imagine a scenario in which someone who you know very well, someone who is close or dear to you, is in a situation in which he or she loses his or her temper. You can imagine this occurring either in a very acrimonious relationship or in a situation in which something personally upsetting is happening. The person is so angry that he or she has lost all his or her mental composure, creating very negative vibrations, even going to the extent of beating himself or herself up or breaking things. "Then, reflect upon the immediate effects of the person's rage. You'll see a physical transformation happening to that person. This person whom you feel close to, whom you like, the very sight of whom gave you pleasure in the past, now turns into this ugly person, even physically speaking. The reason why I think you should visualize this happening to someone else is because it is easier to see the faults of others than to see your own faults. So, using your imagination, do this meditation and visualization for a few minutes. "At the end of that visualization, analyze the situation and relate the circumstances to your own experience. See that you yourself have been in this state many times. Resolve that 'I shall never let myself fall under the sway of such intense anger and hatred, because if I do that, I will be in the same position. I will also suffer all these consequences, lose my peace of mind, lose my composure, assume this ugly physical appearance,' and so on. So once you make that decision, then for the last few minutes of the meditation focus your mind on that conclusion; without further analysis, simply let your mind remain on your resolution not to fall under the influence of anger and hatred.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Become conscious of being conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. It is total freedom. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The dreamer is consciousness itself—who you are. To awaken within the dream is our purpose now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad, but to let it be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself. ... It is content, not essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more honest you are, the more open, the less fear you will have because there's no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis. That is why it lends itself to manipulation of "public opinion," as politicians and special-interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more the dysfunction of the human mind plays itself out on the world stage, clearly visible to everyone in the daily television news reports, the greater the number of people who realize the urgent need for a radical change in human consciousness if humanity is not to destroy both itself and the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they're true. As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nobody's life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn't it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is something that needs to happen in my life before I can be at peace (happy, fulfilled, etc.). And I resent that it hasn't happened yet. Maybe my resentment will finally make it happen." "Something happened in the past that should not have happened, and I resent that. If that hadn't happened, I would be at peace now." "Something is happening now that should not be happening, and it is preventing me from being at peace now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In Buddhism, for instance, there is a reference to the four factors of fulfillment, or happiness: wealth, worldly satisfaction, spirituality, and enlightenment. Together they embrace the totality of an individual's quest for happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When listening to another person, don't just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space—space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Most ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is our purpose and destiny to bring a new dimension into this world by living in conscious oneness with the totality and conscious alignment with universal intelligence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you'll never have your freedom.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
And I am in the bardo of dying, trying to let go of my old life and not yet born into my new one. At least I am not stuck. I am moving.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
The word suchness describes reality as it is. Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death. It is total freedom.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies"—his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Through the whole trajectory from birth to childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal spark within. At the beginning it may be felt as a very subtle, almost incomprehensible intuition, but when we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of what's the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter and brighter in our lives.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
When that little button gets pushed, something unconscious arises, and the invitation is to stay awake. That's it. Just stay awake, and then the alchemy happens. Just stay awake. Don't do the spiritual thing, like back up fifty steps and witness it from some infinite distance. That's somewhat better than being lost in it, but even that is a subtle form of unconsciousness because it's a subtle form of avoidance or withdrawing awakeness from what is. Awakeness is just here. You don't need to bring it backward or up or down or behind something to be essentially free of what's arising. It already is free. It doesn't need to back up.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man or woman. If "Christ" were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you other than this: "I am the Truth. I am divine presence. I am eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We cannot storm the gates of heaven. Instead we must allow ourselves to become more and more disarmed. Then the pure consciousness of being becomes brighter and brighter, and we realize who we are. This brightness is what we are.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don't forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is our suffering that is the most basic element that we share with others, the factor that unifies us with all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Only if we are still enough inside and the noise of thinking subsides can we become aware that there is a hidden harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order in which everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what it is and the way it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What remains when we have let go of all thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions, activities and relationships? Our self alone remains: not an enlightened, higher, spiritual, special self or a self that we have become through effort, practice or discipline, but just the essential self or being that we always and already are before it is coloured by experience.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Within all beings there is the seed of perfection. However, compassion is required in order to activate that seed which is inherent in our hearts and minds....
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
I remember hearing a talk from a very famous Tibetan teacher, a man who had spent many years in a small, stone hut in the Himalayas. He was crippled, and so he couldn't use either one of his legs. He told a story of how a big boulder fell on his legs and broke them, and he spent many years in a stone hut, because there was really nothing that he could do. It was hard for someone with broken legs to get around much in the Himalayas. He told the story of being in this small hut, and he said, "To be locked in that small hut for so many years was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was a great grace, because if it wasn't for that, I would never have turned within, and I would never have found the freedom that revealed itself there. So I look back at the losing of my legs as one of the most profound and lucky events of my whole life." Normally, most of us wouldn't think that losing the use of our legs would be grace. We have certain ideas about how we want grace to appear. But grace is simply that which opens our hearts, that which has the capacity to come in and open our perceptions about life.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Spiritual autonomy is knowing who and what you are—knowing that you are divine being itself, knowing that the essence of you is divinity. You are moving in the world of time and space, appearing as a human being, but nonetheless you are eternal, divine being, the timeless breaking through and operating within the world of time. To Jesus, spirit is everything. Nothing matters more than spirit or, as I like to say, divine being. Divine being is what Jesus is here for; it is the vitality source from which he moves, from which he speaks, from which his critique arises. He is the living presence of divine being. He's a human being too, but he's here to convey divine being, and that comes out most clearly in the Gospel of Mark.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I think that this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But to me, whether it is an old friend or new friend, there's not much difference anyway, because I always believe we are the same; we are all human beings. Of course, there may be differences in cultural background or way of life, there may be differences in our faith, or we may be of a different color, but we are human beings, consisting of the human body and the human mind. Our physical structure is the same, and our mind and our emotional nature are also the same. Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself. I find it is much easier to communicate with others on that level. If we emphasize specific characteristics, like I am Tibetan or I am Buddhist, then there are differences. But those things are secondary. If we can leave the differences aside, I think we can easily communicate, exchange ideas, and share experiences.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened—before you have freed yourself from your mind—you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True realization, true enlightenment, comes through a complete relinquishing of personal will - a complete letting go.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When many of the old saints and sages say, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion," they're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
So it is essential to bring more consciousness into your life in ordinary situations when everything is going relatively smoothly. In this way, you grow in presence power. It generates an energy field in you and around you of a high vibrational frequency.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you know yourself only through content, you will also think you know what is good or bad for you. You differentiate between events that are 'good for me' and those that are 'bad.' This is a fragmented perception of the wholeness of life in which everything is interconnected, in which every event has its necessary place and function within the totality. ... Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a higher order and purpose. ... But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Forgiveness" is a term that has been in use for two thousand years, but most people have a very limited view of what it means. You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are. The whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enthusiasm and the ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can participate in the dance of creation and be active without attachment to outcome and without placing unreasonable demands upon the world: fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world can not give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self-created suffering comes to an end.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
cultivating greater happiness benefits not only oneself, but also one's family, community, and society.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence—your deeper self—behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Generally speaking, our mind is predominantly directed towards external objects. Our attention follows after the sense experiences. It remains at a predominantly sensory and conceptual level. In other words, normally our awareness is directed towards physical sensory experiences and mental concepts. But in this exercise, what you should do is to withdraw your mind inward; don't let it chase after or pay attention to sensory objects. At the same time, don't allow it to be so totally withdrawn that there is a kind of dullness or lack of mindfulness. You should maintain a very full state of alertness and mindfulness, and then try to see the natural state of your consciousness—a state in which your consciousness is not afflicted by thoughts of the past, the things that have happened, your memories and remembrances; nor is it afflicted by thoughts of the future, like your future plans, anticipations, fears, and hopes. But rather, try to remain in a natural and neutral state."This is a bit like a river that is flowing quite strongly, in which you cannot see the riverbed very clearly. If, however, there was some way you could stop the flow in both directions, from where the water is coming and to where thewater is flowing, then you could keep the water still. That would allow you to see the base of the river quite clearly. Similarly, when you are able to stop your mind from chasing sensory objects and thinking about the past and future and so on, and when you can free your mind from being totally 'blanked out' as well, then you will begin to see underneath this turbulence of the thought processes. There is an underlying stillness, an underlying clarity of the mind. You should try to observe or experience this ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be is not just out there in space—it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth—an attribute of the one transcendental reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With the seeing comes the power of choice...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words "resist nothing," as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable." The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When the fan, the hand or indeed anything else are experienced, their apparent existence is not separate from awareness. All experiences are equally close, equally 'one with', awareness. When the apparent object disappears, awareness remains as it is.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
For example, if anger is the predominant energy vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts, dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become "you." Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We have to realize that spirit is an infinite potential that includes everything. And all of our lives are proof that our spiritual nature contains everything at once—that we can become clear or confused, that we can act loving or cruel. How we act and feel depends on how awake we are, and how much we experience that silence, that peace, within.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
awareness is the main dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other deep pain, such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of your presence—...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable. Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?"—if anybody were there to ask it—would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?" Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in. The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past. If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and others, if you no longer want to add to the residue of past pain that still lives on in you, then don't create any more time, or at least no more than is necessary to deal with the practical aspects of your life. How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don't misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world's suffering is a bottomless pit. So don't let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We can never understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we think about is content; whereas, the higher order emanates from the formless realm of consciousness, from universal intelligence. But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you are waiting, wherever it may be, use that time to feel the inner body. In this way, traffic jams and lines become very enjoyable. Instead of mentally projecting yourself away from the Now, go more deeply into the Now by going more deeply into the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person's attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we've utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But still we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Problem" means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing endures but change, and accepting this has the potential to transform the dread of dying into joyful living.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
the 'right choice' is often the difficult one—the one that involves some sacrifice of our pleasure.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It's as if you wake up from the dream of thinking that you're already awake in your ordinary waking state. When you are spiritually awakened, what you thought was an awake state now seems like a dream.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or a blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as there is a lack of the inner discipline that brings calmness of mind, no matter what external facilities or conditions you have, they will never give you the feeling of joy and happiness that you are seeking. On the other hand, if you possess this inner quality, a calmness of mind, a degree of stability within, then even if you lack various external facilities that you would normally consider necessary for happiness, it is still possible to live a happy and joyful life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The body loves your attention. It is also a potent form of self-healing. Most illnesses creep in when you are not present in the body. If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its insanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The freedom that's discovered isn't, "I have attained enlightenment." The freedom is, "My God, there is nobody here to be enlightened. Therefore, there is nobody there to be unenlightened." That's the light. Only the concept "me" thinks it needs enlightenment, freedom, liberation, and emancipation. It thinks it needs to find God or get a Ferrari—it's all the same thing when you get right down to it.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What we call ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time—a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago—yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To create suffering without recognizing it -- this is the essence of unconscious living...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
From that place, the only thing left to do is to be a benevolent presence in the world. I don't say this because one wants to do it or tries to do it. All attempts to be spiritual or pure or compassionate or loving, all of that striving is just what the ego or self tries to do or to be. But when all that falls away, there's literally nothing left to do; there's no life orientation that makes sense other than to be a selfless and benevolent presence. This may happen on a big stage, but it may just mean being a benevolent grandmother or a mother or daughter or son or business owner. It doesn't have to look any particular way, and in fact the resurrected state can actually look quite normal.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there", or being in the present moment but wanting to be in the future. You can move fast, work fast, or run without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, do it totally, enjoying the flow of energy at that moment. Or when you do nothing and the mind says "you should be working. You are wasting time" - observe the mind. Smile at it! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you take any action—leaving or changing your situation—drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world's suffering is a bottomless pit. So don't let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain.Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.This also applies if you are supporting a movement designed to stop deeply unconscious humans from destroying themselves, each other, and the planet, or from continuing to inflict dreadful suffering on other sentient beings. Remember: Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so you cannot fight unconsciousness. If you try to do so, the polar opposites will become strengthened and more deeply entrenched. You will become identified with one of the polarities, you will create an "enemy," and so be drawn into unconsciousness yourself. Raise awareness by disseminating information, or at the most, practice passive resistance. But make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you catch yourself playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning of freedom from that role. When you are completely identified with a role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take yourself very seriously. You also automatically assign roles to others that correspond to yours.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we go exclusively by the information we receive on a daily basis through the news reports and the mainstream media, then our assessment of the state of human affairs in this new millennium will necessarily be overwhelmingly negative, and we will most likely come to the depressing conclusion that nothing has changed. After all, it continues to be true for millions of people that the greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This division of experience into a perceiver and a perceived, a knower and a known, a lover and a loved, is like a mirage.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought—or the emotion or sense perception—happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Now, for example, as a Buddhist monk, I find Buddhism to be most suitable. So, for myself, I've found that Buddhism is best. But that does not mean Buddhism is best for everyone.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[I]t is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Jesus's statement that "your whole body will be filled with light, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right and another wrong.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Never personalize Christ. Don't make Christ into a form identity. Avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters, the very few that are real, are not special as persons. Without a false self to uphold, defend, and feed, they are more simple, more ordinary than the ordinary man or woman. Anyone with a strong ego would regard them as insignificant or, more likely, not see them at all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS All of the above are assumptions, unexamined thoughts that are confused with reality. They are stories the ego creates to convince you that you cannot be at peace now or cannot be fully yourself now. Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one. The ego says: Maybe at some point in the future, I can be at peace—if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that. Or it says: I can never be at peace because of something that happened in the past. Listen to people's stories and they could all be entitled "Why I Cannot Be at Peace Now." The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now. Or maybe it does know, and it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego. How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"A new heaven" is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and "a new earth" is its reflection in the physical realm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I've been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would 'let go of them' is itself simply one such pattern.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Both death and life are happening at every instant in the river of our physical body.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."3 When this is your state of Being, how can you not succeed? You have succeeded already.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes its vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. It's a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"I can't do that." Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The very last phase of spiritual awakening is what I call "the transmutation." Transmutation is what transfiguration and relinquishment make possible. In it, your orientation to life is entirely selfless. It's not that you want to be selfless or you're practicing being selfless: rather you're selfless in the sense of no self.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Beyond even any teaching, though, the aspect of spiritual life that is the most profound is the element of grace. Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know. In this gap of not knowing, in the suspension of any conclusion, a whole other element of life and reality can rush in. This is what I call grace. It's that moment of "ah-ha!"—a moment of recognition when we realize something that previously we never could quite imagine.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
What did Jesus tell his disciples? "Heaven is right here in the midst of you."6 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood. He says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."7 In modern versions of the Bible, "meek" is translated as humble. Who are the meek or the humble, and what does it mean that they shall inherit the earth? The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their, essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all "others," all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth. A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth".
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Sooner or later, disorder will irrupt into everyone's life no matter how many insurance policies he or she has. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever you identify with turns into ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a relatively shallow and shortlived one. Concealed within it remains a deep seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of "not enough." "I don't have enough yet," by which the ego really means, "I am not enough yet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego thrives on others' attention, which is after all a form of psychic energy. The ego doesn't know that the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"One of the most important steps in the process of coming to the end of suffering is seeing that there's something deep inside of us that actually wants to suffer, that actually indulges in suffering. As I've mentioned, there is a piece of us that wants to suffer because it is through suffering that we maintain this wall of separation around us. It is through our suffering that we can continue to hold onto everything we think is true. Wearing the veil of suffering, we don't really have to look at ourselves and say, "I'm the one that's dreaming. I'm the one that's full of illusions. I'm the one that's holding on with everything I have." It's much easier to see that the other person is caught in illusion. That's easy. "So and so over there, they're completely lost in illusion. They don't know the truth." It's a whole other thing to say, "No, no, no! I'm the one who is caught in illusion. I don't know what's real, I don't know what's true, and part of me actually wants to suffer because then I can remain separate and distinct.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depths to you as a human being–no humility, no compassion. You would not be listening to this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego. And then comes a point where it has served its purpose.Suffering is necessary until you realize that it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It's the way spirit moves in the world of time and space. That's what a human body-mind is: an extension of spirit in time and space.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
once you harbor feelings of hatred or ill feeling towards someone, once you yourself are filled by hatred or negative emotions, then other people appear to you as also hostile. So as a result there is more fear, greater inhibition and hesitation, and a sense of insecurity. These things develop, and also loneliness in the midst of a world perceived as hostile.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The very root of sin, to use Jesus' language, is something that can be forgiven. It's forgivable because it's an unconscious act, a result of being spiritually asleep. We can't be blamed for being unconscious, for acting out our unconsciousness, even for feeling the effects of our unconsciousness within our psychology.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
"In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through "just being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If a course of action is in alignment with what the Universe wants, it will become empowered.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness. And A New Earth is it's direct reflection in the physical realm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The answer is obvious, is it not? Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now. The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
practices that could be directly applied to our lives to simply help us become happier, stronger, perhaps less afraid.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If we look closely at the actual experience of the body rather than the idea we may have of it, we find that our only experience of it is the current sensation or perception. All sensations and perceptions appear and disappear, but our self, aware Presence, remains throughout. This ever-present 'I' cannot therefore be made out of an intermittent object such as a sensation or perception.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
However, if we can transform our attitude towards suffering, adopt an attitude that allows us greater tolerance of it, then this can do much to help counteract feelings of mental unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and discontent.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In present-day humans, consciousness is completely identified with its disguise. It only knows itself as form and therefore lives in fear of the annihilation of its physical or psychological form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True intelligence operates silently.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering—and free of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You discover that a "bored person" is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you can feel the inner body clearly as a single field of energy, let go, if possible, of any visual image and focus exclusively on the feeling. If you can, also drop any mental image you may still have of the physical body. All that is left then is an all-encompassing sense of presence or "beingness," and the inner body is felt to be without a boundary. Then take your attention even more deeply into that feeling. Become one with it. Merge with the energy field, so that there is no longer a perceived duality of the observer and the observed, of you and your body. The distinction between inner and outer also dissolves now, so there is no inner body anymore. By going deeply into the body, you have transcended the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When the first sign appears, you need to be alert enough to "catch" it before it takes you over. For example, the first sign may be a sudden, strong irritation or a flash of anger, or it may be a purely physical symptom. Whatever it is, catch it before it can take over your thinking or behavior. This simply means putting the spotlight of your attention on it. If it is an emotion, feel the strong energy charge behind it. Know that it is the pain-body. At the same time, be the knowing; that is to say, be aware of your conscious presence and feel its power. Any emotion that you take your presence into will quickly subside and become transmuted.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking is something and then feeling it are two different reference points for most human beings: If I think it and I feel it, then it is real. But it does not take much reflection to acknowledge we have all thought and felt things to be true that later found out were not.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
"We practice the Five Contemplations before eating. The second Contemplation is, "May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive this food.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stillness is really another word for space. Becoming conscious of stillness whenever we encounter it in our lives will connect us with the formless and timeless dimension within ourselves, that which is beyond thought, beyond ego. It may be the stillness that pervades the world of nature, or the stillness in your room in the early hours of the morning, or the silent gaps in between sounds. Stillness has no form—that is why through thinking we cannot become aware of it. Thought is form. Being aware of stillness means to be still. To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves. When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness—unconditioned, formless, eternal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Perceiving presence is what true awakening is all about.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Through the practice of shamata meditation, the tumultuous habits of mind calm down; and then we can investigate the characteristics of the calm waters beyond the monkey's control. This is called vipashyana—or insight—meditation. I knew monkey mind intimately. I also knew that when we dismiss any value to knowing this monkey, it's like owning a car without knowing how to drive. The less we know about the chattering, muttering voice in our heads that tells us what to do, what to believe, what to buy, which people we should love, and so forth, the more power we grant it to boss us around and convince us that whatever it says is true.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below thought. Everyone does that every night during sleep. But this also happens to some extent through sex, alcohol, and other drugs that suppress excessive mind activity. If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This ability to change the brain's wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
According to the Buddha, the human mind in its normal state generates "dukkha," which can be translated as suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery. He sees it as a characteristic of the human condition. Wherever you go, whatever you do, says the Buddha, you will encounter dukkha, and it will manifest in every situation sooner or later.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are in engaged in doing anything at all—from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
in terms of our enjoying a happy day-to-day existence, the greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
What you refer to as your "life" should more accurately be called your "life situation." It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
enlightenment is simply a rebranding of the conventional search for happiness.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
first sessions, for example, by posing to him certain common human problems, illustrating with several lengthy case histories. Having described a woman who persisted in self-destructive behaviors despite the tremendous negative impact on her life, I asked him if he had an explanation for this behavior and what advice he could offer. I was taken aback when after a long pause and reflection, he simply said, ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The fact is: Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A conversation that took place between two American women describes this intimate relationship between physical and immaterial forms of dying. One of these women came to see me soon after her only child, a twenty-year-old son, died from an accidental drug overdose. We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman's best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son's death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths. The profound misfortune of the death of this woman's son opened her heart to an exploration of impermanence and death that went far beyond her own personal story.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem." Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION What is the role of the established religions in the arising of the new consciousness? Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
people who are reaching a point where they become capable of breaking out of inherited collective mind-patterns that have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem. no sutterns. nothing that is not wro you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time: it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our essential being shines equally in all experience, irrespective of its content. Even our darkest feelings shine brightly with the light of being. All that is necessary is to give attention to being in the midst of experience, before it is qualified or conditioned by it.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
In the original Greek, one of the meanings of sin [hamartia] is simply "to miss the mark." Now, imagine you've gone to confession, and the priest says to you, "Confess your sins." Imagine that this priest even accuses you of being a sinner; imagine how that would feel in your mind and heart, to be considered a moral failure. Now imagine instead how you'd feel if that priest were to say, "So, tell me, how have you missed the mark in your life?" There's an enormous difference in how these two interpretations of sin are held in our hearts, in our minds, in our bodies. If we understand that sin means to miss the mark, it's not so personal and damning.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A woman who in childhood was physically abused by her father may find that her pain-body becomes easily activated in any close relationship with a man. Alternatively, the emotion that makes up her pain-body may draw her to a man whose pain-body is similar to that of her father. Her pain-body may feel a magnetic pull to someone who it senses will give it more of the same pain. That pain is sometimes misinterpreted as falling in love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But as long as negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that reminds you to be more present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?" She became quiet again. "I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?" She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, "This is weird. I'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less." This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person.What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention—instead of using it as a means to an end—you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them—your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past—and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The mind cannot forgive. Only you can. You become present, you enter your body, you feel the vibrant peace and stillness that emanate from Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have fifty cents left in my bank account" is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life—birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner body, you are forever one with God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That which comes and goes is not real; quit chasing it. It doesn't matter. What haven't you lost? That is what's important. What always is? What is there in bliss and in misery? Who you are is always present and is always the same. That which doesn't come and go is real. That is where Freedom is found—nowhere else.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Seeing others as basically compassionate instead of hostile and selfish helps us relax, trust, live at ease. It makes us happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
If you found yourself in paradise, it wouldn't be long before your mind would say "yes, but... ." Ultimately, this is not about solving your problems. It's about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations—to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the "isness" of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The true non-dual understanding is like an explosion—it cannot be contained in any form.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
extremely high volume of correspondence I receive, I am regretfully ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Silence is helpful, but you don't need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself. You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That's a teaching meant to shake us from our slumber. In order to come into our full potential and to embody the truth and radiance of what we are, we must come vitally alive; we must lean once again into presence; we must pour ourselves forth into life, instead of trying to escape life and avoid its challenges.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness." That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and relationships. Your reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Are you worried? Do you have many "what if" thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist. It's a mental phantom. You can stop this health-and life-corroding insanity simply by acknowledging the present moment. Become aware of your breathing. Feel the air flowing in and out of your body. Feel your inner energy field. All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life—as opposed to imaginary mind projections—is this moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future—nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A good ritual is meant to evoke the mystery of being, the mystery of our own existence, the mystery of life, the mystery of God. It's meant to evoke that sense of eternity that shines through the latticework of time and space. That's really what ritual is for—to put us in touch with that sense of eternity, with the sense of the sacred.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain becomes fuel for the flame of your consciousness, which then burns more brightly as a result.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative,"3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
And this 'knowing' is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is an invitation beyond the wall of knowledge, which is not to some regressive state before the mind can operate, but a transcendent state that's beyond where the mind can go. That's what spirituality is. It's going where the mind cannot go.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
finding your true nature beyond name and form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But to know that you are not present is a great success: ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by "watching the thinker"? When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won't make much difference to your life. To realize this truth, you need to live it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you are able to stay alert and present at that time and watch whatever you feel within, rather than be taken over by it, it affords an opportunity for the most powerful spiritual practice, and a rapid transmutation of all past pain becomes possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness, and likewise we do not cease to be the witness and become pure Awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot do this in the future. You do it now or not at all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ultimately, of course, there is no other and you are always meeting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Yes, I aspire to be a happy yogi in all situations…but these crying babies…and the stench of the overflowing toilets…Who am I now? Who allowed these prickly eye, ear, smell, touch sensations to spin a web that is leaving me diminished, irritable, and alone? ...
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
It seems that often when problems arise, our outlook becomes narrow. All of our attention may be focused on worrying about the problem, and we may have a sense that we're the only one that is going through such difficulties. This can lead to a kind of self-absorption that can make the problem seem very intense. When this happens, I think that seeing things from a wider perspective can definitely help—realizing, for instance, that there are many other people who have gone through similar experiences, and even worse experiences. This practice of shifting perspective can even be helpful in certain illnesses or when in pain. At the time the pain arises it is of course often very difficult, at that moment, to do formal meditation practices to calm the mind. But if you can make comparisons, view your situation from a different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at that one event, then it appears bigger and bigger. If you focus too closely, too intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Fearless and honest self-appraisal can be a powerful weapon against self-doubt and low self-confidence.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You might say, "What a dreadful day," without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance. In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent empty space—so vast are the distances between the atoms compared to their size. What is more, even inside every atom there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. Buddhists have known that for over 2,500 years. "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The known always changes; knowing never changes.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often anger against the perceived enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness—without doing anything—simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it. Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Cease being exclusively fascinated by whatever you are aware of and be interested instead in the experience of being aware itself.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Awareness isn't something we own; awareness isn't something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?"—if anybody were there to ask it—would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad." The undercurrent of constant unease started long before the rise of Western industrial civilization, of course, but in Western civilization, which now covers almost the entire globe, including most of the East, it manifests in an unprecedentedly acute form. It was already there at the time of Jesus, and it was there six hundred years before that at the time of Buddha, and long before that. Why are you always anxious? Jesus asked his disciples. "Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?" And the Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving. Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, by the way, also recognized the existence of this undercurrent of unease and wrote about it in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, but he did not recognize the true root of the unease and failed to realize that freedom from it is possible. This collective dysfunction has created a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has become a threat not only to itself but also to all life on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing else truly is.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Non-duality is the essential quality of awareness, yet when we speak of three types of awareness—normal, meditative, and pure—we are speaking of a gradual experiential process that takes place from dualistic to non-dualistic states, from very cluttered minds to minds that are increasingly liberated from habitual reactivity and preconceptions about how things are supposed to be.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
As you read, a shift takes place within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn't restrain himself any longer. 'Why did you carry that girl across the road?' he asked. 'We monks are not supposed to do things like that.' 'I put the girl down hours ago,' said Tanzan. 'Are you still carrying her? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you accept what is, every piece of meat—every moment—is the best. That is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are. We could say "God" if the word had not been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence. Existence is form, content, "what happens." Existence is the foreground of life; Being is the background, as it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I think that generally, being honest with oneself and others about what you are or are not capable of doing can counteract that feeling of lack of self-confidence.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Children in particular find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding into facing the emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the child at that time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a higher order and purpose. This is beautifully expressed in the Zen saying "The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[The ego] cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a matter of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness—not through thinking—can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see: There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The fact is: Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
if a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
ignorance is more deeply rooted there: for years the body has been considered to house the separate self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But what is it? What is it like to experience blame? By questioning, "What is this?" consciousness is allowed to get inside of it. So you see, there might be blame, but now it is blame that's conscious. If you try to do something with the blame, such as get rid of it, then you are not really with it.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Being aware of being aware is the essence of meditation. It is the only form of meditation that does not require the directing, focusing or controlling of the mind.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality—and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality—this is also its definition: complete identification with form—physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness. [...] If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once again, eternity is peering through the latticework of time and space, and this sense of eternal stillness and deep freedom is what the iconic image of the seated Buddha conveys. What this image doesn't convey is a sense of humanity, of a real flesh-and-blood human being. But in the Jesus story, it's as if the still point that the image of the Buddha evokes within us becomes ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
But as long as we view suffering as an unnatural state, an abnormal condition that we fear, avoid, and reject, we will never uproot the causes of suffering and begin to live a happier life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door. Through that, you can communicate much more easily with other people. And that feeling of warmth creates a kind of openness. You'll find that all human beings are just like you, so you'll be able to relate to them more easily.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
One of the most common ego-repair mechanisms is anger, which causes a temporary but huge ego inflation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
of the realm of the manifested. Continuous mind activity keeps you imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the Unmanifested, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention.This is surrendered action—empowered action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Most people don't inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This calling can arrive at any point in your life. It is that moment when the trajectory of your life begins to turn toward the mystery of life. When I say the mystery of life, what I'm referring to is that transcendent aspect of life that shines through the world of space and time.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Don't get attached to any words. They are only stepping stones, to be left behind as quickly as possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens—and it happens continuously for most people—you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey's inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment. The outer purpose belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension of the timeless Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
If your partner is still identified with the mind and the pain-body while you are already free, this will represent a major challenge—not to you but to your partner. It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self. The pain-body is demanding feedback and not getting it. The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not being met.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So, anyway, I think that cultivating positive mental states like kindness and compassion definitely leads to better psychological health and happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be present as the watcher of your mind—of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ending of Jesus' life in John is completely different than in Mark. In Mark, Jesus' last breath was a loud death cry from exhaustion and torment. In the Gospel of John, Jesus right to the very end maintains his dignity and balance, and remains centered in divine being. With his last breath, Jesus simply says, "It is finished." Jesus has lived out his destiny; he's played his part well, and he has no regrets.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The other more serious reason for the illusion of separateness is compulsive thinking. It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can relate to them because you are still a human being, within the human community. You share that bond. And that human bond is enough to give rise to a sense of worth and dignity. That bond can become a source of consolation in the event that you lose everything else.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don't project a mind-made image -- and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world -- but function from the deeper core of their Being, those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world. They are the bringers of the new consciousness. Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the purpose of the whole. Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence -- simple, natural, unassuming -- has a transformational effect on whoever they come into contact with. When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. ... 'How can I be myself?' is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. ... If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. ... Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already been there, but had been largely obscured by their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus said, "for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All creativity comes out of inner spaciousness. Once the creation has happened and something has come into form, you have to be vigilant so that the notion of "me" or "mine" does not arise. If you take credit for what you accomplished, the ego has returned, and the spaciousness has become obscured.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For someone possessed by a heavy pain-body, it is often impossible to step outside his or her distorted interpretation, the heavily emotional "story." The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such but is taken to be reality. When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don't even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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... [which happened] if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In education, it is my experience that those lessons which we learn from teachers who are not just good, but who also show affection for the student, go deep into our minds. Lessons from other sorts of teachers may not. Although you may be compelled to study and may fear the teacher, the lessons may not sink in. Much depends on the affection from the teacher.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Only a thought compares the present with an imaginary past, creating the old and therefore the new.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality: Whatever you think people are withholding from you—praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on—give it to them. You don't have it? Just act as if you had it, and it will come. Then, soon after you start giving, you will start receiving. You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance. The law that outflow determines inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: "Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we've utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful—happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Seeing Jesus through the lens of the spiritual revolutionary is powerfully transformative; if we can embody that spirit within ourselves, we can begin to break down the internal walls that separate ourselves from each other, from the world, and from our own divinity.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
In identifying one's mental state as the prime factor in achieving happiness, of course that doesn't deny that our basic physical needs for food, clothing, and shelter must be met. But once these basic needs are met, the message is clear: we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate—right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness. In ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
I think that this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But to me, whether it is an old friend or new friend, there's not much difference anyway, ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it "eternal life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that comes with surrender. You rest in God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every limit that the mind suggests turns out to be some kind of an object. The mind claims that our self is a body and, having made this initial presumption, subsequently claims that it has an age, a history, a future, a nationality, a gender, a colour, a weight, a shape and a size. However, all these characteristics are qualities of the body, not of our self. They are known by our self but do not belong to our self. They do not limit our self any more than an image limits the screen on which it appears.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
By bringing about a certain inner discipline, we can undergo a transformation of our attitude, our entire outlook and approach to living.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news, in exactly the same way: 'Is that so?' He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody's victim. He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. Well? I had to wait for quite a long time before a thought came in. Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You may remember the paradox of time we mentioned earlier:Whatever you do takes time, and yet it is always now. So while your innerpurpose is to negate time, your outer purpose necessarily involves future andso could not exist without time. But it is always secondary. Whenever youbecome anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sightof your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness isprimary, all else secondary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created. I sometimes refer to those things as "drama." When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego operates and how it creates drama. Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune—that is, highly conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you can learn to accept and even welcome the endings in your life, you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful. By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to Life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Thinking that is not rooted in awareness becomes self-serving and dysfunctional. Cleverness devoid of wisdom is extremely dangerous and destructive. That is the current state of most of humanity. The amplification of thought as science and technology, although intrinsically neither good nor bad, has also become destructive because so often the thinking out of which it comes has no roots in awareness. The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing has ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living— ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even the Buddha is said to have practiced body denial through fasting and extreme forms of asceticism for six years, but he did not attain enlightenment until after he had given up this practice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
THE SOURCE OF CHI Is the Unmanifested what in the East is called chi, a kind of universal life energy? No, it isn't.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There are various positive side effects of enhancing one's feeling of compassion. One of them is that the greater the force of your compassion, the greater your resilience in confronting hardships and your ability to transform them into more positive conditions.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm claimed that humankind's most basic fear is the threat of being separated from other humans. He believed that the experience of separateness, first encountered in infancy, is the source of all anxiety in human life. John Bowlby agreed, citing a good deal of experimental evidence and research to support the idea that separation from one's caregivers—usually the mother or father—during the latter part of the first year of life inevitably creates fear and sadness in babies. He feels that separation and interpersonal loss are at the very roots of the human experiences of fear, sadness, and sorrow.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Even mainstream medicine, although it knows very little about how the ego operates yet, is beginning to recognize the connection between negative emotional states and physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,' ‘me,' or ‘mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger—just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"what is God's self-definition in the Bible? Did God say, "I have always been and I always will be?" Of course not. That would have made the past and future a reality. God said, "I am that I am." No time here, just presence. The "Second Coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness – not the arrival of some man or woman. If Christ were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you other than "I am the Truth… I am divine presence. I am eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, in reality, there are not two things—one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin." Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. 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 suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you, which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the demands and expectations of your mind and what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus gave the key to the creative use of mind and to the conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you hold your cup and drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, it's like you're performing a sacred ritual, and that is a prayer.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Spirit never asks itself, "How do I stay within myself?" That would be ridiculous. It just makes no sense, coming from the true nature of things. What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself. What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren't true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the gravitational field of the dream state? We should not ask, "How do I stay awake? ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of "I can't be bothered anymore" or "I just don't care anymore." If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked resistance. As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if there is any trace of resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you do so; otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some dark corner in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and "mine": You make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[F]or so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking "plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself."1 So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Somewhere inside I always knew that everything was one—that I was eternal, unborn, undying, and uncreated. I understood that my essential nature was not limited by or confined to my personality structure or the body I seemed to be inhabiting. There had been a dissolving, in a somewhat radical way, of the world as I had known it and of the self I had known myself to be.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being is that which disturbs our insistence on remaining in the life-numbing realm of our secret desperation. It is the itch that cannot be scratched, the whisper that will not be denied. To be, to truly be, is not a given. Most of us live in a state where our being has long ago been exiled to the shadow realm of our silent anguish. At times being will break through the fabric of our unconsciousness to remind us that we are not living the life we could be living, the life that truly matters. At other times being will recede into the background silently waiting for our devoted attention. But make no mistake: being—your being—is the central issue of life. To remain unconscious of being is to be trapped within an ego-driven wasteland of conflict, strife, and fear that only seems customary because we have been brainwashed into a state of suspended disbelief where a shocking amount of hate, dishonesty, ignorance, and greed are viewed as normal and sane. But they are not sane, not even close to being sane. In fact, nothing could be less sane and unreal than what we human beings call reality.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you refer to as your 'life' should more accurately be called your 'life situation'. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind stuff. Your life is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements, yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion that is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none. The truth is: you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling, or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds? You say, "I want to know myself." You are the "I." You are the Knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself. There is nothing to know beyond that, and yet all knowing arises out of it. The "I" cannot make itself into an object of knowledge, of consciousness. So you cannot become an object to yourself. That is the very reason the illusion of egoic identity arose—because mentally you made yourself into an object. "That's me," you say. And then you begin to have a relationship with yourself, and tell others and yourself your story. By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self-seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words: what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form—no more and no less.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
My maroon robes, yellow shirt, and shaved head identified me as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a lama by profession—a perfect disguise for the disorderly mix of curiosity, anxiety, and confidence that accompanied my every heartbeat—and who in so many ways was still seeking the answer to my father's question: Who is Mingyur Rinpoche? ...
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Myth isn't about factual or historical truth, but about a deeper truth. In ancient times, people saw myth in a very different light—as a vehicle that can transmit and carry a subtlety and richness of experience that simply cannot be conveyed by linear, conceptual forms of language.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly challenges the religious authorities of the day, but ultimately what he's saying is relevant to all forms of religion. It wouldn't matter if he grew up a Jew, or a Christian, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, because he's speaking about the structure of religion itself—its hierarchy, its tendency to become corrupted by human beings' desires for power, for influence, for money. Jesus, I think, had a profound understanding that the religion itself, instead of connecting us to the radiance of being, connecting us to that spiritual mystery, could easily become a barrier to divinity. As soon as we get too caught up with the rites and the rituals and the Thou shalts and Thou shalt nots of conventional religion, we begin to lose sight of the primary task of religion, which is to orient us toward the mystery of being and awaken us to what we really are. Of course, ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Anyone who is still totally identified with the voice in their head—the stream of involuntary and incessant thinking—will inevitably fail to see what The Power of Now is all about. Some enthusiastic readers gave a copy of the book to a friend or relative and were surprised and disappointed when the recipient found it quite meaningless and could not get beyond the first few pages. "Mumbo jumbo" was all that Time magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe found life-changing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing extraordinary happened except the falling away of the concepts ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
watch out for any kind of defensiveness within you, What are you defending? an illusionary identity, an image in your mind,a fictional entity ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is real for Awareness is abstract and utterly mysterious for the mind, and what is seemingly real for the mind is utterly non-existent for Awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It belongs to a different order of reality and will create a different world when a sufficient number of humans enter the surrendered state and so become totally free of negativity. If the Earth is to survive, this will be the energy of those who inhabit it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you delve into the past, it will become abottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free ofit, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sometimes it's very difficult to explain why people do the things they do ... You'll often find that there are no simple explanations.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
We can never understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we think about is content; ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Suffering occurs when youbelieve in a thought that is at odds withwhat is, what was, or what may be.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The turning-toward happiness as a valid goal and the conscious decision to seek happiness in a systematic manner can profoundly change the rest of our lives.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[An] unconscious fear of facing the pain [...] lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every challenge that it contains is actually a disguised opportunity for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Experience itself does not know agitation. Only the mind knows agitation, and the agitation it knows belongs to its own activity alone.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspect of life, but the very foundation on which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
In pointing to the impermanence of all forms, by implication, they are also pointing to the eternal. Only the eternal in you can recognize the impermanent as impermanent.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Absolute Truth is not a belief, not a religion, not a philosophy, not a momentary experience, and not a transient spiritual experience either. It is neither static nor in motion, neither good nor bad. It is other than all of that, more other than you can ever imagine. Truth cannot be touched by thought or imagined by the mind. It can only be found in the heart of universal being. To know thy self is the key. To bring forth your being is The Way.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto experience itself.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When this pattern becomes more pronounced, and this is very common, the present moment is regarded and treated as if it were an obstacle to be overcome. This is where impatience, frustration, and stress arise, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[Through practice] we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead." The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Focus not on the one hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don't start to run "mental movies," project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does—do not resist what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As people have become more and more mind-identified, which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent decades. If the sufferer could look at her body without the interfering judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they are instead of believing in them—or better still, if she could feel her body from within—this would initiate her healing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance. Many feel a diminished sense of self-worth because they perceive their body as ugly or imperfect. In some cases, the ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is what the virgin birth signifies: time and space being opened up and eternity being embodied as a human being. This is you and I, yet we don't know it. We are eternal, divine beings manifested here and now in our humanity as a particular human being. Our human form comes from the pairs of opposites. The body that feels, the mind that thinks—all this comes from the pairs of opposites. Your mother and father got together and produced a baby, a beautiful, incarnated being, and that being is filled and animated by the vitality of divine being. That is the beauty of what the virgin birth signifies if you can read the metaphor.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As we sit allowing these thoughts and, more importantly, uncomfortable feelings to arise, it is important not to have any subtle agenda with them, not to 'do this' in order to 'get rid of them', That would be more of the same. Just allow the full panoply of thoughts and feelings to display themselves in your loving and indifferent presence. In time their ferocity will die down, revealing subtler and subtler layers of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate entity, until we come to the little, almost innocuous background thinking about which we were speaking earlier. This is the sense of separation, the 'ego', in its apparently mildest and least easily detectable form. Be very sensitive to this. Be sensitive to the 'avoidance of what is' in its subtlest forms. It is the sweet, furry baby animal that later turns into a monster! As time goes on we become more and more sensitive and we see how much of our thinking and feeling, as well as our activities, are generated for the sole purpose of avoiding 'what is', of avoiding the 'this' and the 'now', It is this open, un-judging, un-avoiding allowing of all things which, in time, restores the 'I' to its proper place in the seat of awareness and which, as a natural corollary to the abiding in and as our true self, gently realigns our thoughts, feelings and activities with the peace and happiness that are inherent in it. Nobody Has, Owns or Chooses Anything Q: While allowing the body, mind and world to be as they are, different thoughts arise, some not so savoury and others that might be better left not acted upon. You have said that, once one begins to abide knowingly as presence, responses to situations will flow naturally from there. Some thoughts will engage the body, others ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love is a state of being. Your love is not outside, it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible. Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Meditative self-inquiry is the art of asking a spiritually powerful question. And a question that is spiritually powerful always points us back to ourselves. Because the most important thing that leads to spiritual awakening is to discover who and what we are—to wake up from this dream state, this trance state of identification with ego. And for this awakening to occur, there needs to be some transformative energy that can flash into consciousness. It needs to be an energy that is actually powerful enough to awaken consciousness out of its trance of separateness into the truth of our being. Inquiry is an active engagement with our own experience that can cultivate this flash of spiritual insight.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Allow your suffering to speak. Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these two aspects as separate, but in fact, when we're in deep states of suffering, we're usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we're feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up. I invite you to set some time aside—perhaps a half an hour—to allow yourself simply to feel whatever is there: to let any sensation, feeling, or emotion come up without trying to avoid or "solve" it. Simply let whatever is there arise. Get in touch with the kinesthetic feeling of it, of what these experiences are like when you're not trying to push or explain them away. Just experience the raw energy of the emotion or sensation. You might notice it in your heart or your solar plexus, or in your gut. See if you can identify where the tightness is in your body—not only where the emotion is, but what parts of your body feel rigid. It could be your neck or shoulders or it might be your back. Suffering manifests as emotion—often as deep, painful emotion—and also as tension throughout the body. Suffering also manifests as certain patterns of circular thinking. Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak. Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it's vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It's important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Coming and going' is imagined by the mind and superimposed on the ever-presence of Awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Ultimate Reality is not a certain state of consciousness, no matter how wonderful or blissful. Reality is the ground of all being, unborn and undying eternity. It is as present in one experience or state of consciousness as in any other. Reality, or Truth, is that which is ultimately true in all states, at all times, in all locations.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The wise man's "maybe" signifies a refusal to judge anything that happens. Instead of judging what is, he accepts it and so enters into conscious alignment with the higher order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What is my relationship with Life? This question is an excellent way of unmasking the ego in you and bringing you into the state of Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In either case, you can only go beyond it by taking responsibility for your inner state now. Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So, how can we achieve inner contentment? There are two methods. One method is to obtain everything that we want and desire—all the money, houses, and cars; the perfect mate; and the perfect body. The Dalai Lama has already pointed out the disadvantage of this approach; if our wants and desires remain unchecked, sooner or later we will run up against something that we want but can't have. The second, and more reliable, method is not to have what we want but rather to want and appreciate what we have.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
What you react to in another you strengthen within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you look at people who, from the beginning of their lives, have had everything, you may see that when small things happen they soon lose hope or grow irritated. Others have developed stronger mental attitudes as a result of their hardships.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Shaking his head, the Dalai Lama replied, "Even in conventional terms, in our everyday life, we consider education as a very important factor for ensuring a successful and happy life. And knowledge does not come by naturally. We have to train; we have to go through a kind of systematic training program and so forth. And we consider this conventional education and training to be quite hard; otherwise why would students look forward so much to vacations? Still, we know that this type of education is quite vital for ensuring a happy and successful life. "In the same way, doing wholesome deeds may not come naturally, but we have to consciously train towards it.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True Meditation is effortless stillness, abidance as primordial being.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When our attitude towards our material possessions and wealth is not proper, it can lead to an extreme attachment towards such things as our property, houses and belongings. This can lead to an inability to feel contented. If that happens, then one will always remain in a state of dissatisfaction, always wanting more. In a way, one is then really poor, because the suffering of poverty is the suffering of wanting something and feeling the lack of it.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To approach the finality of our bodies while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life is like confusing diamonds with pebbles and throwing them away.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Fortunately, however, during times of comparative ease, periods before or after acute experiences of suffering, we can reflect on suffering, seeking to develop an understanding of its meaning. And the time and effort we spend searching for meaning in suffering will pay great rewards when bad things begin to strike. But in order to reap those rewards, we must begin our search for meaning when things are going well. A tree with strong roots can withstand the most violent storm, but the tree can't grow roots just as the storm appears on the horizon. So ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon, or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and then reset our priorities on the basis of that.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
To be everything and nothing at the same time. Is it possible to start to feel, in this very moment, that our bodies, our minds, and even our personalities are ways through which our spiritual essence connects with the world around us? That these bodies and minds are actually sensing organs for spirit? Our physical forms are the vehicle through which spiritual essence gets to experience its own mysterious creation—to be bewildered by its creation, shocked by it, in awe of it, and even confused by it. Spirit is pure potential that contains every possible outcome. From the standpoint of our spiritual essence, nothing is to be avoided. No experiences need to be turned from. Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
The light of awakeness itself is the deepest transformative agent, and the deepest alchemy takes place in the willingness to stay conscious to our own unconsciousness.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled. There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come. I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. "At this moment, this is what you feel." I said. "There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?" She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, "No, I don't want to accept this." "Who is speaking?" I asked her. "You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?" She became quiet again. "I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?" She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, "This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less."This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called "The Unhappy Me." Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past—the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind. Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
However, the common usage of ego, both within Buddhist teachings and in the world at large, makes ego sound like an entity that has a shape and a size, and that can be extracted like a tooth. It doesn't work that way. Ego is not an object; it's more like a process that follows through on the proclivity for grasping, and for holding on to fixed ideas and identities.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Judging someone for looking unclean or smelling bad, or being loud, or anything, is a pretty neurotic way to seek happiness—but it provides a toehold to climb up from and allows you to temporarily enjoy the illusion that you are better than someone else. It's never just: They are bad. It is also: Therefore, I am good.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is nothing personal in this: I am not teaching you. You are consciousness, and you are listening to yourself. There is an Eastern saying: "The teacher and the taught together create the teaching." In any case, the words in themselves are not important. They are not the Truth; they only point to it. I speak from presence, and as I speak, you may be able to join me in that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
See clearly that the breath takes place in this vast open space of Awareness, not in an imagined, confined body.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
WAKE UP OR PERISH The world's problems are, by and large, human problems—the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well. In a manner of speaking, we have lost (or at the very least forgotten) our souls, and we try very, very hard not to notice, because we don't want to see how asleep we are, how desolate our condition really is. So we blindly carry on, driven by forces we do not recognize or understand, or even acknowledge. We are no doubt at a very critical point in time. Our world hangs in the balance, and a precarious balance it is. Awakening to Reality is no longer a possibility; it is an imperative. We have sailed the ship of delusion about as far as she can carry us. We have run her ashore and now find ourselves shipwrecked on an increasingly desolate land. Our options have imploded. "Wake up or perish" is the spiritual call of our times. Did we ever need more motivation than this? And yet all is eternally well, and more well than can be imagined.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Everyday we are faced with numerous decisions and choices. And try as we may, we often don't choose the thing that we know is "good for us." Part of this is related to the fact that the "right choice" is often the difficult one—the one that involves some sacrifice of our pleasure. In every century, men and women have struggled with trying to define the proper role that pleasure should play in their lives—a legion of philosophers, theologists, and psychologists, all exploring our relationship with pleasure.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The subtle effort not to love what truly is, is known as the separate self, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We cannot overcome anger and hatred simply by suppressing them. We need to actively cultivate the antidotes to hatred: patience and tolerance.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
On the positive side, you are "in love" with your partner. This is at first a deeply satisfying state. You feel intensely alive. Your existence has suddenly become meaningful because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel special, and you do the same for him or her. When you are together, you feel whole. The feeling can become so intense that the rest of the world fades into insignificance. However, you may also have noticed that there is a neediness and a clinging quality to that intensity. You become addicted to the other person. He or she acts on you like a drug. You are on a high when the drug is available, but even the possibility or the thought that he or she might no longer be there for you can lead to jealousy, possessiveness, attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail, blaming and accusing—fear of loss. If the other person does leave you, this can give rise to the most intense hostility or the most profound grief and despair. In an instant, loving tenderness can turn into a savage attack or dreadful grief. Where is the love now? Can love change into its opposite in an instant? Was it love in the first place, or just an addictive grasping and clinging? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Self satisfaction alone cannot determine if a desire or action is positive or negative. The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you a immediate feeling of satisfaction, but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Recognizing the fluidity of all forms disempowers the false claims of the fixed mind.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
although seeming to take place outside, in fact take place within Consciousness ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
although meditation may seem at first to be an activity that the mind undertakes in order to achieve some new state or experience, it is later understood to be the very nature or essence of the mind itself.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self—your invisible and indestructible reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
THE EGO'S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen—the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You are that awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous," says the ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable." What the ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You should cultivate freedom, including freedom from your own concepts and ideas.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the news tends to focus mostly on incidents and areas of our planet that represent the most extreme forms of human unconsciousness, which more often than not means violence and warfare, or at least severe dysfunction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The waves of mind demand so much of Silence. But She does not talk back does not give answers nor arguments. She is the hidden author of every thought every feeling every moment. Silence. She speaks only one word. And that word is this very existence. No name you give Her touches Her captures Her. No understanding can embrace Her. Mind throws itself at Silence demanding to be let in. But no mind can enter into Her radiant darkness Her pure and smiling nothingness. The mind hurls itself into sacred questions. But Silence remains unmoved by the tantrums. She asks only for nothing. Nothing. But you won't give it to Her because it is the last coin in your pocket. And you would rather give her your demands than your sacred and empty hands. *** Everything leaps out in celebration of mystery, but only nothing enters the sacred source, the silent substance. Only nothing gets touched and becomes sacred, realizes its own divinity, realizes what it is without the aid of a single thought. Silence is my secret. Not hidden. Not hidden. —ADYASHANTI ...
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
True salvation is a state of freedom—from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep you inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as the witness, and so initiate its transmutation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. Your life situation consists of your circumstances and your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point of access for that is the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego doesn't know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe—in the form of people and circumstances—gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole. The ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react to someone else's success as if that success had taken something away from "me." It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now (see chapter 6).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What about people who want to use me, manipulate or control me? Am I to surrender to them? They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt to get energy and power from you. It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated. If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say "no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the time-bound state of consciousness. There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy. Let us look at them in turn, so that when this pattern operates in you, you can recognize it and—decide again. To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
time is only in thought. Experience is eternally now.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Abundance comes only to those who already have it. It sounds almost unfair, but of course it isn't. It is a universal law. Both abundance and scarcity are inner states that manifest as your reality. Jesus puts it like this: "For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away."2 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As long as space endures, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
When doing becomes infused with the timeless quality of Being, that is success.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you're taking this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our attitude towards suffering becomes very important because it can affect how we cope with suffering when it arises.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position—a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than little me, you would remain non-reactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to "gain the world and lose your soul," as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to "fail" sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is the cause of suffering in the human being? Why is it that human beings have such a difficult time putting their suffering down? What's the reason that we often carry it around, when it becomes such a burden to us?One of the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
When you are present, when your attention is fully in the Now, that Presence will flow into and transform what you do. There will be quality and power in it. You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction'' and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
As I delved deeper into these Christian mystics, I was beginning to question in my own mind if I needed to make a path change from Zen Buddhism to Christianity. It had been many years since I'd been to my first Catholic mass, and I decided to go back a second time.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
FREEDOM FROM UNHAPPINESS Do you resent doing what you are doing? It may be your job, or you may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but part of you resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken resentment toward a person close to you? Do you realize that the energy you thus emanate is so harmful in its effects that you are in fact contaminating yourself as well as those around you? Have a good look inside. Is there even the slightest trace of resentment, unwillingness? If there is, observe it on both the mental and the emotional levels. What thoughts is your mind creating around this situation? Then look at the emotion, which is the body's reaction to those thoughts. Feel the emotion. Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant? Is it an energy that you would actually choose to have inside you? Do you have a choice? Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space. Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation. In fact, in most cases it keeps you stuck in it, blocking real change. Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune—that is, highly conscious. Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is unhappiness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there. But don't say, 'I'm unhappy.' Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: 'There is unhappiness in me.' Then investigate it. A situation you find yourself in may have something to do with it. Action may be required to change the situation or remove yourself from it. If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable.' The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, 'I am ruined' is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. 'I have fifty cents left in my bank account' is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions.Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them. Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"So give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting ... snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything. So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In most ancient cultures, there must have been an intuitive understanding of this process, which is why old people were respected and revered. They were the repositories of wisdom and provided the dimension of depth without which no civilization can survive for long. In our civilization, which is totally identified with the outer and ignorant of the inner dimension of spirit, the word old has mainly negative connotations. It equals useless and so we regard it as almost an insult to refer to someone as old. To avoid the word, we use euphemisms such as elderly and senior. The First Nation's "grandmother" is a figure of great dignity. Today's "granny" is at best cute. Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As he spoke, I found something very appealing about the Dalai Lama's approach to achieving happiness. It was absolutely practical and rational: Identify and cultivate positive mental states; identify and eliminate negative mental states.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Instead of trying to be a mountain, teaches the ancient Tao Te Ching, "Be the valley of the universe."4 In this way, you are restored to wholeness and so "all things will come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love - even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
expectations that anything or anybody in the future will save you or make you happy. As far as your life situation is concerned, there may be things to be attained or acquired. That's the world of form, of gain and loss. Yet on a deeper level you are already complete, and when you realize that, there is a playful, joyous energy behind what you do. Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight—that our "normal" state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as 'war,' your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything depends upon your readiness and willingness to let go into the Unknown and live from that mysterious and precious condition. The question is: Are you ready to give up everything when God comes knocking at your door? This willingness to completely let go and surrender to the divine determines how free you will ultimately become. Whatever you hold back for yourself will become your prison. My advice is to give your whole heart, mind, body, and soul to Grace when it comes. Ask yourself now: Am I ready?
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
BEAUTY ARISES IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So, in dealing with fear, you need to first use your faculty of reasoning and try to discover whether there is a valid basis for your fear or not.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Beware of making it your mission to 'eradicate evil,' as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional ego behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the way a person sees or understands him or herself deeply conditions the ways he or she sees and understands objects, others and the world.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The habits of drinking alcohol or getting angry are also you, and therefore you must treat them with great tenderness and nonviolence. The essential point is not to create conflict, a fight, within yourself.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The correct attitude is one where you have no more time to waste. This means that everything is oriented toward the now. The correct attitude is that there is no such thing as an awakening that happens tomorrow. Tomorrows never come. The time is now. You must be sincere. Sincerity and earnestness are the most beneficial attitudes to have.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That is, it knows itself as the totality of experience. This could be formulated as, 'I, Awareness, am everything', ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks, and acts, as well as the recognition of the collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the unawakened state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you're willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"What is being born is a new consciousness and, as its inevitable reflection, a new world. This is also foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is no so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
in it. It means consciousness is lost in its own dream. You get taken in by every thought, every emotion, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
fact, whether we are feeling happy or unhappy at any given moment often has very little to do with our absolute conditions, but rather, it is a function of how we perceive our situation, how satisfied we are with what we have.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
don't know what it is. They'll forget that that thing flying through the sky is beyond all words, that it's an expression of the immensity of life. It's actually an extraordinary and wondrous thing that flies through the sky. But as soon as we name it, we think we know what it is. We see "bird," and we almost discount it.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
You have already understood the basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with the mind, which creates a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, the newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
a belief in a policy of kindness, and a sense of commonality among all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If the thought of lack -- whether it be money, recognition, or love -- has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is already in your life, all you see is lack.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is inner stillness that will save and transform the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Whenever any kind of deep loss occurs in your life—such as loss of possessions, your home, a close relationship; or loss of your reputation, job, or physical abilities—something inside you dies. You feel diminished in your sense of who you are. There may also be a certain disorientation. "Without this... who am I?" When a form that you had unconsciously identified with as part of yourself leaves you or dissolves, that can be extremely painful. It leaves a hole, so to speak, in the fabric of your existence. When this happens, don't deny or ignore the pain or the sadness that you feel. Accept that it is there. Beware of your mind's tendency to construct a story around that loss in which you are assigned the role of victim. Fear, anger, resentment, or self-pity are the emotions that go with that role. Then become aware of what lies behind those emotions as well as behind the mind-made story: that hole, that empty space. Can you face and accept that strange sense of emptiness? If you do, you may find that it is no longer a fearful place. You may be surprised to find peace emanating from it. Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. That is why the peace of God can come to you through the contemplation and acceptance of death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Become at ease with the state of "not knowing." This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes, much like a light that grows brighter as you turn up the dimmer switch and so increase the flow of electricity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whether our action is wholesome or unwholesome depends on whether that action or deed arises from a disciplined or undisciplined state of mind. It is felt that a disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering, and in fact it is said that bringing about discipline within one's mind is the essence of the Buddha's teaching.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We are so busy and obsessed with our restless thinking about everything and everyone that we have mistaken our thinking about everything and everyone for everything and everyone. This tendency to take our thoughts to be real is what keeps the dream state intact and keeps us trapped within its domain of unconsciousness and strife. To many people the very idea that what is is more real than all of their beliefs and opinions about what is is hard to believe. But that's how it is when you are caught up in a dream.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
SERMON ON THE BODY What you perceive as a dense physical structure called the body, which is subject to disease, old age, and death, is not ultimately real—is not you. It is a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind, which, having lost touch with Being, creates the body as evidence of its illusory belief in separation and to justify its state of fear. But do not turn away from the body, for within that symbol of impermanence, limitation, and death that you perceive as the illusory creation of your mind is concealed the splendor of your essential and immortal reality. Do not turn your attention elsewhere in your search for the Truth, for it is nowhere else to be found but within your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Who really wants to find out that we're all addicted to qualities like approval, recognition, control, and power, and that none of these things actually brings an end to suffering? In fact, they're the cause of suffering! So the truth is that most of us don't really want to wake up. We don't really want to end suffering. What we really want to do is manage our suffering, to have a little bit less of it, so that we can just go on with our lives as they are, unchanged, the way we want to live them, maybe feeling a little better about them.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I am is said to be 'nothing', 'empty' or 'void' because it has no observable qualities.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don't identify with it, the pain-body can no longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. Your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion; your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That is, a single sensation/thought/perception appears in consciousness and thinking alone conceptualises ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
This ability to change the brain's wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our "negative conditioning" (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with "positive conditioning" (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Buddhism, the principle of causality is accepted as a natural law.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no "I" except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Effortless doesn't mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this "effortless effort." We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence of the Unmanifested in that? You can't? Look for it in the silence out of which the sounds come and into which they return. Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Mind can neither recognize nor create beauty. Only for a few seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty or that sacredness there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up. In a world of role-playing ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
uncompromising commitment to truth, and a total dedication to discovering the nature of reality are things that both Buddhism and science have in common.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in—or don't, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an "enemy." If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose