To complain is always nonacceptance to what *is*.
— 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
"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
Being is the very Intelligence whose visible manifestation is the physical universe.
— 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
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
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
…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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
[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
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
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
— 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
Enlightenment means rising above thought, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
... the ego is a derived sense of self...
— 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
"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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, ...
— 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The known always changes; knowing never changes.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
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
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
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
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
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
"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
You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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
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
Who am I? Meditate on that. Seek the Seeker.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
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
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 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
... 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
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
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
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 mystery is always for thought, never for our self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
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
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
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
Fearless and honest self-appraisal can be a powerful weapon against self-doubt and low self-confidence.
— 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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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 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
compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
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
we now confuse these new states of mind for enlightenment.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
Abundance comes only to those who already have it.
— 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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
"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
Learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
"Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Every object of the mind is itself mind.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
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
happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events. Success ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Nothing extraordinary happened except the falling away of the concepts ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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 will know the truth, and the truth will make you free ...
— 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
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
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
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
natural state of felt oneness with Being.
— 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
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
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
"Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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
The heavenly state is the context of eternity in which the world resides.
— 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
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
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
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
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
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
"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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
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
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
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
see the sameness of being in every human.
— 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
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
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
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
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
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
[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
[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
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
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
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
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
You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive.
— 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
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
person is a collection of thoughts, images, feelings, ...
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
... 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
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
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
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
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
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
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
who are you? Consciousness that has become conscious of itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Only thinking imagines that imaginary one! ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
"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
extremely high volume of correspondence I receive, I am regretfully ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
"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 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
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
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
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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 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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
[...]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
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
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
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
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
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
unbridled devotion to sensual pleasures could sometimes lead to pain instead. In the closing years of the ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.
— 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 you inner space clear.
— 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
— 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 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
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
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 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
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
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
Perceiving presence is what true awakening is all about.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
"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
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 moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
Nothing else truly is.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Become conscious of being conscious.
— 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 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course, means "have no enemies.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
"Become at ease with the state of "not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
"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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
— 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Eternity, of course, does not mean endless time, but no time.
— 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
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
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
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
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
If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— 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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
"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
Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
"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
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
"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
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
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 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
leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
dissolving quality rather than their ability to formulate something ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
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
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
an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What ...
— 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
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
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
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
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
Will you become less when you let go of it? ...
— 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The true antidote of greed is contentment ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"Surrender comes when you no longer ask, "Why is this happening to me? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
"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
[...]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
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
"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
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 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
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
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
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
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
That is why the most sacred thing in life is death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
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
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from