The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Generally speaking, you can have two different types of individuals. On the one hand, you can have a wealthy, successful person, surrounded by relatives and so on. If that person's source of dignity and sense of worth is only material, then so long as his fortune remains, maybe that person can sustain a sense of security. But the moment the fortune wanes, the person will suffer because there is no other refuge. On the other hand, you can have another person enjoying similar economic status and financial success, but at the same time, that person is warm and affectionate and has a feeling of compassion. Because that person has another source of worth, another source that gives him or her a sense of dignity, another anchor, there is less chance of that person's becoming depressed if his or her fortune happens to disappear. Through this type of reasoning you can see the very practical value of human warmth and affection in developing an inner sense of worth.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
The mind cannot forgive. Only you can. You become present, you enter your body, you feel the vibrant peace and stillness that emanate from Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world -- relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself -- who you are.To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
basic or underlying nature of human beings is gentleness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course, means "have no enemies.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and depends upon whether you can become present enough to dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
This ability to change the brain's wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
It is as it is. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
The emotion is the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Watch the emotion. You are the watcher, not the emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ultimately, of course, there is no other and you are always meeting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren't who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
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
If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For example, if anger is the predominant energy vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts, dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become "you." Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking that is not rooted in awareness becomes self-serving and dysfunctional. Cleverness devoid of wisdom is extremely dangerous and destructive. That is the current state of most of humanity. The amplification of thought as science and technology, although intrinsically neither good nor bad, has also become destructive because so often the thinking out of which it comes has no roots in awareness. The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
When you learn to be the witness of your thoughts and emotions, which is an essential part of being present, you may be surprised when you first become aware of the background "static" of ordinary unconsciousness and realize how rarely, if ever, you are truly at ease within yourself. On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental projection away from the Now. On the emotional level, there will be an undercurrent of unease, tension, boredom, or nervousness. Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual resistance mode.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The very last phase of spiritual awakening is what I call "the transmutation." Transmutation is what transfiguration and relinquishment make possible. In it, your orientation to life is entirely selfless. It's not that you want to be selfless or you're practicing being selfless: rather you're selfless in the sense of no self.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
we've come to understand sin as a kind of moral failing, but that interpretation actually comes from the power structures of the church and religious authorities. If you can convince somebody that they are inherently impure and that there is a mistake at the center of their being, then sin becomes a wrongdoing that deserves blame.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"What is being born is a new consciousness and, as its inevitable reflection, a new world. This is also foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Suffering occurs when youbelieve in a thought that is at odds withwhat is, what was, or what may be.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The 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
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
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
Furthermore, any teaching that puts the spotlight of attention on the workings of the ego will necessarily provoke egoic reaction, resistance, and attack.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The 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 egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In most ancient cultures, people believed that everything, even so-called inanimate objects, had an indwelling spirit, and in this respect they were closer to the truth than we are today.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Beware of making it your mission to 'eradicate evil,' as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional ego behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. Well? I had to wait for quite a long time before a thought came in. Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about. In that state, all your attention is in the Now. There is none left for daydreaming, thinking, remembering, anticipating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The first stage of the awakening journey is the calling. The calling arrives when we first feel that spiritual impulse that galvanizes our attention. All of a sudden we sense a greater mystery to life that we seek to experience more deeply; it literally calls us.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
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
The simplest thing one can say about the experiential knowledge of awakening is that it is a shift in one's perception. This is the heart of awakening. There is a shift in perception from seeing oneself as an isolated individual to seeing oneself, if we have a sense of self at all after this shift, as something mush more universal—everything and everyone and everywhere at the same time.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness—without doing anything—simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. That's another role. It's called "natural, spontaneous me." As soon as you are trying to be this or that, you are playing a role.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
What remains when we have let go of all thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions, activities and relationships? Our self alone remains: not an enlightened, higher, spiritual, special self or a self that we have become through effort, practice or discipline, but just the essential self or being that we always and already are before it is coloured by experience.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
One of the most common ego-repair mechanisms is anger, which causes a temporary but huge ego inflation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
full attention means full acceptance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
kind of thing. I don't want to talk to a lot of people about past lives, especially the radical nondualists who say that there is nobody who was born, there is nobody who has past lives, there are no incarnations, and so on. Of course, that is all true; it's all a dream, even past lives. When I talk about them at all, I talk about them as past dreams. I dreamed I was this person; I dreamed I was that person. Personally, I've never tried to gather experiences of past lives and wrap them all up in some sort of metaphysical understanding. I don't have a clear understanding about what a past life is, except that it seems clear to me that it also has the nature of a dream; it doesn't have objective, actual existence. Nonetheless, the experience I had happened. Since it happened, I can't say it didn't happen. But in my own mind, I don't try to figure it all out. All I know is what happened.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
"Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. "I don't know," I said. "They all look so interesting. But I do know this," I added. "Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Wherever I meet people, I always have the feeling that I am encountering another human being, just like myself.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You do not need to wait for the world to become sane, or for somebody else to become conscious, before you can be enlightened ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word suchness describes reality as it is. Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death. It is total freedom.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
It seems that often when problems arise, our outlook becomes narrow. All of our attention may be focused on worrying about the problem, and we may have a sense that we're the only one that is going through such difficulties. This can lead to a kind of self-absorption that can make the problem seem very intense. When this happens, I think that seeing things from a wider perspective can definitely help—realizing, for instance, that there are many other people who have gone through similar experiences, and even worse experiences. This practice of shifting perspective can even be helpful in certain illnesses or when in pain. At the time the pain arises it is of course often very difficult, at that moment, to do formal meditation practices to calm the mind. But if you can make comparisons, view your situation from a different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at that one event, then it appears bigger and bigger. If you focus too closely, too intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
ADYA I will try to explain what happened experientially. At the moment of awakening, it was as though I was completely outside who I thought I was. There was a vast, vast, vast emptiness. In that vast emptiness, in that infinite emptiness, there was the smallest, smallest, smallest point of light you could imagine. And ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling—mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore; spontaneous right action happens, and "you" are not doing it. Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Somewhere inside I always knew that everything was one—that I was eternal, unborn, undying, and uncreated. I understood that my essential nature was not limited by or confined to my personality structure or the body I seemed to be inhabiting. There had been a dissolving, in a somewhat radical way, of the world as I had known it and of the self I had known myself to be.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something goes seriously "wrong"—illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, breakup of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death—know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present 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
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
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
But as long as we view suffering as an unnatural state, an abnormal condition that we fear, avoid, and reject, we will never uproot the causes of suffering and begin to live a happier life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
The mind always wants to categorize and compare, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection. We spoke about this earlier.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The body loves your attention. It is also a potent form of self-healing. Most illnesses creep in when you are not present in the body. If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can you give some more examples of ordinary unconsciousness? See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
All utopian visions have this in common: the mental projection of a future time when all will be well, we will be saved, there will be peace and harmony and the end of our problems. There have been many such utopian visions. Some ended in disappointment, others in disaster.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We should come to know that there is more Reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about Reality.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
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
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
Our duck's lesson is this: Flap your wings—which translates as "let go of the story"—and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
reveal themselves as none other than the shape that our self is taking from moment to moment.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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 you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That is why the most sacred thing in life is death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
a belief in the fundamental gentleness and goodness of all human beings, a belief in the value of compassion, a belief in a policy of kindness, and a sense of commonality among all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Experience itself does not know agitation. Only the mind knows agitation, and the agitation it knows belongs to its own activity alone.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
To me, THE definition of hell is simple: it is a place where there is no understanding and no compassion.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The ego is always on guard against any kind of perceived diminishment. Automatic ego-repair mechanisms come into effect to restore the mental form of "me." When someone blames or criticizes me, that to the ego is a diminishment of self, and it will immediately attempt to repair its diminished sense of self through self-justification, defense, or blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities are needed: surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is illogical to expect smiles from others if one does not smile oneself. Therefore, one can see that many things depend on one's own behaviour.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
THE EGO IS NOT PERSONAL On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative,"3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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 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
There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When I don't mind what happens, what does that imply? It implies that internally I am in alignment with what happens. "What happens," of course, refers to the suchness of this moment, which always already is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are in touch with something infinitely greater than any pleasure, greater than any manifested thing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
... making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal ego mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
"This (liberation) isn't something I can help you with. I can tell you what you need to do, but you have to do it. In the beginning, teachers can help a lot. But the deeper you go, all they can do is point, and clarify, and tell you what you need to do. Only you can take this step. Nobody can push you into this place. It's like Buddha's final night under the Bodhi tree. What did he do when confronted with this? He reached down and touched the ground and said, „I will not be moved." Finally—when everything that could be thrown at him was thrown, and he was still unmoved—it was done. He never looked back.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence of the Unmanifested in that? You can't? Look for it in the silence out of which the sounds come and into which they return. Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret ...
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
watch out for any kind of defensiveness within you, What are you defending? an illusionary identity, an image in your mind,a fictional entity ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Spirit never asks itself, "How do I stay within myself?" That would be ridiculous. It just makes no sense, coming from the true nature of things. What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself. What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren't true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the gravitational field of the dream state? We should not ask, "How do I stay awake? ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
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
When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love—even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As we go through life, we eventually have enough experience to see that sometimes profound difficulty can also be profoundly heart opening. When you are in a tough position, when you are facing something hard, when you feel challenged, when you feel like you are at your edge, it is a gift to be willing to stop, to sit with those moments, and not look for the quick, easy resolution for that feeling. It is a kind of grace to be able and willing to open yourself entirely to the experience of challenge, of difficulty, and of insecurity.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it—who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Don't ask your mind for permission to enjoy what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That's a teaching meant to shake us from our slumber. In order to come into our full potential and to embody the truth and radiance of what we are, we must come vitally alive; we must lean once again into presence; we must pour ourselves forth into life, instead of trying to escape life and avoid its challenges.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not create or participate in drama anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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 voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As long as space endures, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
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
The other more serious reason for the illusion of separateness is compulsive thinking. It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger—just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What it doesn't say—but only points to—is more important than what it says.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn't anything that isn't made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training, we can change; we can transform ourselves. Within Buddhist practice there are various methods of trying to sustain a calm mind when some disturbing event happens. Through repeated practice of these methods we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down. And, although my own experience may be very little, I have found this to be true in my own small practice. So, if I receive some tragic news, at that moment I may experience some disturbance within my mind, but it goes very quickly. Or, I may become irritated and develop some anger, but again, it dissipates very quickly. There is no effect on the deeper mind. No hatred. This was achieved through gradual practice; it didn't happen overnight.'Certainly not. The Dalai Lama has been engaged in training his mind since he was four years old.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and on life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you Are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you have a liberating effect on others.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
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
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges--the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Large-scale waiting" is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within (...) ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I think the person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody "fails" sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, dishonesty, propensity to violence, or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You 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
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
BEAUTY ARISES IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking is something and then feeling it are two different reference points for most human beings: If I think it and I feel it, then it is real. But it does not take much reflection to acknowledge we have all thought and felt things to be true that later found out were not.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
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
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
... the ego is a derived sense of self...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the news tends to focus mostly on incidents and areas of our planet that represent the most extreme forms of human unconsciousness, which more often than not means violence and warfare, or at least severe dysfunction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self—because it never existed in the first place.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Recognition of our true nature does not need studious reading of spiritual texts, years of meditation practice or deep devotion to a teacher. We need only the willingness to engage in a rigorously honest investigation into the nature of awareness itself—not an intellectual investigation, but a personal investigation into what we truly are.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When this unification occurs, there's a simplicity to life, a deep sense of freedom and essential well-being and also of fearlessness.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system, becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can you be aware of your mind racing to defend its position, justify, attack, blame? In other words, can you awaken at that moment of unconsciousness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Within all beings there is the seed of perfection. However, compassion is required in order to activate that seed which is inherent in our hearts and minds....
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
Jesus gave the key to the creative use of mind and to the conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 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
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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 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
Each person's life, each life-form infact, represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself. And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end - one of countless worlds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be present as the watcher of your mind—of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
first sessions, for example, by posing to him certain common human problems, illustrating with several lengthy case histories. Having described a woman who persisted in self-destructive behaviors despite the tremendous negative impact on her life, I asked him if he had an explanation for this behavior and what advice he could offer. I was taken aback when after a long pause and reflection, he simply said, ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you realize that what you react to in others is also in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As much as possible in everyday life, use awareness of the inner body to create space. When waiting, when listening to someone, when pausing to look at the sky, a tree, a flower, your partner, or child, feel the aliveness within at the same time. This means part of your attention or consciousness remains formless, and the rest is available for the outer world of form. Whenever you "inhabit" your body in this way, it serves as an anchor for staying present in the Now. It prevents you from losing yourself in thinking, in emotions, or in external situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS All of the above are assumptions, unexamined thoughts that are confused with reality. They are stories the ego creates to convince you that you cannot be at peace now or cannot be fully yourself now. Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one. The ego says: Maybe at some point in the future, I can be at peace—if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that. Or it says: I can never be at peace because of something that happened in the past. Listen to people's stories and they could all be entitled "Why I Cannot Be at Peace Now." The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now. Or maybe it does know, and it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego. How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The world as it appears to us now is, as I said, largely a reflection of the egoic mind. Fear being an unavoidable consequence of egoic delusion, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some people get angry when they hear me say that problems are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
What the world doesn't tell you—because it doesn't know—is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The ego doesn't know that mind and mental positions have nothing to do with who you are because the ego is the unobserved mind itself. In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What does that mean? Let ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
natural state of felt oneness with Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
[...]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
Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body; ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In identifying one's mental state as the prime factor in achieving happiness, of course that doesn't deny that our basic physical needs for food, clothing, and shelter must be met. But once these basic needs are met, the message is clear: we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate—right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness. In ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
Everyone around us sees themselves as essentially different from others, and from life in general. So we move in a world where almost everyone we meet will be reflecting back to us this egoic sense of consciousness. To find liberation, we must wake up from this dream that our mind creates, that we're something separate than everything around us.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When we speak of this inner discipline, it can of course involve many things, many methods. But generally speaking, one begins by identifying those factors which lead to happiness and those factors which lead to suffering. Having done this, one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness. That is the way.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Rather, genuine compassion is based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration. On the basis of the recognition of this equality and commonality, you develop a sense of affinity and closeness with others. With this as a foundation, you can feel compassion regardless of whether you view the other person as a friend or an enemy. It is based on the other's fundamental rights rather than your own mental projection. Upon this basis, then, you will generate love and compassion. That's genuine compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Religion's primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
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
The subtle effort not to love what truly is, is known as the separate self, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This one question -- "What do I know for certain?"-- is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-- things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual people always think the Truth is hidden from them. It is not hidden. What gets in the way is the idea of what it is going to be.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depths to you as a human being–no humility, no compassion. You would not be listening to this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego. And then comes a point where it has served its purpose.Suffering is necessary until you realize that it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born. This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Our essential being shines equally in all experience, irrespective of its content. Even our darkest feelings shine brightly with the light of being. All that is necessary is to give attention to being in the midst of experience, before it is qualified or conditioned by it.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
We can never understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we think about is content; whereas, the higher order emanates from the formless realm of consciousness, from universal intelligence. But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happens to the knowing with which all experience is known.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
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
In Buddhism, for instance, there is a reference to the four factors of fulfillment, or happiness: wealth, worldly satisfaction, spirituality, and enlightenment.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Every word on this page is in fact only made of paper. It only expresses the nature of the paper, although it may describe the moon.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
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
Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Doing is never enough if you neglect Being. The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing. If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough 'doings' to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won't. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When you look and listen in this way, you may become aware of a subtle and at first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm. Some people feel it as a stillness in the background. Others call it peace. When consciousness is no longer totally absorbed by thinking, some of it remains in its formless, unconditioned, original state. This is inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
We can see how a calm, affectionate, wholesome state of mind has beneficial effects on our health and physical well-being. Conversely, feelings of frustration, fear, agitation, and anger can be destructive to our health.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
There are no 'things' there in the first place to be transparent or otherwise.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
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
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
To create suffering without recognizing it -- this is the essence of unconscious living...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
"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
The experience of being aware is in exactly the same condition now as it was two minutes ago, two days ago, two months ago, two years ago or twenty years ago. The awareness with which our experience as five-year-old girls or boys was known is exactly the same awareness with which our current experience is known. Thus, our essential nature of knowing, being aware or awareness itself has no age. It is for this reason that as we get older, we feel that we are not really getting older. The older we get, the more we feel that we have always been the same person. The sameness in ourself is the sameness of awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore. What cannot be heard with the ear but that whereby the ear can hear: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore…. What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore.7 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet—in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acute crises and dysfunction always precede or coincide with any evolutionary advancement or gain in consciousness. All life-forms need obstacles and challenges in order to evolve. In the case of the ego, most of the challenges it encounters are self-created through its unconscious patterns. Eventually, the ego brings about its own demise. In that sense, it can be considered a necessary precursor for the next stage in human evolution, which is the awakening of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
And I am in the bardo of dying, trying to let go of my old life and not yet born into my new one. At least I am not stuck. I am moving.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one. Whereas some of them do remain trapped in their heavy pain-bodies, many others reach a point where they cannot live with their unhappiness any longer, and so their motivation to awaken becomes strong. ... Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are here to enable the divinepurpose of the universe to unfold.That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In pointing to the impermanence of all forms, by implication, they are also pointing to the eternal. Only the eternal in you can recognize the impermanent as impermanent.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Likewise we cannot 'see' our own being and yet all we ever know, in all experience, is the light of our self. It knows only itself. All experience first and foremost announces the presence of awareness, the light of our own b ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is unhappiness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there. But don't say, 'I'm unhappy.' Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: 'There is unhappiness in me.' Then investigate it. A situation you find yourself in may have something to do with it. Action may be required to change the situation or remove yourself from it. If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable.' The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, 'I am ruined' is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. 'I have fifty cents left in my bank account' is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions.Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them. Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't get attached to any words. They are only stepping stones, to be left behind as quickly as possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen—the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Everyday we are faced with numerous decisions and choices. And try as we may, we often don't choose the thing that we know is "good for us." Part of this is related to the fact that the "right choice" is often the difficult one—the one that involves some sacrifice of our pleasure. In every century, men and women have struggled with trying to define the proper role that pleasure should play in their lives—a legion of philosophers, theologists, and psychologists, all exploring our relationship with pleasure.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, (and if you are reading this, you almost certainly have), you are able to decide what kind of a relationship you want to have with the present moment. Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there. When you inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to enter.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you delve into the past, it will become abottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free ofit, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
they are no more than unconscious players in the egoic game, a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose. It is, in the words of Shakespeare, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."1 Amazingly, Shakespeare arrived at this conclusion without having the benefit of television. If the egoic ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love—even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
But what is it? What is it like to experience blame? By questioning, "What is this?" consciousness is allowed to get inside of it. So you see, there might be blame, but now it is blame that's conscious. If you try to do something with the blame, such as get rid of it, then you are not really with it.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents' pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you hold your cup and drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, it's like you're performing a sacred ritual, and that is a prayer.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
We can see making breakfast as mundane work or as a privilege—it just depends on our way of looking.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The beginning of the spiritual journey is what I call "life after awakening".
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
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
Deep sleep is not the absence of awareness; it is the awareness of absence.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Do not seek after what you yearn for; seek the source of the yearning itself.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. It will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.In the state of enlightenment, you *are* yourself. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you'll see that a thought simply occurs on its own—it arises without any intention on your part.In response to this, we're taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
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
Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"As Jesus says, "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon earth, and men do not see it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
"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
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming" with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness" of that moment? Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and "mine": You make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. Your life situation consists of your circumstances and your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point of access for that is the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Die to the past every moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
In fact, we don't know objects; we just know 'knowing'. And who is it that knows 'knowing'? 'Knowing' is not known by something or someone outside or other than itself. 'Knowing' is known by 'knowing'. In other words, all that is experienced in the experience of an object, other or world is 'knowing'.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The moment you see the dysfunction, it begins to dissolve. Some people laugh out loud when they see this. With ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every "other" as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
No thought can encapsulate the vastness of the totality. Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments. This gives rise to fundamental misperceptions, for example, that there are separate things and events, or that this is the cause of that. Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by its very nature, implies limitation, which ultimately means that it is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought. Seen from beyond the limitation of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The 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
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— 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
Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
One thing you should remember is that mental transformations take time and are not easy. I think some people from the West, where technology is so good, think that everything is automatic.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
As I delved deeper into these Christian mystics, I was beginning to question in my own mind if I needed to make a path change from Zen Buddhism to Christianity. It had been many years since I'd been to my first Catholic mass, and I decided to go back a second time.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identity with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality—and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality—this is also its definition: complete identification with form—physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even in the presence of thinking, there may be the belief in time but never the actual experience of time. There is just the current experience, appearing now. Age is never an experience; it is always a concept.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
With a true and authentic awakening, who and what we are becomes clear. There's no longer a question about it; it is a done deal. In this way, one of the hallmarks of a true awakening is the end of seeking. You no longer feel the momentum, the push and the pull. The seeker has been revealed as the virtual reality it always was, and as such it disappears. The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You have already understood the basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with the mind, which creates a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more the dysfunction of the human mind plays itself out on the world stage, clearly visible to everyone in the daily television news reports, the greater the number of people who realize the urgent need for a radical change in human consciousness if humanity is not to destroy both itself and the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Surrender—the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is—also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are bound to the world of form, the harder and more impenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat "transparent," as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Once you have a theory, it's not too hard to find evidence to substantiate it, at least until some other theory comes along.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
dissolving quality rather than their ability to formulate something ...
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
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
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 sense of contentment is a key factor for attaining happiness. Bodily health, material wealth and companions and friends are three factors for happiness. Contentment is the key that will determine the outcome of your relations with all three of these factors.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
your dwelling place in the Now and pay ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is a scripture in the Buddhist tradition called the Heart Sutra, which says that there is no birth, no old age, and no death, and no end to birth, old age, or death. This is a very important part of the sutra. There is no birth, no old age, and no death. This is true from the absolute point of view. But unless we've also realized, simultaneously, that there is no end to birth, old age, and death, then our realization is not complete.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Children in particular find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding into facing the emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the child at that time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nothing has ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"A new heaven" is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and "a new earth" is its reflection in the physical realm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The usual pattern of thought creating emotion is reversed in the case of the pain-body, at least initially. Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative. The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is no knower of this experience and nothing that is known. There is just the knowing of it, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
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
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, "Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create." They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of "normal" human existence. They showed the way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you 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
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
... enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be predictably preceded by vast upheavals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
What you refer to as your 'life' should more accurately be called your 'life situation'. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind stuff. Your life is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the 'right choice' is often the difficult one—the one that involves some sacrifice of our pleasure.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
"If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable." The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self." These are just a few of the habitual ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
Love is the experience of our shared being. When we love another person we feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that the separation between us dissolves.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
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
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
I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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 see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible. Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms and circumstances, but you won't be identified with them. You do not need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life—only your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Dogmas—religious, political, scientific—arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know." Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.
— 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
This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form—it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. FOCUS ATTENTION ON THE FEELING INSIDE YOU. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In reality, which means in our actual experience, all experience is one seamless substance. The duality between the inside self and the outside object, world or other is never actually experienced. It is always imagined.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
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
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
When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the "me" is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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 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
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
When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won't be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter.... The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance. Many feel a diminished sense of self-worth because they perceive their body as ugly or imperfect. In some cases, the ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
To see one's predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In accepting that suffering is a part of your daily existence, you could begin by examining the factors that normally give rise of feelings of discontent and mental unhappiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
once you harbor feelings of hatred or ill feeling towards someone, once you yourself are filled by hatred or negative emotions, then other people appear to you as also hostile. So as a result there is more fear, greater inhibition and hesitation, and a sense of insecurity. These things develop, and also loneliness in the midst of a world perceived as hostile.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won't make much difference to your life. To realize this truth, you need to live it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don't project a mind-made image -- and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world -- but function from the deeper core of their Being, those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world. They are the bringers of the new consciousness. Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the purpose of the whole. Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence -- simple, natural, unassuming -- has a transformational effect on whoever they come into contact with. When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. ... 'How can I be myself?' is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. ... If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. ... Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems. You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
She believed I had 'done something' to her, but I had done nothing. Instead of asking what I had done to her, perhaps she should have asked what I had not done. I had not reacted, not confirmed the reality of her story, not fed her mind with more thought and her pain-body with more emotion. I had allowed her to experience whatever she was experiencing at that moment, and the power of allowing lies in noninterference, nondoing. Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
PART TWO FACING DEATH AND DYING The issue of facing death in a peaceful manner is a very difficult one. According to common sense, there seem to be two ways of dealing with the problem and the suffering. The first is simply to try to avoid the problem, to put it out of your mind, even though the reality of that problem is still there and it is not minimized. Another way of dealing with this issue is to look directly at the problem and analyse it, make it familiar to you and make it clear that it is a part of all our lives. Illness happens. It is not something exceptional; it is part of nature and a fact of life. Of course we have every right to avoid illness and pain, but in spite of that effort, when illness happens it is better to accept it. While you should make every effort to cure it as soon as possible, you should have no extra mental burden. As the great Indian scholar Shantideva has said: 'If there is a way to overcome the suffering, then there is no need to worry; if there is no way to overcome the suffering, then there is no use in worrying.' That kind of rational attitude is quite useful. Death is a part of all our lives. Whether we like it or not, it is bound to happen. Instead of avoiding thinking about it, it is better to understand its meaning. We all have the same body, the same human flesh, and therefore we will all die. There is a big difference, of course, between natural death and accidental death, but basically death will come sooner or later. If from the beginning your attitude is, 'Yes, death is part of our lives', then it may be easier to face.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
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
When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Enlightenment depends to a large extent on believing that you are born for Freedom in this lifetime, and that it is available now, in this moment. The mind, which creates the past and future, keeps you out of the moment where the Truth of your Being can be discovered. In this moment, there is always Freedom and there is always peace. This moment in which you experience Stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
If you were able to observe the physiological changes that take place inside your body when possessed by such negative states, how they adversely affect the functioning of the heart, the digestive and immune systems, and countless other bodily functions, it would become abundantly clear that such states are indeed pathological, are forms of suffering and not pleasure. Whenever ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Do you want an easy death? Would you rather die without pain, without agony? Then die to the past every moment, and let the light of your presence shine away the heavy, time-bound self you thought of as "you".
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Nature exists in a state of unconscious oneness with the whole. This, for example, is why virtually no wild animals were killed in the tsunami disaster of 2004. Being more in touch with the totality than humans, they could sense the tsunami's approach long before it could be seen or heard and so had time to withdraw to higher terrain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
aware Presence loses its apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure Awareness alone, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Every challenge that it contains is actually a disguised opportunity for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
awareness of the inner body has other benefits in the physical realm. One of them is a significant slowing down of the aging of the physical body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind. Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Non-duality is the essential quality of awareness, yet when we speak of three types of awareness—normal, meditative, and pure—we are speaking of a gradual experiential process that takes place from dualistic to non-dualistic states, from very cluttered minds to minds that are increasingly liberated from habitual reactivity and preconceptions about how things are supposed to be.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain becomes fuel for the flame of your consciousness, which then burns more brightly as a result.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don't forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current state of mind dominance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, in reality, there are not two things—one, the screen and two, the document or image. There is just the screen. Two things (or a multiplicity and diversity of things) only come into apparent existence when their true reality—the screen—is overlooked. Experience is like that. All we know is experience but there is no independent 'we' or 'I' that knows experience. There is just experience or experiencing. And experiencing is not inherently divided into one part that experiences and another part that is experienced.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
most humans see only the outer forms, unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their own essence and identify only with their own physical and psychological form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
If you stop investing it with "selfness," the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate—in love—or move ever more deeply into the Now together—into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
North America. In deep love and appreciation, I would like to thank those exceptional ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As the great Indian scholar Shantideva has said: 'If there is a way to overcome the suffering, then there is no need to worry; if there is no way to overcome the suffering, then there is no use in worrying.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Sometimes the 'fault' you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you want others to be happy practice compassion; and if you want yourself to be happy practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
"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
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
It's the way spirit moves in the world of time and space. That's what a human body-mind is: an extension of spirit in time and space.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no "I" except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In identifying one's mental state as the prime factor in achieving happiness, of course that doesn't deny that our basic physical needs for food, clothing, and shelter must be met. But once these basic needs are met, the message is clear: we don't need more money, we don't need greater success or fame, we don't need the perfect body or even the perfect mate—right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
"Making it" in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to "fail" so that your life can have meaning.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[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 could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
So, the first step in seeking happiness is learning. We first have to learn how negative emotions and behaviors are harmful to us and how positive emotions are helpful. And we must realize how these negative emotions are not only very bad and harmful to one personally but harmful to society and the future of the whole world as well. That kind of realization enhances our determination to face and overcome them.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
We can see that there are many ways in which we actively contribute to our own experience of mental unrest and suffering. Although, in general, mental and emotional afflictions themselves can come naturally, often it is our own reinforcement of those negative emotions that makes them so much worse. For instance when we have anger or hatred towards a person, there is less likelihood of its developing to a very intense degree if we leave it unattended.However, if we think about the projected injustices done to us, the ways in which we have been unfairly treated, and we keep on thinking about them over and over, then that feeds the hatred. It makes the hatred very powerful and intense. Of course, the same can apply to when we have an attachment towards a particular person; we can feed that by thinking about how beautiful he or she is, and as we keep thinking about the projected qualities that we see in the person, the attachment becomes more and more intense. But this shows how through constant familiarity and thinking, we ourselves can make our emotions more intense and powerful.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
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
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
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
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
In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
the notion that we are separate is not really true; it's all made up. It's all conjured up in our mind. It's one big dream that we have. The difficulty with this dream is that almost everybody around us is having the same dream. It's essentially the collective dream of humanity. So it's not just you or me that's dreaming; almost all human beings are also having this dream of being separate, of being completely other than the world around them. What this means is that we really have to look within ourselves quite deeply, because we're not only looking beyond our own deluded mind, our own misunderstanding; we're looking beyond the delusion of the entirety of humanity.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 thrives on others' attention, which is after all a form of psychic energy. The ego doesn't know that the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God" - not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True inquiry is experiential ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The mental illness that is called paranoid schizophrenia, or paranoia for short, is essentially an exaggerated form of ego. It usually consists of a fictitious story the mind has invented to make sense of a persistent underlying feeling of fear. The main element of the story is the belief that certain people (sometimes large numbers or almost everyone) are plotting against me, or are conspiring to control or kill me. The story often has an inner consistency and logic so that it sometimes fools others into believing it too. Sometimes ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Spiritual autonomy is knowing who and what you are—knowing that you are divine being itself, knowing that the essence of you is divinity. You are moving in the world of time and space, appearing as a human being, but nonetheless you are eternal, divine being, the timeless breaking through and operating within the world of time. To Jesus, spirit is everything. Nothing matters more than spirit or, as I like to say, divine being. Divine being is what Jesus is here for; it is the vitality source from which he moves, from which he speaks, from which his critique arises. He is the living presence of divine being. He's a human being too, but he's here to convey divine being, and that comes out most clearly in the Gospel of Mark. This gospel uniquely conveys Jesus' search for himself. Mark's Jesus is a Jesus who is very much a searcher: he's looking for his identity, he's looking for his role, he's experimenting, he's finding out what works and what doesn't. He's on a journey, and he's inviting all of us along for that journey with him as if we were also the disciples.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The 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
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
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
forgetting takes place in the mind alone. Presence never truly forgets itself.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
I've been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would 'let go of them' is itself simply one such pattern.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
"Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies"—his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself. Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no "I" apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say, "What voice?" or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an entity that has taken possession of them. Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
All artists, whether they know it or not create from a place of inner stillness, a place of no mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Happiness is our very nature and lies at the source of the mind, or the heart of ourself, in all conditions and under all circumstances. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
"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
You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don't misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Instead of trying to be a mountain, teaches the ancient Tao Te Ching, "Be the valley of the universe."4 In this way, you are restored to wholeness and so "all things will come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought—or the emotion or sense perception ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If we can directly address our problem and focus our energies on finding a solution, for instance, the problem can be transformed into a challenge.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
"If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. You have "overcome the world," in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have "crossed over to the other shore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I am is said to be 'nothing', 'empty' or 'void' because it has no observable qualities.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
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
Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Recognizing the fluidity of all forms disempowers the false claims of the fixed mind.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations,you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
Only thinking imagines that imaginary one! ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
THE SOURCE OF CHI Is the Unmanifested what in the East is called chi, a kind of universal life energy? No, it isn't.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
"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
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Buddhism, the principle of causality is accepted as a natural law.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment.
— 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
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
There is nothing that you need to understand before you can become present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Even mainstream medicine, although it knows very little about how the ego operates yet, is beginning to recognize the connection between negative emotional states and physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But to know that you are not present is a great success: ...
— 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 and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If there is awareness in you, you will be able to recognize that voice in your head for what it is: an old thought, conditioned by the past. If there is awareness in you, you no longer need to believe in every thought you think. It's an old thought, no more. Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever it is that is feeling the chair is the substance of the chair.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now. So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
It's just natural. It's not better than or higher than anything or anybody. It's simply the natural state of being. It's totally democratic. It's the inheritance of everybody.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
as long as you are run by the egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity. Perhaps you haven't looked very deeply into the human condition in its state of dominance by the egoic mind. Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be is not just out there in space—it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth—an attribute of the one transcendental reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[...]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
"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
Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"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
So, in dealing with fear, you need to first use your faculty of reasoning and try to discover whether there is a valid basis for your fear or not.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When our attitude towards our material possessions and wealth is not proper, it can lead to an extreme attachment towards such things as our property, houses and belongings. This can lead to an inability to feel contented. If that happens, then one will always remain in a state of dissatisfaction, always wanting more. In a way, one is then really poor, because the suffering of poverty is the suffering of wanting something and feeling the lack of it.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
I think that in many cases people tend to expect the other person to respond to them in a positive way first, rather than taking the initiative themselves to create that possibility. I feel that's wrong, it leads to problems and can act as a barrier that just serves to promote a feeling of isolation from others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is self-created - some form of unconscious resistance to what *is*. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Understanding is the dissolution of the mind into its support, into its ground. It is the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, returning to itself knowingly.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience