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
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
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
"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
When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
there are no enlightened individuals, there is only enlightenment. Enlightenment wakes up. Not you or I. You and I are rendered insignificant and nonexistent. Enlightenment wakes up. That's why it is said that everybody is inherently enlightened. But that statement is misleading because it implies that everybody is a separate, special, unique little somebody who is inherently enlightened, and that misses the point. An illusion can't be enlightened. So it's not really true that everybody is enlightened. It's only true that enlightenment is enlightened.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
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
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
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do. And, of course, you cannot be present unless you become friendly with the present moment. That is the basis for effective action, uncontaminated by negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you catch yourself playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning of freedom from that role. When you are completely identified with a role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take yourself very seriously. You also automatically assign roles to others that correspond to yours.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more. But you cannot be more than you are because underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being. In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same. THE PATHOLOGICAL EGO In a wider sense of the word, the ego itself is pathological, no matter what form it takes. When we look at the ancient Greek root of the word pathological, we discover just how appropriate that term is when applied to the ego. Although the word is normally used to describe a condition of disease, it is derived from pathos, which means suffering. This is, of course, exactly what the Buddha already discovered 2,600 years ago as a characteristic of the human condition. A person in the grip of ego, however, does not recognize suffering as suffering, but will look upon it as the only appropriate response in any given ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you can learn to accept and even welcome the endings in your life, you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful. By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to Life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
On the other hand, if you can maintain a calm, peaceful state of mind, then you can be a very happy person even if you have poor health.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you'll never have your freedom.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it truly is, infinite.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear. If you take any action—leaving or changing your situation—drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case, you are free. Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace.
— 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 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
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
This reminds me of one of the Tibetan Kadampa masters, Potowa, who said that for a meditator who has a certain degree of inner stability and realization, every event, every experience you are exposed to comes as a kind of a teaching. It's a learning experience. This I think is very true.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
I've been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would 'let go of them' is itself simply one such pattern. These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens, so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and naturally realign themselves with this new understanding. In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self. What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object. To say 'I am', (in other words to assert that we are present), we must know that 'I am'. Being and knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience. But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are our self. That being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining in all experience. This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find ourselves as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes obvious we discover that it is not just the background but also the foreground. In other words, it is not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience. Completely relax the desire to find yourself as an object or to change your experience in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate, familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it. As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being), it is known as freedom and, as the substance of all things, it is known as beauty. However, more simply it is known just as 'I' or 'this'. Who Is? Q: All these questions about consciousness ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
So break the old pattern of present-moment denial and present-moment resistance. Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
SERMON ON THE BODY What you perceive as a dense physical structure called the body, which is subject to disease, old age, and death, is not ultimately real—is not you. It is a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind, which, having lost touch with Being, creates the body as evidence of its illusory belief in separation and to justify its state of fear. But do not turn away from the body, for within that symbol of impermanence, limitation, and death that you perceive as the illusory creation of your mind is concealed the splendor of your essential and immortal reality. Do not turn your attention elsewhere in your search for the Truth, for it is nowhere else to be found but within your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Since patience or tolerance comes from an ability to remain firm and steadfast and not be overwhelmed by the adverse situations or conditions that one faces, one should not see tolerance or patience as a sign of weakness, or giving in, but rather as a sign of strength, coming from a deep ability to remain firm. Responding to a trying situation with patience and tolerance rather than reacting with anger and hatred involves active restraint, which comes from a strong, self-disciplined mind.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Enthusiasm brings an enormous empowerment into what you do, so that all those who have not accessed that power would look upon "your" achievements in awe and may equate them with who you are. You, however, know the truth that Jesus pointed to when he said, "I can of my own self do nothing."3 Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others. It does not need to use and manipulate people, because it is the power of creation itself and so does not need to take energy from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you feel the pain-body, don't fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into the problem -- the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
nothing can satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs your life, there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you can feel the inner body clearly as a single field of energy, let go, if possible, of any visual image and focus exclusively on the feeling. If you can, also drop any mental image you may still have of the physical body. All that is left then is an all-encompassing sense of presence or "beingness," and the inner body is felt to be without a boundary. Then take your attention even more deeply into that feeling. Become one with it. Merge with the energy field, so that there is no longer a perceived duality of the observer and the observed, of you and your body. The distinction between inner and outer also dissolves now, so there is no inner body anymore. By going deeply into the body, you have transcended the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. It's a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that comes with surrender. You rest in God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The quality of emptiness that we are referring to was never born; likewise, it cannot die. This essential nature of our lives is unborn—like space itself. Space provides no place to abide, no foothold in which to secure our steps. In skylike emptiness, we cannot be stuck. Yet here we are, alive in this wondrous world of appearances, which can always benefit from wise discernment. With particularity as fine as flour, we discriminate between actions that intend to relieve suffering for ourselves and others and those that intend to cause harm.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
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
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
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to "gain the world and lose your soul," as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to "fail" sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now? ...
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
"One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Buddha image shows us abiding tranquility amidst the turning wheel of life.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
But the utter intimacy of the knower and the known is a well-known and familiar experience.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. Wanting is structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental structure remains in place. Intense wanting that has no specific can often be found in the still-developing ego of teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and dissatisfaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.
— 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
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
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
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
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming"with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness"of that moment? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No separate me loved the world. The world was love. My perfect home. Vast and intimate. Every particle was alive with love, fluid, flowing, without barriers.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
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 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
Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego. The man on the cross is an archetypal image. He is every man and every woman. As long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain. Even if both of your parents were enlightened, you would still find yourself growing up in a largely unconscious world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And this 'knowing' is our self, aware presence. In other words, all that is ever experienced is our self knowing itself, awareness aware of awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
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
This is most people's reality: As soon as something is perceived, it is named, interpreted, compared with something else, liked, disliked, or called good or bad by the phantom self, the ego. They are imprisoned in thought forms, in object consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A Buddhist monk once told me: "All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know." What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[I]t is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mystery is always for thought, never for our self.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The answer is obvious, is it not? Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Feel yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid "wall" inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I think that if one is seeking to build a truly satisfying relationship, the best way of bringing this about is to get to know the deeper nature of the person and relate to her or him on that level, instead of merely on the basis of superficial characteristics.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
"Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a higher order and purpose. This is beautifully expressed in the Zen saying "The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever I associate with someone, may I think myself the lowest among all and hold the other supreme in the depth of my heart! ... When Isee beings of wicked nature, pressed by violent sin and affliction, may I hold these rare ones dear as if I had found a precious treasure! ... When others, out of envy, treat me badly with abuse, slander and the like, may I suffer the defeat and offer the victory to others! ... When the one, whom I have benefited with great hope, hurts me very badly, may I behold him as my supreme Guru! In short may I, directly and indirectly, offer benefit and happiness to all beings; may I secretly take upon myself the harm and suffering of all beings! ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
"So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action-just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Show your friend how to be the observing presence behind her thoughts and her emotions. Tell her about the pain-body and how to free herself from it. Teach her the art of inner-body awareness. Demonstrate to her the meaning of presence. As soon as she is able to access the power of the Now, and thereby break through her conditioned past, she will have a choice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
So the pain-body doesn't want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the power of Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The past lives in you as memories, but memories in themselves are not a problem. In fact, it is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes. It is only when memories, that is to say, thoughts about the past, take you over completely that they turn into a burden, turn problematic, and become part of your sense of self. Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as 'war,' your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
A conversation that took place between two American women describes this intimate relationship between physical and immaterial forms of dying. One of these women came to see me soon after her only child, a twenty-year-old son, died from an accidental drug overdose. We spoke of ways to help her live with this tragic loss. About two years later, this woman's best friend found herself struggling through a very painful divorce. The first woman explained to her friend: My son is never coming back. I entertain no fantasies about this. My relationship to myself and to how I relate to the world has changed forever. But the same is true for you. Your sense of who you are, of who is there for you and who you will travel through life with, has also changed forever. You too need to grieve a death. You are thinking that you have to come to terms with this intolerable situation outside of yourself. But just as I had to allow myself to die after my son's death, you must die to a marriage that you once had. We grieve for the passing of what we had, but also for ourselves, for our own deaths. The profound misfortune of the death of this woman's son opened her heart to an exploration of impermanence and death that went far beyond her own personal story.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you, which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the demands and expectations of your mind and what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you're willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen. You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Giving space to others—and to yourself—is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis. That is why it lends itself to manipulation of "public opinion," as politicians and special-interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity manifests for you in various ways.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
in terms of our enjoying a happy day-to-day existence, the greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
We are so busy and obsessed with our restless thinking about everything and everyone that we have mistaken our thinking about everything and everyone for everything and everyone. This tendency to take our thoughts to be real is what keeps the dream state intact and keeps us trapped within its domain of unconsciousness and strife. To many people the very idea that what is is more real than all of their beliefs and opinions about what is is hard to believe. But that's how it is when you are caught up in a dream.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is 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
Alienation means you don't feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get 'home' but never feel at home.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment—allow it to be as it is—then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To an onlooker, it may appear that you are under stress, but the intensity of enthusiasm has nothing to do with stress. When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Become at ease with the state of "not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have fifty cents left in my bank account" is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
At this moment, this is what you feel," I said. "There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we ask, "Who am I without the me-concept? What am I without the me?" instantly the wordless can open up, the concept-less can open up. Allow the experience of that, because that is the living answer to the questions, "What am I? Who am I?" This is not the dead conceptual answer, but the living answer. It is alive! In this moment of radiant awakeness there's a mystery unfolding unto itself, moment to moment to moment. This living state of being, call it what you will, is the only thing that you always have been, always will be, and are right now. You are not a human being, you are being appearing as human.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other deep pain, such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of your presence—...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Perceiving presence is what true awakening is all about.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness. The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is inner stillness that will save and transform the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened—before you have freed yourself from your mind—you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be— to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet. What pollution is on the outer level is negativity on the inner. It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"Forgiveness" is a term that has been in use for two thousand years, but most people have a very limited view of what it means. You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are. The whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The German word for breathing—atmen—is derived from the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word Atman, meaning the indwelling divine spirit or God within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And the miracle is that when you are no longer placing an impossible demand on it, every situation, person, place, or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Throughout history humans have inflicted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of? Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
The Dalai Lama clearly has a set of basic beliefs that act as a substrate for all his actions: A belief in the underlying goodness of all human beings. A belief in the value of compassion. A policy of kindness. A sense of his commonality with all living creatures.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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 whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time: it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The inability or rather unwillingness of the human mind to let go of the past is beautifully illustrated in the story of two Zen monks, Tanzan and Ekido, who were walking along a country road that had become extremely muddy after heavy rains. Near a village, they came upon a young woman who was trying to cross the road, but the mud was so deep it would have ruined the silk kimono she was wearing. Tanzan at once picked her up and carried her to the other side. The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn't restrain himself any longer. "Why did you carry that girl across the road?" he asked. "We monks are not supposed to do things like that." "I put the girl down hours ago," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"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
The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction'' and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you 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
In either case, you can only go beyond it by taking responsibility for your inner state now. Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you are able to stay alert and present at that time and watch whatever you feel within, rather than be taken over by it, it affords an opportunity for the most powerful spiritual practice, and a rapid transmutation of all past pain becomes possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
basic or underlying nature of human beings is gentleness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto experience itself.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
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
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
By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
"The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I feel that a genuine, affectionate smile is very important in our day-to-day lives.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply. If you cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your hands or feet. That's good enough for the moment. Just focus on the feeling. Your body is coming alive. Later, we will practice some more. Please open your eyes now, but keep some attention in the inner energy field of the body even as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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 perpetual longing for happiness—which can, by definition, never be fulfilled because that very search itself denies the happiness that is present in our own being now—condemns us to an endless search in the future and thus perpetuates unhappiness. It is for this reason that the poet said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
When you accept what is, every piece of meat—every moment—is the best. That is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. 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
Satisfaction through gratification will always be short-lived, therefore it will always be projected again.You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You "get" there by realizing you *are* there already.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Through the practice of shamata meditation, the tumultuous habits of mind calm down; and then we can investigate the characteristics of the calm waters beyond the monkey's control. This is called vipashyana—or insight—meditation. I knew monkey mind intimately. I also knew that when we dismiss any value to knowing this monkey, it's like owning a car without knowing how to drive. The less we know about the chattering, muttering voice in our heads that tells us what to do, what to believe, what to buy, which people we should love, and so forth, the more power we grant it to boss us around and convince us that whatever it says is true.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Accept your parents' behavior with compassion, without needing to react to it, that is to say, without personalizing it. Be aware also of your own unconscious assumptions or expectations that lie behind your old, habitual reactions to them. 'My parents should approve of what I do. They should understand me and accept me for who I am.' Really? Why should they? The fact is they don't because they can't. Their evolving consciousness hasn't made the quantum leap to the level of awareness yet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And then I noticed there were all sorts of other points, points, and I could enter each one of those points, and each one of those points was a different world, a different time, and I was a different person, a totally different manifestation in each one of those points. I could go into each one of them and see a totally different dream of self and a totally different world that was being dreamed as well. For the most part, what I saw was anything that was unresolved about the dream of "me" in a particular lifetime. There were certain confusions, fears, hesitations, and doubts that were unresolved in particular lifetimes. In certain lifetimes, what was unresolved was a feeling of confusion about what happened at the time of death. In one lifetime, I drowned and did not know what was happening, and there was tremendous terror and confusion as the body ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
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
And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
In order to find what the concept of God is pointing to, you must let go of your image of God and every concept you have about God. You must dare to be void of all concepts and enter into perfect Emptiness, perfect stillness, and perfect silence. You must forget everything you have ever learned about God. It won't help you. It may comfort you, but such comfort is imaginary; it is an illusion. Let go of all the false comforts of the mind. Let them all come to an end. The end must be experienced fully in Stillness. When you let all images, all concepts, all hopes, and all beliefs end, Stillness is experienced. Experience the core of Stillness. Dive into it and surrender fully. In full surrender to Stillness, you directly experience That to which the concept of God points. In that direct experience, you awaken from the dream of the mind and realize that the concept of God points to who you truly are...
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
If you found yourself in paradise, it wouldn't be long before your mind would say "yes, but... ." Ultimately, this is not about solving your problems. It's about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations—to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the "isness" of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Experience is too intimate to admit of two entities between which there might be relationship.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
the negative and the positive polarities are faces of the same coin, are both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from the mind-identified egoic state of consciousness. There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain—this is what I want to talk about now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?"—if anybody were there to ask it—would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Each person's life—each lifeform,in fact—represents a world, aunique way in which the universe experiences itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The ending of Jesus' life in John is completely different than in Mark. In Mark, Jesus' last breath was a loud death cry from exhaustion and torment. In the Gospel of John, Jesus right to the very end maintains his dignity and balance, and remains centered in divine being. With his last breath, Jesus simply says, "It is finished." Jesus has lived out his destiny; he's played his part well, and he has no regrets.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
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
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
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
leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— 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
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
The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I am is said to be 'nothing', 'empty' or 'void' because it has no observable qualities.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Attachment to the false view of the self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities that exist on their own.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
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
... enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be predictably preceded by vast upheavals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But in the Gospel of Thomas, the whole point of Jesus' teaching is to discover your true identity, to realize who and what you really and truly are here and now.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you add a goal to the enjoyment of what you do, the energy-field or vibrational frequency changes. A certain degree of what we might call structural tension is now added to enjoyment, and so it turns into enthusiasm. At the height of creative activity fueled by enthusiasm, there will be enormous intensity and energy behind what you do. You will feel like an arrow that is moving toward the target—and enjoying the journey.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There exists only the present instant … a Now which always and without end is itself new. MEISTER ECKHART ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you are. Even if people agree with it, it is ultimately a fiction. Many people don't realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So, anyway, I think that cultivating positive mental states like kindness and compassion definitely leads to better psychological health and happiness.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet—in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous. Although such an image can help you temporarily, pay more attention to the feeling than to any image that may arise. An image, no matter how beautiful or powerful, is already defined in form, so there is less scope for penetrating more deeply.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you 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
Can anxious thought add a single day to your life? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I think that generally, being honest with oneself and others about what you are or are not capable of doing can counteract that feeling of lack of self-confidence.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When many of the old saints and sages say, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion," they're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
"I can't do that." Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Because ego is frequently identified in negative terms, especially among Buddhists, my father made a point of reminding me that we also have a healthy ego—or a healthy sense of self. This relates to aspects of self that intuitively know right from wrong, that can discern between protection and harm, that instinctively know what is virtuous and wholesome. We trip ourselves up only when we become attached to these basic instincts and create inflated stories around them. For example, I had used ego in a positive way to explore, and then maintain, monastic discipline. But if I were to think, Oh, I am such a pure monk, I maintain my vows so perfectly, then I would be in trouble. When I examined my difficulties with too much newness all at once, I could see ego-self as a process, not as a solid thing.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
We believe that happiness is possible only in the future. That is why the practice "I have arrived" is very important. The realization that we have already arrived, that we don't have to travel any further, that we are already here, can give us peace and joy. The conditions for our happiness are already sufficient. We only need to allow ourselves to be in the present moment, and we will be able to touch them.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To approach the finality of our bodies while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life is like confusing diamonds with pebbles and throwing them away.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you think that people should be nice to one another, then byall means be nice. But when you project that belief onto thepeople and the world around you as if it were an objective reality,or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you putyourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Anyone who is still totally identified with the voice in their head—the stream of involuntary and incessant thinking—will inevitably fail to see what The Power of Now is all about. Some enthusiastic readers gave a copy of the book to a friend or relative and were surprised and disappointed when the recipient found it quite meaningless and could not get beyond the first few pages. "Mumbo jumbo" was all that Time magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe found life-changing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Just as the screen does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of any of the objects or characters in a movie, although it is their sole reality, so the knowing with which all knowledge and experience are known does not share the qualities, characteristics, or limitations of whatever is known or experienced. Thus, it is unlimited or infinite.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The 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
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
You might say, "I know I am an immortal spirit," or "I am tired of this mad world, and peace is all I want"—until the phone rings. Bad news: The stock market has collapsed; the deal may fall through; the car has been stolen; your mother-in-law has arrived; the trip is cancelled, the contract has been broken; your partner has left you; they demand more money; they say it's your fault. Suddenly there is a surge of anger, of anxiety. A harshness comes into your voice; "I can't take any more of this." You accuse and blame, attack, defend, or justify yourself, and it's all happening on autopilot. Something is obviously much more important to you now than the inner peace that a moment ago you said was all you wanted, and you're not an immortal spirit anymore either. The deal, the money, the contract, the loss or threat of loss are more important. To whom? To the immortal spirit that you said you are? No, to me. The small me that seeks security or fulfillment in things that are transient and gets anxious or angry because it fails to find it. Well, at least now you know who you really think you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power—not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing or experiencing is not what it does; it is what it is.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It is our suffering that is the most basic element that we share with others, the factor that unifies us with all living creatures. We ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example, when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself—do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner speciousness that feels intensely alive. You haven't been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute non-reaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image. Through becoming less (in the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
However, if we can transform our attitude towards suffering, adopt an attitude that allows us greater tolerance of it, then this can do much to help counteract feelings of mental unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and discontent.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
its 'outsideness', its 'not-me-ness', its 'somethingness'—that dissolves.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
We need to learn how to want what we have NOT to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness ...
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
At some point after awakening—sometimes very soon, sometimes not for quite a while—you reach a stage that I call "trials and tribulations." In the Jesus story, this is symbolized by Jesus' forty days in the desert and his encounter with Satan in the desert immediately following his baptism. In Buddhism, this stage is mythically portrayed by the image of Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, assaulted by Maya, the force of illusion. Maya is an impersonal force of illusion, while Satan is a personification of what we think of as evil, but the source of evil is actually illusion, so these are really two different mythic representations of the same experience.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
It's good to be reminded that hubris, left unchecked, can have serious consequences in our lives. If we don't notice soon enough, we might just realize too late that we've lost some very important things in our lives. The beauty of this story is that it reminds us: keep your feet firmly planted on the soil, keep your consciousness and your heart open, and stay available to this relative world and all the human beings within it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.You are open to life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind. Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
And it is from inner space, the unconditioned consciousness itself, that true happiness, the joy of Being, emanates.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
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
How easy it is for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons. The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth. It says: this is how it is. You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret "your life" or someone else's life or behavior, however you judge any situation, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many possible perspectives. It is no more than a bundle of thoughts. But reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself. Thinking fragments reality—it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces. The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
time is only in thought. Experience is eternally now.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now—nobody else is—and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
who are you? Consciousness that has become conscious of itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past. Die ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words "resist nothing," as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you hate what you are doing, complain about your surroundings, curse things that are happening or have happened, or when your internal dialogue consists of shoulds and shouldn'ts, of blaming and accusing, then you are arguing with what is, arguing with that which is always already the case. You are making Life into an enemy and Life says, "War is what you want, and war is what you get." External reality, which always reflects back to you your inner state, is then experienced as hostile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself—"you" and "yourself" merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind that seeks awareness is like a current in the ocean in search of water. Such a mind is destined for endless dissatisfaction.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
The 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
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do then is "ride the wave.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 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
Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are. We could say "God" if the word had not been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence. Existence is form, content, "what happens." Existence is the foreground of life; Being is the background, as it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There are many people who are always waiting for the next thing to react against, to feel annoyed or disturbed about—and it never takes long before they find it. "This is an outrage," they say. "How dare you…." "I resent this." They are addicted to upset and anger as others are to a drug. Through reacting against this or that they assert and strengthen their feeling of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
We have forgotten that we are the one that is aware of thoughts, feelings, images and sensations and instead believe and, more importantly, feel that we actually are those thoughts, feelings, images and sensations.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Love is a state of being. Your love is not outside, it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Studying the complexities of the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won't take you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"We practice the Five Contemplations before eating. The second Contemplation is, "May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive this food.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
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
The great secret that lies at the heart of all the main religious and spiritual traditions is the understanding that the peace and happiness for which all people long can never be delivered via objective experience. It can only be found in our self, in the depths of our being.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
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
Shaking his head, the Dalai Lama replied, "Even in conventional terms, in our everyday life, we consider education as a very important factor for ensuring a successful and happy life. And knowledge does not come by naturally. We have to train; we have to go through a kind of systematic training program and so forth. And we consider this conventional education and training to be quite hard; otherwise why would students look forward so much to vacations? Still, we know that this type of education is quite vital for ensuring a happy and successful life. "In the same way, doing wholesome deeds may not come naturally, but we have to consciously train towards it.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm claimed that humankind's most basic fear is the threat of being separated from other humans. He believed that the experience of separateness, first encountered in infancy, is the source of all anxiety in human life. John Bowlby agreed, citing a good deal of experimental evidence and research to support the idea that separation from one's caregivers—usually the mother or father—during the latter part of the first year of life inevitably creates fear and sadness in babies. He feels that separation and interpersonal loss are at the very roots of the human experiences of fear, sadness, and sorrow.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Often, if we are not careful, these ancient traditions and techniques—many of which I myself was taught, and which have great value—become an end instead of a means to an end. People end up with what is simply a discipline. They end up watching their breath for years and years and years, becoming perfect at watching their breath. But in the end spirituality is not about watching the breath. It's about waking up from the dream of separateness to the truth of unity. That's what it's about, and this can get forgotten if we adhere too closely to technique.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
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
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
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
When this pattern becomes more pronounced, and this is very common, the present moment is regarded and treated as if it were an obstacle to be overcome. This is where impatience, frustration, and stress arise, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities-warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful-happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
India, a country considered by many to be the birthplace of humanity's quest for spiritual enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Motivation included purifying the mind of any past disturbances, anything that might cast a shadow on the pure perception of luminous emptiness. It's not helpful to simply say, Everything is essentially empty, everything is essentially pure. Although that happens to be absolutely true, in order to know this absolute truth from the inside out, we must work with those thorns that cannot be plucked through intellectual reasoning or dharma philosophy. To be effective, working with subtle knots of guilt and remorse must be embodied experiences. Furthermore, these knots prevent the full expression of our compassion. In subtle ways, they keep us stuck on ourselves and hold us back from giving everything we have to the welfare of others.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
there is no need to go elsewhere for the truth. Let me show you how to go more deeply into what you already have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the timeless realm where God dwells, which is also your home, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, are one, and the essence of everything that ever has been and ever will be is eternally present in an unmanifested state of oneness and perfection—totally beyond anything the human mind can ever imagine or comprehend.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don't feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you. The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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 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
Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there is: this one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
When Being becomes conscious of itself—that's presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Both these people illustrate the essential point that happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future—which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
But to know that you are not present is a great success: ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true—from ourselves to the world.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Be an open space for whatever arises. Notice that you are the space in which everything arises. When everything is allowed to arise, you have the opportunity to perceive That which does not arise or subside. You Are That.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
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
Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
Transformation is through the body, not away from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad." The undercurrent of constant unease started long before the rise of Western industrial civilization, of course, but in Western civilization, which now covers almost the entire globe, including most of the East, it manifests in an unprecedentedly acute form. It was already there at the time of Jesus, and it was there six hundred years before that at the time of Buddha, and long before that. Why are you always anxious? Jesus asked his disciples. "Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?" And the Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving. Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, by the way, also recognized the existence of this undercurrent of unease and wrote about it in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, but he did not recognize the true root of the unease and failed to realize that freedom from it is possible. This collective dysfunction has created a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has become a threat not only to itself but also to all life on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more you make your thoughts and beliefs into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Stay present, stay conscious. Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space. You need to be present enough to be able to watch the pain-body directly and feel its energy. It then cannot control your thinking. The moment your thinking is aligned with the energy field of the pain-body, you are identified with it and again feeding it with your thoughts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you know yourself only through content, you will also think you know what is good or bad for you. You differentiate between events that are 'good for me' and those that are 'bad.' This is a fragmented perception of the wholeness of life in which everything is interconnected, in which every event has its necessary place and function within the totality. ... Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a higher order and purpose. ... But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
... next time you say, «I have nothing in common with this person,» remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. [... ] In that sense , there is total equality between you and every other creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"One of the most important steps in the process of coming to the end of suffering is seeing that there's something deep inside of us that actually wants to suffer, that actually indulges in suffering. As I've mentioned, there is a piece of us that wants to suffer because it is through suffering that we maintain this wall of separation around us. It is through our suffering that we can continue to hold onto everything we think is true. Wearing the veil of suffering, we don't really have to look at ourselves and say, "I'm the one that's dreaming. I'm the one that's full of illusions. I'm the one that's holding on with everything I have." It's much easier to see that the other person is caught in illusion. That's easy. "So and so over there, they're completely lost in illusion. They don't know the truth." It's a whole other thing to say, "No, no, no! I'm the one who is caught in illusion. I don't know what's real, I don't know what's true, and part of me actually wants to suffer because then I can remain separate and distinct.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
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
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
Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You will be free to let go of unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. ... The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. ... Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."3 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
…you don't die; the illusion of a separate self dies. Still, it may feel like you are going to die. Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
What the world doesn't tell you—because it doesn't know—is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful. Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you"—the mind—did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your primary purpose is now to enable consciousness to flow into what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What is the cause of suffering in the human being? Why is it that human beings have such a difficult time putting their suffering down? What's the reason that we often carry it around, when it becomes such a burden to us?One of the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In general, if we carefully examine any given situation in a very unbiased and honest way, we will realize that to a large extent we are also responsible for the unfolding of events.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
Deep sleep is not the absence of awareness; it is the awareness of absence.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
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
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
If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
As you read, a shift takes place within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down. Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Judging someone for looking unclean or smelling bad, or being loud, or anything, is a pretty neurotic way to seek happiness—but it provides a toehold to climb up from and allows you to temporarily enjoy the illusion that you are better than someone else. It's never just: They are bad. It is also: Therefore, I am good.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
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
Don't look for peace.Don't look for any ther state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being peace.The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peaceAnything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.This is the miracle of surrencer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
most ordinary, intimate and familiar experience there is. Everybody can say from their own direct experience, 'I know that I am', irrespective of the condition of their mind or body, or whatever is taking place in their environment. It is our experience that I am. 'I am' refers to our knowledge of our self before it is qualified by experience. Before we know that I am a man or a woman, of such-and-such an age, married or single, a mother, father or friend, before we know anything about our self, we simply know that I am. Before we know what I am, we know that I am. Everything we know about our self is added to the simple knowledge 'I am'. If we feel that our self is not clearly known as it essentially is, it is not because we do not know it but because we have forgotten or ignored it in favour of objective experience. We have become so accustomed to giving our love and attention to the content of experience that we have simply overlooked that which is closest and most familiar to us. To remedy this, we first make a distinction between the knower and the known, the experiencer and the experienced, the witness and the witnessed. Later on we will collapse this distinction, but for one who is lost in experience, who identifies with every passing thought, feeling, activity and relationship, it is first necessary to make the distinction.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't ask your mind for permission to enjoy what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"The word "identification" is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning "same" and facere, which means "to make." So when I identify with something, I "make it the same." The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my "identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
In order to find what the concept of God is pointing to, you must let go of your image of God and every concept you have about God. You must dare to be void of all concepts and enter into perfect Emptiness, perfect stillness, and perfect silence. You must forget everything you have ever learned about God. It won't help you. It may comfort you, but such comfort is imaginary; it is an illusion. Let go of all the false comforts of the mind. Let them all come to an end. The end must be experienced full yin Stillness. When you let all images, all concepts, all hopes, and all beliefs end, Stillness is experienced. Experience the core of Stillness. Dive into it and surrender fully. In full surrender to Stillness, you directly experience That to which the concept of God points. In that direct experience, you awaken from the dream of the mind and realize that the concept of God points to who you truly are....
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment—the observing consciousness—cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists—all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm—and yet all worlds are ultimately one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion. It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.The thinking mind cannot understand Presence and so will often misinterpret it. It will say that you are uncaring, distant, have no compassion, are not relating. The truth is, you are relating but at a level deeper than thought and emotion. In fact, at that level there is a true coming together, a true joining that goes far beyond relating. In the stillness of Presence, you can sense the formless essence in yourself and in the other as one. Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
the way a person sees or understands him or herself deeply conditions the ways he or she sees and understands objects, others and the world.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
WAKE UP OR PERISH The world's problems are, by and large, human problems—the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well. In a manner of speaking, we have lost (or at the very least forgotten) our souls, and we try very, very hard not to notice, because we don't want to see how asleep we are, how desolate our condition really is. So we blindly carry on, driven by forces we do not recognize or understand, or even acknowledge. We are no doubt at a very critical point in time. Our world hangs in the balance, and a precarious balance it is. Awakening to Reality is no longer a possibility; it is an imperative. We have sailed the ship of delusion about as far as she can carry us. We have run her ashore and now find ourselves shipwrecked on an increasingly desolate land. Our options have imploded. "Wake up or perish" is the spiritual call of our times. Did we ever need more motivation than this? And yet all is eternally well, and more well than can be imagined.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
Will you become less when you let go of it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But I think that as time goes on, you can make positive changes. Everyday as soon as you get up, you can develop a sincere positive motivation, thinking, 'I will utilize this day in a more positive way. I should not waste this very day.' And then, at night before bed, check what you've done, asking yourself, 'Did I utilize this day as I planned?' If it went accordingly, then you should rejoice. If it went wrong, then regret what you did and critique the day. So, through methods such as this, you can gradually strengthen the positive aspects of the mind.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
All it means it that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Yes, I aspire to be a happy yogi in all situations…but these crying babies…and the stench of the overflowing toilets…Who am I now? Who allowed these prickly eye, ear, smell, touch sensations to spin a web that is leaving me diminished, irritable, and alone? ...
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you want others to be happy practice compassion; and if you want yourself to be happy practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge... [which happened] if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the "normal" state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or even madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than little me, you would remain non-reactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and the senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the "body" of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space - it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death [of the ego].
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that determines the future, then what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So the only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
— 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 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
The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
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
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity—which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater intensity. After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the functions of a spiritual teacher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right and another wrong.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
It's not your ego that realizes it's God, but your true essence. It might be more accurate to say God within you realizes it's God; the radiance realizes that you are the radiance.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Questioner: What's the best thing I can do for my awakening? Adyashanti: Be with an enlightened teacher and listen.
— Adyashanti
from The Impact of Awakening: Excerpts From the Teachings of Adyashanti
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
The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness, and likewise we do not cease to be the witness and become pure Awareness.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below thought. Everyone does that every night during sleep. But this also happens to some extent through sex, alcohol, and other drugs that suppress excessive mind activity. If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the "madness" in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation. Every moment, hold the knowing of that moment, particularly of your inner state. If there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right, an inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain of any kind—whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing. The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice. If you observe unconscious behavior in your partner, hold it in the loving embrace of your knowing so that you won't react. Unconsciousness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always 'with you'.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In order to fulfil the desire for happiness, most people engage in a relentless search in the realm of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This division of experience into a perceiver and a perceived, a knower and a known, a lover and a loved, is like a mirage.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
I was walking across the living room when all of this happened. I can't tell you how long I was walking. It could have been five seconds—because all of this is outside of time—I don't actually know. I could have been walking across the living room floor for five hours, but I was, literally, just walking across the living room. And it's not like I stood still; I was walking, and it all happened right in the midst of what I was doing. I walked across the living room, I went into the backyard, I was doing something, I don't even remember what I was doing, and simultaneously this whole other thing was happening, too. I know it sounds odd. This didn't happen in a moment of meditation; it was completely mixed in as a part of ordinary life. As you know, I haven't talked much about this ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help.
— Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between where you don't want to be (now) and where you want to be (the projected future). Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting, snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When there is stress, it is usually a sign that the ego has returned, and you are cutting yourself off from the creative power of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
She turned her heartbreak into wisdom.
— Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
from In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
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
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
Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. They didn't become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock time" - but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it.
— Rupert Spira
from The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
Stay with the pause between these two thoughts. When we remain in this pause before the answer formulates itself, what takes place 'there' is the most valuable and, at the same time, the most underrated or overlooked experience that one can have.
— Rupert Spira
from The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter
But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can't you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: "I" and "myself," subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life. In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself—"you" and "yourself" merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the greater scheme of things, human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings, and those who don't will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
awareness is the main dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ultimately, of course, there is no other and you are always meeting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
But isn't a life based on seeking personal happiness by nature self-centered, even self-indulgent? Not necessarily. In fact, survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are often socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative and are able to tolerate life's daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
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
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
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
The wise man's "maybe" signifies a refusal to judge anything that happens. Instead of judging what is, he accepts it and so enters into conscious alignment with the higher order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up. In a world of role-playing ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious). Even the men who wrote the Gospels did not understand the meaning of these parables, so the first misinterpretations and distortions crept in as they were written down. With subsequent erroneous interpretations, the real meaning was completely lost. These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,' ‘me,' or ‘mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That is, it knows itself as the totality of experience. This could be formulated as, 'I, Awareness, am everything', ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
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
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
Seeing others as basically compassionate instead of hostile and selfish helps us relax, trust, live at ease. It makes us happier.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
There is no need to investigate the unconscious past in you except as it manifests at this moment as a thought, an emotion, a desire, a reaction, or an external event that happens to you. Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
And then, just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now - nobody else is - and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the last chapter we discussed the importance of accepting suffering as a natural fact of human existence. While some kinds of suffering are inevitable, other kinds are self-created. We explored, for instance, how the refusal to accept suffering as a natural part of life can lead to viewing oneself as a perpetual victim and blaming others for our problems—a sure-fire recipe for a miserable life.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize "At this moment I am creating suffering for myself" it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Seeing Jesus through the lens of the spiritual revolutionary is powerfully transformative; if we can embody that spirit within ourselves, we can begin to break down the internal walls that separate ourselves from each other, from the world, and from our own divinity.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Nothing else truly is.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All creativity comes out of inner spaciousness. Once the creation has happened and something has come into form, you have to be vigilant so that the notion of "me" or "mine" does not arise. If you take credit for what you accomplished, the ego has returned, and the spaciousness has become obscured.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, the newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Choice implies consciousness—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. Your friend is stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner, and not for the first time. Why? No choice. The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the thought of lack -- whether it be money, recognition, or love -- has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is already in your life, all you see is lack.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself is being yourself, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute. It would be even more accurate to say that the illusion is defending itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that is to say, what is or what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When instead of reacting against a situation, you merge with it, the solution arises out of the situation itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we're willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that's really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don't insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it's just an image, it's just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They'll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we're not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future—which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The thought is not the thing that it represents. Try to get that right down to your core, right down to the marrow in your bones and into the blood that flows through your veins: the thought is not the thing. Then embrace that intermediary step of unknowing things, and as you enter the unknown, you'll see it is not a place; it is the living reality of things underneath the idea of the unknown. The point is not to spend the rest of your life saying, "I do not know" to everything; it is to step out of the known and directly perceive. You do this by entering the lived reality of not knowing, which takes you out of the known, out of the idea and into the reality of you, of anything, and of anyone. It's a place where words are useful tools, but you are no longer trapped by them.
— Adyashanti
from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.‘I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with.' ‘Maybe,' I thought, ‘only one of them is real.'I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing,' as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marvelling at the beauty and aliveness of it all. That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The breath and the body are both sensations. One sensation does not appear in another sensation, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once again, eternity is peering through the latticework of time and space, and this sense of eternal stillness and deep freedom is what the iconic image of the seated Buddha conveys. What this image doesn't convey is a sense of humanity, of a real flesh-and-blood human being. But in the Jesus story, it's as if the still point that the image of the Buddha evokes within us becomes ...
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.
— Adyashanti
from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
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
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
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
The word parable comes from a Greek word meaning "comparison or analogy" and is essentially a very brief story that conveys a spiritual truth. A parable is a bit like a riddle: it has a meaning you can't completely understand with the logical, conditioned mind. A parable is meant to present your mind with something that pushes you to go beyond your current level of understanding in order to comprehend it.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead." The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is the self-aware screen of awareness, upon which the drama of experience is playing and out of which it is made, that becomes so intimately involved with the objective content of its experience that it seems to lose itself in it and, as a result, overlooks or forgets its own presence, just as a dreamer's mind loses itself in its own dream at night.
— Rupert Spira
from Being Aware of Being Aware
compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every object of the mind is itself mind.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
from Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh
The more honest you are, the more open, the less fear you will have because there's no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to others.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
A woman who in childhood was physically abused by her father may find that her pain-body becomes easily activated in any close relationship with a man. Alternatively, the emotion that makes up her pain-body may draw her to a man whose pain-body is similar to that of her father. Her pain-body may feel a magnetic pull to someone who it senses will give it more of the same pain. That pain is sometimes misinterpreted as falling in love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
In many cases you are not buying a product but an "identity enhancer." Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I have also met many others who may be technically good at what they do but whose ego constantly sabotages their work. Only part of their attention is on the work they perform; the other part is on themselves. Their ego demands personal recognition and wastes energy in resentment if it doesn't get enough—and it's never enough. "Is someone else getting more recognition than me?" Or their main focus of attention is profit or power, and their work is no more than a means to that end. When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.
— 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
Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thinking comes to an end and our own being tastes itself as it is, as the experience of beauty.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
There is only one absolute Truth, and all other truths emanate from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness. Not only your psychological form but also your physical form—your body—becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause—the resistance pattern—has not been dissolved.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, don't you agree? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious. To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be quite a shocking realization. The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment. The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now—nobody else is—and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now. So identification prevents you from dealing with the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react tosomeone else's success as if that success had taken something away from"me." It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's successcurtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need towelcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
The truth, I would suggest, is that you poured yourself willingly into form out of infinite love in order to redeem the entirety of this life. When seen from that perspective, all of a sudden life looks very different. You stop holding back from life, your inner life or the life around you, because the kingdom of heaven is within and all around you. That's the message of the Jesus story.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
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
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
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
"St. Paul expressed this universal principle beautifully: "Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.
— Adyashanti
from The Way of Liberation
"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
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
Imagine what it would be like if we went through life never encountering an enemy, or any other obstacles for that matter, if from the cradle to the grave everyone we met pampered us, held us, hand fed us (soft bland food, easy to digest), amused us with funny faces and the occasional 'goo-goo' noise. If from infancy we were carried around in a basket (later on, perhaps on a litter), never encountering any challenge, never tested—in short, if everyone continued to treat us like a baby. That might sound good at first. For the first few months of life it might be appropriate. But if it persisted it could only result in one becoming a sort of gelatinous mass, a monstrosity really—with the mental and emotional development of veal. It's the very struggle of life that makes us who we are. And it is our enemies that test us, provide us with the resistance necessary for growth.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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
When that little button gets pushed, something unconscious arises, and the invitation is to stay awake. That's it. Just stay awake, and then the alchemy happens. Just stay awake. Don't do the spiritual thing, like back up fifty steps and witness it from some infinite distance. That's somewhat better than being lost in it, but even that is a subtle form of unconsciousness because it's a subtle form of avoidance or withdrawing awakeness from what is. Awakeness is just here. You don't need to bring it backward or up or down or behind something to be essentially free of what's arising. It already is free. It doesn't need to back up.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
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
According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin." Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is only thinking which seemingly reduces pure Awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and localisation, ...
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to the past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Oneness is when there isn't another. Oneness is—there is only this. There is no that over there, there is only this. And that's all there is. There is only this, and as soon as you say what this is, you've just defined what it's not. This is only realized in the utter demolition of everything that it's not. Then that awakening is an awakening outside of everything that comes and goes. It is a total waking up outside of time.
— Adyashanti
from Emptiness Dancing
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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 one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
See clearly that the breath takes place in this vast open space of Awareness, not in an imagined, confined body.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an "enemy." If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention.This is surrendered action—empowered action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
disappeared into the water. Seeing this lifetime and the confusion at the moment of death, I immediately knew what I had to do. I had to rectify the confusion and explain to the dream of me that I died, that I fell off a boat and drowned. When I did this, all of a sudden the confusion from that lifetime popped like a bubble, and there was a tremendous sense of freedom. Many past life dreams appeared, and each one of them seemed to focus on something that had been in conflict, something that was unresolved from a different incarnation. I went through each one of them and unhooked the confusion. TS Were you lying on a carpeted floor with your eyes closed, or something? ADYA No, actually, the strangest thing was that ...
— Adyashanti
from The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
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
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
It is impossible to have the 'me' without the 'not me', and it is impossible to have the 'not me' without the 'me'.
— Rupert Spira
from You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being
You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is—no matter what form it takes—you are still, you are at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Not projecting the old emotion into situations means facing it directly within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to feel and be in her body, so she is naturally closer to Being and potentially closer to enlightenment than a man.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What you react to in another you strengthen within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When listening to another person, don't just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space—space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Most ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Presence is pure consciousness—consciousness that has been reclaimed from the mind, from the world of form. The inner body is your link with the Unmanifested, and in its deepest aspect is the Unmanifested: the Source from which consciousness emanates, as light emanates from the sun. Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A good ritual is meant to evoke the mystery of being, the mystery of our own existence, the mystery of life, the mystery of God. It's meant to evoke that sense of eternity that shines through the latticework of time and space. That's really what ritual is for—to put us in touch with that sense of eternity, with the sense of the sacred.
— Adyashanti
from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic
Fearless and honest self-appraisal can be a powerful weapon against self-doubt and low self-confidence.
— Dalai Lama
from The Art of Happiness
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 the fan, the hand or indeed anything else are experienced, their apparent existence is not separate from awareness. All experiences are equally close, equally 'one with', awareness. When the apparent object disappears, awareness remains as it is.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
"Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This adult world has an insane quality to it. Everybody's going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what's real and what's not, pretending they know what's right, pretending they know who's wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we're afraid of. We don't really want to admit that nobody really knows.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
Enthusiasm and the ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"How dare you serve me cold soup…." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want change so that it can go on complaining.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION What is the role of the established religions in the arising of the new consciousness? Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
Die to the past every moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Who really wants to find out that we're all addicted to qualities like approval, recognition, control, and power, and that none of these things actually brings an end to suffering? In fact, they're the cause of suffering! So the truth is that most of us don't really want to wake up. We don't really want to end suffering. What we really want to do is manage our suffering, to have a little bit less of it, so that we can just go on with our lives as they are, unchanged, the way we want to live them, maybe feeling a little better about them.
— Adyashanti
from Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
person is a collection of thoughts, images, feelings, ...
— Rupert Spira
from Being Myself
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
You are not the ego, so when you become aware of the ego in you, it does not mean you know who you are - it means you know who you are not. But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, ...
— 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
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
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
His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes's statement "I think, therefore I am" very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, "The consciousness that says ‘I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says "I am." If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"the present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not "this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength ...
— 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. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course. Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Love as a continuous state is as yet very rare—as rare as conscious human beings.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The history of humanity, on both the individual and the collective scales, is the drama of this loss of our true identity and the subsequent search to regain it.
— Rupert Spira
from Presence, Volume I: The Art of Peace and Happiness
What it doesn't say—but only points to—is more important than what it says.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is; these are all portals you can use—but you only need to use one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are here to enable the divinepurpose of the universe to unfold.That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from