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
Take responsibility for your life. Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant inner Being nor the Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So 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
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As people have become more and more mind-identified, which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent decades. If the sufferer could look at her body without the interfering judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they are instead of believing in them—or better still, if she could feel her body from within—this would initiate her healing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stillness is really another word for space. Becoming conscious of stillness whenever we encounter it in our lives will connect us with the formless and timeless dimension within ourselves, that which is beyond thought, beyond ego. It may be the stillness that pervades the world of nature, or the stillness in your room in the early hours of the morning, or the silent gaps in between sounds. Stillness has no form—that is why through thinking we cannot become aware of it. Thought is form. Being aware of stillness means to be still. To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves. When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness—unconditioned, formless, eternal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also strengthens the immune system and the body's ability to heal itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You don't have to wait for something "meaningful" to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The "waiting to start living" syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
whatever you fight, you strengthyen. What you resist, persists. "A New Earth":War is a mind set ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of consciousness now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future. Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in—or don't, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
fear, greed, and the desire for power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of, but are themselves created by the dysfunction, which is a deep-seated collective delusion that lies within the mind of each human being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now. Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret. It is certainly not taught in churches and temples. If you go to a church, you may hear readings from the Gospels such as "Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," or "Nobody who puts his hands to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God." Or you might hear the passage about the beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now and are provided for abundantly by God. The depth and radical nature of these teachings are not recognized. No one seems to realize that they are meant to be lived and so bring about a profound inner transformation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
beautiful flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with ease in the timeless Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Don't get attached to any one word. You can substitute "Christ" for presence, if that is more meaningful to you. Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now. So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"—and find that there is no death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end. You live for the future, and when you achieve your goals, they don't satisfy you, at least not for long. When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning. Your doing then becomes not only a great deal more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Here is the key: End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And the ego's greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
That is why the most sacred thing in life is death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and "mine": You make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If your partner is still identified with the mind and the pain-body while you are already free, this will represent a major challenge—not to you but to your partner. It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self. The pain-body is demanding feedback and not getting it. The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not being met.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
"How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For someone possessed by a heavy pain-body, it is often impossible to step outside his or her distorted interpretation, the heavily emotional "story." The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such but is taken to be reality. When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don't even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You say that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind says "no" while the emotion says "yes," or the other way around. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Learn to disidentify from your mind.
— 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
finding your true nature beyond name and form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
THE 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
Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matter whether you are rich or poor—it certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don't matter absolutely.There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The ego cannot distinguish between a situation and its interpretation of and reaction to that situation. You might say, "What a dreadful day," without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance. In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."2 What is more, suffering or negativity is often misperceived by the ego as pleasure because up to a point the ego strengthens itself through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Problem" means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment means rising above thought, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Kasan, a Zen teacher and monk, was to officiate at a funeral of a famous nobleman. As he stood there waiting for the governor of the province and other lords and ladies to arrive, he noticed that the palms of his hands were sweaty.The next day he called his disciples together and confessed he was not yet ready to be a true teacher. He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human. He then left and became the pupil of another master. He returned to his former disciples eight years later, enlightened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there", or being in the present moment but wanting to be in the future. You can move fast, work fast, or run without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, do it totally, enjoying the flow of energy at that moment. Or when you do nothing and the mind says "you should be working. You are wasting time" - observe the mind. Smile at it! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself. ... It is content, not essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. It will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.In the state of enlightenment, you *are* yourself. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing has ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time—that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
natural state of felt oneness with Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it—don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With the seeing comes the power of choice...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time—a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago—yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through "just being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True salvation is a state of freedom—from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of-body experience. Although such an experience can be fascinating and can give you a glimpse of the state of liberation from the material form, in the end you will always have to return to the body, where the essential work of transformation takes place. Transformation is through the body, not away from it. This is why no true master has ever advocated fighting or leaving the body, although their mind-based followers often have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even the Buddha is said to have practiced body denial through fasting and extreme forms of asceticism for six years, but he did not attain enlightenment until after he had given up this practice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self." These are just a few of the habitual ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
see the sameness of being in every human.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can't get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Can anxious thought add a single day to your life? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking that is not rooted in awareness becomes self-serving and dysfunctional. Cleverness devoid of wisdom is extremely dangerous and destructive. That is the current state of most of humanity. The amplification of thought as science and technology, although intrinsically neither good nor bad, has also become destructive because so often the thinking out of which it comes has no roots in awareness. The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
What "I" could there be apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as "my life," and I don't have a life. I am life. I and life are one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
But as long as negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that reminds you to be more present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
— 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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
occur. I have noticed with concern, for example, that not only certain politicians, but also some commentators in respectable publications are increasingly portraying Russia and/or China as the "enemy." Thoughts can spread like a virus, and if thoughts proliferate in the collective psyche, they distort our perceptions and cause us to act as if they were true, and so subsequently they manifest as our reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
whenever there is inspiration, which translates as "in spirit," and enthusiasm, which means "in God," there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the news tends to focus mostly on incidents and areas of our planet that represent the most extreme forms of human unconsciousness, which more often than not means violence and warfare, or at least severe dysfunction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In pointing to the impermanence of all forms, by implication, they are also pointing to the eternal. Only the eternal in you can recognize the impermanent as impermanent.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace. The ego doesn't like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"When I obtain this or am free of that—then I will be okay." This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss. If you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are attached. If you are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification is no longer total.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
through right nutrition and exercise. If you don't equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below thought. Everyone does that every night during sleep. But this also happens to some extent through sex, alcohol, and other drugs that suppress excessive mind activity. If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Illness is not the problem. You are the problem—as long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything "bad" that happens in your life—use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness—and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent empty space—so vast are the distances between the atoms compared to their size. What is more, even inside every atom there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. Buddhists have known that for over 2,500 years. "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
your dwelling place in the Now and pay ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection. We spoke about this earlier.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: "The Sufi is the son of time present." And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real. Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is—which is the only sane way to live—there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good—which includes the "bad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you take any action—leaving or changing your situation—drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Large-scale waiting" is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
There is a place for mind and mind knowledge. It is in the practical realm of day-to-day living. However, when it takes over all aspects of your life, including your relationships with other human beings and with nature, it becomes a monstrous parasite that, unchecked, may well end up killing all life on the planet and finally itself by ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word chaos means order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,' ‘me,' or ‘mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To 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
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
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course, means "have no enemies.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life—as opposed to imaginary mind projections—is this moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future—nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence—your deeper self—behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You might say, "What a dreadful day," without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance. In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
After all, it continues to be true for millions of people that the greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness. And A New Earth is it's direct reflection in the physical realm.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You need to 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
Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self—your invisible and indestructible reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is unhappiness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there. But don't say, 'I'm unhappy.' Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: 'There is unhappiness in me.' Then investigate it. A situation you find yourself in may have something to do with it. Action may be required to change the situation or remove yourself from it. If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable.' The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, 'I am ruined' is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. 'I have fifty cents left in my bank account' is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions.Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them. Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of identification the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn't mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity. Anticonsumerism or antiprivate ownership would be another thought form, another mental position, that can replace identification with posessions. Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong. As we shall see later, making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you are identified with the mind, you have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say, you get your sense of who you are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with the mind gives it more energy; observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Die to the past every moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization. Freud, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A complete stranger seems to be looking back at you, and in her eyes there is hatred, hostility, bitterness, or anger. When she speaks to you, it is not your spouse or partner who is speaking but the pain-body speaking through them. Whatever she is saying is the pain-body's version of reality, a reality completely distorted by fear, hostility, anger, and a desire to inflict and receive more pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever behavior the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. It is that awareness that says "I AM ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Many poets and sages throughout the ages have observed that true happiness—I call it the joy of Being—is found in simple, seemingly unremarkable things. Most people, in their restless search for something significant to happen to them, continuously miss the insignificant, which may not be insignificant at all. The philosopher Nietzsche, in a rare moment of deep stillness, wrote, ‘For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…. the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"1 At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering—and free of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The moment you become aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean you have failed. It means that you have succeeded. Until that awareness happens, there is identification with inner states, and such identification is ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
You are awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Egos are drawn to bigger egos. Darkness cannot recognize light. Only light can recognize light. So don't believe that the light is outside you or that it can only come through one particular form. If only your master is an incarnation of God, then who are you? Any kind of exclusivity is identification with form, and identification with form means ego, no matter how well disguised. Use the master's presence to reflect your own identity beyond name and form back to you and to become more intensely present yourself. You will soon realize that there is no "mine" or "yours" in presence. Presence is one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge... [which happened] if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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 accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
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
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
"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
Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, as so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness—without doing anything—simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When 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 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
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
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
What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Show your friend how to be the observing presence behind her thoughts and her emotions. Tell her about the pain-body and how to free herself from it. Teach her the art of inner-body awareness. Demonstrate to her the meaning of presence. As soon as she is able to access the power of the Now, and thereby break through her conditioned past, she will have a choice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I would say about 80 to 90 percent of people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunction and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will know this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
... enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be predictably preceded by vast upheavals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
of the realm of the manifested. Continuous mind activity keeps you imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the Unmanifested, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into effect between two human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become. You have a mental image not only of who the other person is, but also of who you are, especially in relation to the person you are interacting with. So you are not relating with that person at all, but who you think you are is relating to who you think the other person is and vice versa.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
The dreamer is consciousness itself—who you are. To awaken within the dream is our purpose now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego is always on guard against any kind of perceived diminishment. Automatic ego-repair mechanisms come into effect to restore the mental form of "me." When someone blames or criticizes me, that to the ego is a diminishment of self, and it will immediately attempt to repair its diminished sense of self through self-justification, defense, or blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, "What a pretty flower," but that's just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don't truly see the flower, don't feel its essence, its holiness—just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own essence, their own holiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence. Most humans are completely unconscious of this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They are out of balance. [...] They identify exclusively with their own physical and psychological form, unconscious of essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
inner state. You need to be extremely alert and absolutely present to be able to detect them. Whenever you do, it is a moment of awakening, of disidentification from the mind. Here is one of the most common negative states that is easily overlooked, precisely because ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What 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
These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the 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
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
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
Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a fragrance from the realm of spirit. Using the word "enlightenment" in a wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something—anything—and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the "isness" of all things. Move deeply into the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Jesus points to this when he says, "Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole."1 The New Testament's "Be ye perfect" is a mistranslation of the original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In many cases, you are not buying a product, but an "identity enhancer." Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived, and so you keep looking for more; you keep buying and keep consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now (see chapter 6).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance. The ego loves its resentment of reality. What is reality? Whatever is. Buddha called it tatata—the suchness of life, which is no more than the suchness of this moment. Opposition toward that suchness is one of the main features of the ego. It creates the negativity that the ego thrives on, the unhappiness that it loves. In this way, you make yourself and others suffer and don't even know that you are doing it, don't know that you are creating hell on earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
There is nothing personal in this: I am not teaching you. You are consciousness, and you are listening to yourself. There is an Eastern saying: "The teacher and the taught together create the teaching." In any case, the words in themselves are not important. They are not the Truth; they only point to it. I speak from presence, and as I speak, you may be able to join me in that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don't misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
True love has no opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish—that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of a dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made a separate entity out of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet—in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive, and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image of your body becoming luminous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But to know that you are not present is a great success: ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute nonreaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True intelligence operates silently.
— 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
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
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and the state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end. It isn't the action you perform that you really enjoy, but the deep sense of aliveness that flows into ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Built into the very structure of the egoic self is a need to oppose, resist, and exclude to maintain the sense of separateness on which its continued survival depends. So there is "me" against the "other," "us" against "them." The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone. That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long. You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness. Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all—from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The ego thrives on others' attention, which is after all a form of psychic energy. The ego doesn't know that the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one's self through "more than" and diminishment through "less than" is neither right nor wrong—it is the ego. The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You have already understood the basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with the mind, which creates a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You have a name, a past, a life situation, a future. But in one essential respect, you are not the same person you were before ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Whenever you are waiting, wherever it may be, use that time to feel the inner body. In this way, traffic jams and lines become very enjoyable. Instead of mentally projecting yourself away from the Now, go more deeply into the Now by going more deeply into the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For the ego to survive, it must make time -- past and future -- more important than the present moment. The ego cannot tolerate becoming friendly with the present moment, except briefly just after it got what it wanted. But nothing can satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs your life, there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as the witness, and so initiate its transmutation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That one step is called surrender. I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into inner peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identifiedwith your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. Well? I had to wait for quite a long time before a thought came in. Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Beware of making it your mission to 'eradicate evil,' as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional ego behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. "I don't know," I said. "They all look so interesting. But I do know this," I added. "Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems. You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living— ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Every human being emanates an energy field that corresponds to his or her inner state, ... Some people are most clearly aware of it when they first meet someone, even before any words are exchanged. A little later, however, words take over the relationship and with words come the roles that most people play. Attention then moves to the realm of mind, and the ability to sense the other person's energy field becomes greatly diminished.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Whatever the present moment contains,accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What did Jesus tell his disciples? "Heaven is right here in the midst of you."6 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, ...
— 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
A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind-dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt threatened by them and often ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it seeks is sympathy or pity or others' interest in my problems, "me and my story." Seeing oneself as a victim is an element in many egoic patterns, such as complaining, being offended, outraged, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We are also learning that action, although necessary, is only a secondary factor in manifesting our external reality. The primary factor in creation is consciousness. No matter how active we are, how much effort we make, our state of consciousness creates our world, and if there is no change on that inner level, no amount of action will make any difference. We would only re-create modified versions of the same world again and again, a world that is an external reflection of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What remains [when you deny the illusion of self] is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness. The only thing that ultimately matters is this: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times? To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Making it" in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to "fail" so that your life can have meaning.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness. [...] If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The opportunity that is concealed within every crisis does not manifest until all the facts of any given situation are acknowledged and fully accepted. As long as you deny them, as long as you try to escape from them or wish that things were different, the window of opportunity does not open up, and you remain trapped inside that situation, which will remain the same or deteriorate further.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The stronger the ego in you, the more likely it is that in your perception other people are the main source of problems in your life. It is also more than likely that you will make life difficult for others. But, of course, you won't be able to see that. It is always others who seem to be doing it to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Some people get angry when they hear me say that problems are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What is my relationship with Life? This question is an excellent way of unmasking the ego in you and bringing you into the state of Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every challenge that it contains is actually a disguised opportunity for salvation.
— 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
When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honoured, but nothing matters.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depths to you as a human being–no humility, no compassion. You would not be listening to this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego. And then comes a point where it has served its purpose.Suffering is necessary until you realize that it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Women are regaining the function that is their birthright and, therefore, comes to them more naturally than it does to men: to be a bridge between the manifested world and the Unmanifested, between physicality and spirit.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be." Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your needs and what matters to you in life -- and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a criterion to find out how deeply you know yourself. What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you. So you may want to ask yourself the question: What are the things that upset and disturb me? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When you walk through a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life all around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life. Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover that the decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work. Molecules are rearranging themselves. So death isn't to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms. What can you learn from this? Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The 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
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
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
And the miracle is that when you are no longer placing an impossible demand on it, every situation, person, place, or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All utopian visions have this in common: the mental projection of a future time when all will be well, we will be saved, there will be peace and harmony and the end of our problems. There have been many such utopian visions. Some ended in disappointment, others in disaster.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign that the ego has returned, as are negative reactions when we encounter obstacles.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible to you only through the portal of the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence of the Unmanifested in that? You can't? Look for it in the silence out of which the sounds come and into which they return. Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"time is the fourth dimension of space. He calls it the "space-time continuum.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"A similar question in the Zen tradition is this: "If not now, when? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To complain is always nonacceptance to what *is*.
— 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
As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
you 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
"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
Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The world as it appears to us now is, as I said, largely a reflection of the egoic mind. Fear being an unavoidable consequence of egoic delusion, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It may then seem that you had something very precious, and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" 1 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 playfulness and joy of a dog, its unconditional love and readiness to celebrate life at any moment often contrast sharply with the inner state of the dog's owner—depressed, anxious, burdened by problems, lost in thought, not present in the only place and only time there is: Here and Now. One wonders: living with this person, how does the dog manage to remain so sane, so joyous? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
ENLIGHTENMENT: RISING ABOVE THOUGHT Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world? Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and depends upon whether you can become present enough to dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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 see one's predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no form. But then, it is not really a thing, and it is not of this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In Shakespeare's words, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something goes seriously "wrong"—illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, breakup of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death—know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Destructive and cruel wars, motivated by fear, greed, and the desire for power, had been common occurrences throughout human history, as had slavery, torture, and widespread violence inflicted for religious and ideological reasons. Humans suffered more at the hands of each other than through natural disasters.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Let me summarize the process. Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it—don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Be present as the watcher of your mind- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
expectations that anything or anybody in the future will save you or make you happy. As far as your life situation is concerned, there may be things to be attained or acquired. That's the world of form, of gain and loss. Yet on a deeper level you are already complete, and when you realize that, there is a playful, joyous energy behind what you do. Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
She believed I had 'done something' to her, but I had done nothing. Instead of asking what I had done to her, perhaps she should have asked what I had not done. I had not reacted, not confirmed the reality of her story, not fed her mind with more thought and her pain-body with more emotion. I had allowed her to experience whatever she was experiencing at that moment, and the power of allowing lies in noninterference, nondoing. Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or actions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans - all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight—that our "normal" state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
THE EGO IS NOT PERSONAL On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative,"3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
"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
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
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
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
You are still seeking outside, and you cannot get out of the seeking mode. Maybe the next workshop will have the answer, maybe that new technique. To you I would say: Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For example, if anger is the predominant energy vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts, dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become "you." Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
... the ego is a derived sense of self...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The word "identification" is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning "same" and facere, which means "to make." So when I identify with something, I "make it the same." The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my "identity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world's suffering is a bottomless pit. So don't let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain.Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.This also applies if you are supporting a movement designed to stop deeply unconscious humans from destroying themselves, each other, and the planet, or from continuing to inflict dreadful suffering on other sentient beings. Remember: Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so you cannot fight unconsciousness. If you try to do so, the polar opposites will become strengthened and more deeply entrenched. You will become identified with one of the polarities, you will create an "enemy," and so be drawn into unconsciousness yourself. Raise awareness by disseminating information, or at the most, practice passive resistance. But make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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 continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Know Thyself. What those words imply is this: Before you ask any other question, first ask the most fundamental question of your life: Who am I? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So if you inhabit the inner body, the outer body will grow old at a much slower rate, and even when it does, your timeless essence will shine through the outer form, and you will not give the appearance of an old person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[F]or so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God" - not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is 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
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Focus not on the one hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don't start to run "mental movies," project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does—do not resist what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
[An] unconscious fear of facing the pain [...] lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. Your life situation consists of your circumstances and your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point of access for that is the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them—while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Enthusiasm and the ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I want you to achieve what I never achieved; I want you to be somebody in the eyes of the world, so that I too can be somebody through you. Don't disappoint me. I sacrificed so much for you. My disapproval of you is intended to make you feel so guilty and uncomfortable that you finally conform to my wishes. And it goes without saying that I know what's best for you. I love you and I will continue to love you if you do what I know is right for you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
"But I don't know who I am. I don't know what it means to be myself." If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are—the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper, true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you are run by your mind, although you have no choice you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will eventually force you out of your unconscious state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever. That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite for any authentic relationship. The ego always either wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it is in a state of utter indifference: It doesn't care about you. And so, the three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining), and indifference.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachingspoint. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."3 When this is your state of Being, how can you not succeed? You have succeeded already.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego doesn't know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe—in the form of people and circumstances—gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole. The ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react to someone else's success as if that success had taken something away from "me." It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Perceiving presence is what true awakening is all about.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already been there, but had been largely obscured by their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus said, "for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If you delve into the past, it will become abottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free ofit, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The way of the cross is a complete reversal. It means that the worst thing in your life, your cross, turns into the best thing that ever happened to you, by forcing you into surrender, into "death," forcing you to become as nothing, to become as God—because God, too, is no-thing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or a blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost. When I quote from the ancient religions or other teachings, it is to reveal their deeper meaning and thereby restore their transformative power—particularly for those readers who are followers of these religions or teachings. I say to them: there is no need to go elsewhere for the truth. Let me show you how to go more deeply into what you already have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world's suffering is a bottomless pit. So don't let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When there is stress, it is usually a sign that the ego has returned, and you are cutting yourself off from the creative power of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents." That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
The source of all abundance is not outside you. It is part of who you are. However, start by acknowledging and recognizing abundance without. See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself. For many people, a large part of their mentalemotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that. By doing this, you make others or a situation "wrong" and yourself "right." Through being "right," you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego. Can you observe those patterns within yourself and recognize the complaining voice in your head for what it is? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The law that outflow determines inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: "Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap."1 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If 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
Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
— 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
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
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
"There is an Eastern saying: "The teacher and the taught together create the teaching.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey. It will free vast amounts of consciousness that previously had been trapped in useless and compulsive thinking. A very effective way of doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you can't stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken. So the pain-body too has its necessary place in the larger picture.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"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
Never personalize Christ. Don't make Christ into a form identity. Avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters, the very few that are real, are not special as persons. Without a false self to uphold, defend, and feed, they are more simple, more ordinary than the ordinary man or woman. Anyone with a strong ego would regard them as insignificant or, more likely, not see them at all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to—alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person—you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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 mind always wants to categorize and compare, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention.This is surrendered action—empowered action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If we go exclusively by the information we receive on a daily basis through the news reports and the mainstream media, then our assessment of the state of human affairs in this new millennium will necessarily be overwhelmingly negative, and we will most likely come to the depressing conclusion that nothing has changed. After all, it continues to be true for millions of people that the greater part of human suffering is not due to natural disasters, but is inflicted by humans on one another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So who is the experiencer? You are. And who are you? Consciousness. And what is consciousness? This question cannot be answered. The moment you answer it, you have falsified it, made it into another object. Consciousness, the traditional word for which is spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops—unless you choose to use it. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality. For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
watch out for any kind of defensiveness within you, What are you defending? an illusionary identity, an image in your mind,a fictional entity ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe. What looks like weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Are you defending your right to be unconscious, your right to suffer? Don't worry. Nobody is going to take that away from you. Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don't identify with it, the pain-body can no longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. Your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion; your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So what happens if you withdraw attention from the objects in space and become aware of space itself? What is the essence of this room? The furniture, pictures, and so on are in the room, but they are not the room. The floor, walls, and ceiling define the boundary of the room, but they are not the room either. So what is the essence of the room? Space, of course, empty space. There would be no "room" without it. Since space is "nothing," we can say that what is not there is more important than what is there. So become aware of the space that is all around you. Don't think about it. Feel it, as it were. Pay attention to "nothing." As you do that, a shift in consciousness takes place inside you. Here is why. The inner equivalent to objects in space such as furniture, walls, and so on are your mind objects: thoughts, emotions, and the objects of the senses. And the inner equivalent of space is the consciousness that enables your mind objects to be, just as space allows all things to be. So if you withdraw attention from things—objects in space—you automatically withdraw attention from your mind objects as well. In other words: You cannot think and be aware of space—or of silence, for that matter. By becoming aware of the empty space around you, you simultaneously become aware of the space of no-mind, of pure consciousness: the Unmanifested. This is how the contemplation of space can become a portal for you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If there is awareness in you, you will be able to recognize that voice in your head for what it is: an old thought, conditioned by the past. If there is awareness in you, you no longer need to believe in every thought you think. It's an old thought, no more. Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
Next time you say "I have nothing incommon with this person," remember that you have a great deal in common: A few yearsfrom now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you willhave become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering andhumbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and everyother creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If 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
Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
It read: 'Danger. All structures are unstable.' I said to my friend, 'That's a profound sutra [sacred scripture].' And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous," says the ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable." What the ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is self-created - some form of unconscious resistance to what *is*. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event--through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you ---ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Can you be aware of your mind racing to defend its position, justify, attack, blame? In other words, can you awaken at that moment of unconsciousness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus said, "for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven."1 What does "poor in spirit" mean? No inner baggage, no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a sense of self in them. And what is the "kingdom of heaven"? The simple but profound joy of Being that is there when you let go of identifications and so become "poor in spirit." This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient spiritual practice in both East and West.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
people who are reaching a point where they become capable of breaking out of inherited collective mind-patterns that have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
But we cannot really honor things if we use them as a means to self-enhancement, that is to say, if we try to find ourselves through them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you are present, when your attention is fully in the Now, that Presence will flow into and transform what you do. There will be quality and power in it. You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured, but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
extremely high volume of correspondence I receive, I am regretfully ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When the dimension of space is lost or rather not known, the things of the world assume an absolute importance, a seriousness and heaviness that in truth they do not have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Jesus's statement that "your whole body will be filled with light, ...
— 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
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— 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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Facing facts is always empowering. Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, dishonesty, propensity to violence, or whatever it may be? Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thoughts that trigger emotional responses in the body may sometimes come so fast that before the mind has had time to voice them, the body has already responded with an emotion, and the emotion has turned into a reaction. Those thoughts exist at a preverbal stage and could be called unspoken, unconscious assumptions. They have their origin in a person's past conditioning, usually from early childhood. "People cannot be trusted" would be an example of such an unconscious assumption in a person whose primordial relationships, that is to say, with parents or siblings, were not supportive and did not inspire trust.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The usual pattern of thought creating emotion is reversed in the case of the pain-body, at least initially. Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your thinking becomes negative. The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The answer is obvious, is it not? Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now. The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 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
Enthusiasm "wants" nothing because it lacks nothing. It is at one with life and no matter how dynamic the enthusiasm-inspired activities are, you don't lose yourself in them. And there remains always a still but intensely alive space at the center of the wheel, a core of peace in the midst of activity that is both the source of all and untouched by it all. Through enthusiasm you enter into full alignment with the outgoing creative principle of the universe, but without identifying with its creations, that is to say, without ego. Where there is no identification, there is no attachment—one of the great sources of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
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
You may remember the paradox of time we mentioned earlier:Whatever you do takes time, and yet it is always now. So while your innerpurpose is to negate time, your outer purpose necessarily involves future andso could not exist without time. But it is always secondary. Whenever youbecome anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sightof your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness isprimary, all else secondary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life—birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner body, you are forever one with God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering—and free of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Sooner or later, disorder will irrupt into everyone's life no matter how many insurance policies he or she has. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dreamof ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem." Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
... the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I didn't realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow. Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present. Accusing, defending, attacking—all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to others—and to yourself—is vital. Love cannot flourish without it. When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships—when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions—and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship. Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone lived in a mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would no longer serve to enhance your sense of self. You could then move to a simple cabin, give up your wealth, and regain an identity by seeing yourself and being seen as more spiritual than others. How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others. You need others to give you a sense of self, and if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more the dysfunction of the human mind plays itself out on the world stage, clearly visible to everyone in the daily television news reports, the greater the number of people who realize the urgent need for a radical change in human consciousness if humanity is not to destroy both itself and the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an indivisible whole in which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in isolation....... mental labels of 'good' and 'bad' are ultimately illusory. They always imply a limited perspective and so are true only relatively and temporarily.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible. Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
In most ancient cultures, people believed that everything, even so-called inanimate objects, had an indwelling spirit, and in this respect they were closer to the truth than we are today.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Doing is never enough if you neglect Being. The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing. If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough 'doings' to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won't. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Only if we are still enough inside and the noise of thinking subsides can we become aware that there is a hidden harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order in which everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what it is and the way it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 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
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"A 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
When the first sign appears, you need to be alert enough to "catch" it before it takes you over. For example, the first sign may be a sudden, strong irritation or a flash of anger, or it may be a purely physical symptom. Whatever it is, catch it before it can take over your thinking or behavior. This simply means putting the spotlight of your attention on it. If it is an emotion, feel the strong energy charge behind it. Know that it is the pain-body. At the same time, be the knowing; that is to say, be aware of your conscious presence and feel its power. Any emotion that you take your presence into will quickly subside and become transmuted.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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 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
The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune—that is, highly conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment