Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save you. Is this not the core error that we have been talking about? Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whatever you identify with turns into ego.
— 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, ...
— 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
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
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
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
What is a negative emotion? An emotion that is toxic to the body and interferes with its balance and harmonious functioning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash—one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone. To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought. To you, it is liberating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"Jesus's statement that "your whole body will be filled with light, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind—its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now—problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"This is beautifully expressed in the Zen saying "The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the "normal" state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or even madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, "Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create." They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of "normal" human existence. They showed the way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Life is Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The person who is talking and making promises, however, is not the entity that commits the violence, and so you can be sure that it will happen again and again unless he becomes present, recognizes the pain-body within himself, and thus disidentifies from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking "plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself."1 So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming"with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness"of that moment? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
your dwelling place in the Now and pay ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other deep pain, such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of your presence—...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We can never understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we think about is content; whereas, the higher order emanates from the formless realm of consciousness, from universal intelligence. But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— 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
Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past. Die ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The thinking mind cannot understand Presence ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence—your deeper self—behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And it is from inner space, the unconditioned consciousness itself, that true happiness, the joy of Being, emanates.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself. Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no "I" apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say, "What voice?" or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an entity that has taken possession of them. Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
— 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
When you know yourself only through content, you will also think you know what is good or bad for you. You differentiate between events that are 'good for me' and those that are 'bad.' This is a fragmented perception of the wholeness of life in which everything is interconnected, in which every event has its necessary place and function within the totality. ... Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic succession of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the unfolding of a higher order and purpose. ... But we can glimpse it, and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be conscious participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The collective manifestations of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness. If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies"—his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
demanding recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don't get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of your illnesses, or making a scene; giving your opinion when nobody has asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other person, which is to say, using other people for egoic reflection or as ego enhancers; trying to make an impression on others through possessions, knowledge, good looks, status, physical strength, and so on; bringing about temporary ego inflation through angry reaction against something or someone; taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself right and others wrong through futile mental or verbal complaining; wanting to be seen, or to appear important.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
Stillness is your essential nature. What is stillness? The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page are being perceived and become thoughts. Without that awareness, there would be no perception, no thoughts, no world. You are that awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
All creativity comes out of inner spaciousness. Once the creation has happened and something has come into form, you have to be vigilant so that the notion of "me" or "mine" does not arise. If you take credit for what you accomplished, the ego has returned, and the spaciousness has become obscured.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death [of the ego].
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.
— 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
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
If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda - the bliss of Being. Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background without which these experiences would not be possible.Whenever there is beauty, kindness, the recognition of the goodness of simple things in your life, look for the background to that experience within yourself. But don't look for it as if you were looking for something. You cannot pin it down and say, "Now I have it," or grasp it mentally and define it in some way. It is like the cloudless sky. It has no form. It is space; it is stillness, the sweetness of Being and infinitely more than these words, which are only pointers. When you are able to sense it directly within yourself, it deepens. So when you appreciate something simple - a sound, a sight, a touch - when you see beauty, when you feel loving kindness toward another, sense the inner spaciousness that is the source and background to that experience.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
To complain is always nonacceptance to what *is*.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now, and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Since time immemorial, flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds have held special significance for the human spirit. Like all life-forms, they are, of course, temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life, one Consciousness. Their special significance and the reason why humans feel such fascination for and affinity with them can be attributed to their ethereal quality. Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank. An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don't empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Can anxious thought add a single day to your life? ...
— 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
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
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
There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If a course of action is in alignment with what the Universe wants, it will become empowered.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
The ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants. It believes that through it, it can attract a desirable condition or dissolve an undesirable one. A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you"—the mind—did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In many cases you are not buying a product but an "identity enhancer." Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind: the witnessing presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
as long as you are run by the egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity. Perhaps you haven't looked very deeply into the human condition in its state of dominance by the egoic mind. Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It's the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says "I am." If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to your inner state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You teach through being, through demonstrating the peace of God. You become the "light of the world," an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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 why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
"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
Now let your spiritual practice be this: As you go about your life, don't give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within. I have spoken about this already. Feel the inner body even when engaged in everyday activities, especially when engaged in relationships or when you are relating with nature. Feel the stillness deep inside it. Keep the portal open. It is quite possible to be conscious of the Unmanifested throughout your life. You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what happens out here. You become a bridge between the Unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the world. This is the state of connectedness with the Source that we call enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
accept it as if you had chosen it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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 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
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
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
Giving space to others—and to yourself—is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there. When you inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to enter.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When 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
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
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
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 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
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
Enlightenment means rising above thought, ...
— 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
Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? ...
— 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
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
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
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
"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
What difference does their approval or disapproval truly make to who you are? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"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
[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
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
The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A Course in Miracles.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever. The Spanish language is the most honest in regard to conventional notions of love: Te quiero means "I want you" as well as "I love you." The other expression for "I love you," te amo, which does not have this ambiguity, is rarely used—perhaps because true love is just as rare.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
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
Don't ask your mind for permission to enjoy what you do.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is inner stillness that will save and transform the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The dreamer is consciousness itself—who you are. To awaken within the dream is our purpose now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To 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
Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What it doesn't say—but only points to—is more important than what it says.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love - even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What ...
— 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
If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"When you 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
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species.
— 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
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
Eternity, of course, does not mean endless time, but no time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within (...) ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
So break the old pattern of present-moment denial and present-moment resistance. Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do then is "ride the wave.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
psychological time, which is the mind's deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So the pain-body doesn't want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the power of Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In most ancient cultures, there must have been an intuitive understanding of this process, which is why old people were respected and revered. They were the repositories of wisdom and provided the dimension of depth without which no civilization can survive for long. In our civilization, which is totally identified with the outer and ignorant of the inner dimension of spirit, the word old has mainly negative connotations. It equals useless and so we regard it as almost an insult to refer to someone as old. To avoid the word, we use euphemisms such as elderly and senior. The First Nation's "grandmother" is a figure of great dignity. Today's "granny" is at best cute. Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world -- relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself -- who you are.To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"When I obtain this or am free of that—then I will be okay." This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Even 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
Enthusiasm brings an enormous empowerment into what you do, so that all those who have not accessed that power would look upon "your" achievements in awe and may equate them with who you are. You, however, know the truth that Jesus pointed to when he said, "I can of my own self do nothing."3 Unlike egoic wanting, which creates opposition in direct proportion to the intensity of its wanting, enthusiasm never opposes. It is non-confrontational. Its activity does not create winners and losers. It is based on inclusion, not exclusion, of others. It does not need to use and manipulate people, because it is the power of creation itself and so does not need to take energy from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Satisfaction through gratification will always be short-lived, therefore it will always be projected again.You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You "get" there by realizing you *are* there already.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater intensity. After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the functions of a spiritual teacher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Every time you are present when the pain-body arises, some of the pain-body's negative emotional energy will burn up, as it were, and become transmuted into Presence. The rest of the pain-body will quickly withdraw and wait for a better opportunity to arise again, that is to say, when you are less conscious. A better opportunity for the pain-body to arise may come whenever you lose Presence, perhaps after you have had a few drinks or while watching a violent film. The tiniest negative emotion, such as being irritated or anxious, can also serve as a doorway through which the pain-body can return. The pain-body needs your unconsciousness. It cannot tolerate the light of Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Die to the past every moment.
— 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
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
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making. Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self. If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as the witness, and so initiate its transmutation ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to "gain the world and lose your soul," as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to "fail" sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— 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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nature exists in a state of unconscious oneness with the whole. This, for example, is why virtually no wild animals were killed in the tsunami disaster of 2004. Being more in touch with the totality than humans, they could sense the tsunami's approach long before it could be seen or heard and so had time to withdraw to higher terrain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
... the ego is a derived sense of self...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are here to enable the divinepurpose of the universe to unfold.That is how important you are!—Eckhart Tolle ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course, means "have no enemies.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The fact is: Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead."
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
full attention means full acceptance.
— 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
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
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
Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of "I can't be bothered anymore" or "I just don't care anymore." If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked resistance. As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if there is any trace of resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you do so; otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some dark corner in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man or woman. If "Christ" were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you other than this: "I am the Truth. I am divine presence. I am eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
What you refer to as your "life" should more accurately be called your "life situation." It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn't go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
who are you? Consciousness that has become conscious of itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except in the mind's judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever. If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive. Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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 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
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence—your deeper self—behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news, in exactly the same way: 'Is that so?' He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody's victim. He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The emotional or physical pain that for many women precedes and coincides with the menstrual flow is the pain-body in its collective aspect that awakens from its dormancy at that time, although it can be triggered at other times too.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"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
Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Now consider this: If there were nothing but silence, it wouldn't exist for you; you wouldn't know what it is. Only when sound appears does silence come into being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don't need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
You think these thoughts in the same way that you dream your dreams when you are asleep. In other words, you don't know you are thinking those thoughts, just as the dreamer doesn't know he is dreaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn't know it is just a thought. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means "I am in danger," and it responds accordingly, even though you may be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, breathing becomes rapid. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. Part of it is fed back to the mind and generates even more anxious thought. The rest of the energy turns toxic and interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. "How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you're doing, you become stressed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"So give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting ... snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything. So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Each person's life, each life-form infact, represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself. And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end - one of countless worlds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you can feel the inner body clearly as a single field of energy, let go, if possible, of any visual image and focus exclusively on the feeling. If you can, also drop any mental image you may still have of the physical body. All that is left then is an all-encompassing sense of presence or "beingness," and the inner body is felt to be without a boundary. Then take your attention even more deeply into that feeling. Become one with it. Merge with the energy field, so that there is no longer a perceived duality of the observer and the observed, of you and your body. The distinction between inner and outer also dissolves now, so there is no inner body anymore. By going deeply into the body, you have transcended the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness. When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative. In any thought activity, make it a habit to go back and forth every few minutes or so between thinking and an inner kind of listening, an inner stillness. We could say: don't just think with your head, think with your whole body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behaviour with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake *that* for who they are.If you are alert and present, you can point out behaviour without ego involvement (making the other person wrong).
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You discover that a "bored person" is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
There is 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
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
"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
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
Will you become less when you let go of it? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person's position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you, which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the demands and expectations of your mind and what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
True communication is communion- the realization of oneness, which is love.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master," says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identification with form. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it. Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
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
Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The body loves your attention. It is also a potent form of self-healing. Most illnesses creep in when you are not present in the body. If the master is not present in the house, all kinds of shady characters will take up residence there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
natural state of felt oneness with Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Do you want an easy death? Would you rather die without pain, without agony? Then die to the past every moment, and let the light of your presence shine away the heavy, time-bound self you thought of as "you".
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot—even for a moment—free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say "no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Abundance comes only to those who already have it. It sounds almost unfair, but of course it isn't. It is a universal law. Both abundance and scarcity are inner states that manifest as your reality. Jesus puts it like this: "For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away."2 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Don't get attached to any words. They are only stepping stones, to be left behind as quickly as possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Always say "yes" to the present moment.
— 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
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of deductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords of the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" is identified with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Next time you say "I have nothing incommon with this person," remember that you have a great deal in common: A few yearsfrom now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you willhave become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering andhumbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and everyother creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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 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
The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
see the sameness of being in every human.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents' pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet.
— 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
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
When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are 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
Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence, the unconditioned consciousness which in a state of inner openness you become one with. Circumstances and people then become helpful, cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that comes with surrender. You rest in God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Teachings that pointed the way beyond the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the insanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you're taking this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Don't look for peace.Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being peace.The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.This is the miracle of surrender.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But to know that you are not present is a great success: ...
— 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
When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It belongs to a different order of reality and will create a different world when a sufficient number of humans enter the surrendered state and so become totally free of negativity. If the Earth is to survive, this will be the energy of those who inhabit it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened—before you have freed yourself from your mind—you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. ... Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality.... Things, bodies and egos, events, situations, thoughts, emotions, desires, ambitions, fears, drama... they comes, pretend to be all-important,...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mental illness that is called paranoid schizophrenia, or paranoia for short, is essentially an exaggerated form of ego. It usually consists of a fictitious story the mind has invented to make sense of a persistent underlying feeling of fear. The main element of the story is the belief that certain people (sometimes large numbers or almost everyone) are plotting against me, or are conspiring to control or kill me. The story often has an inner consistency and logic so that it sometimes fools others into believing it too. Sometimes ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system, becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
... enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be predictably preceded by vast upheavals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to wake.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself—"you" and "yourself" merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
There *are* no problems. Only situations - to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the 'isness' of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions -- as they happen. This is not really a 'doing,' but an alert 'seeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
Don't look for peace.Don't look for any ther state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being peace.The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peaceAnything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.This is the miracle of surrencer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Are you 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
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
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
What you refer to as your 'life' should more accurately be called your 'life situation'. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind stuff. Your life is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If in the midst of negativity you are able to realize "At this moment I am creating suffering for myself" it will be enough to raise you above the limitations of conditioned egoic states and reactions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
— 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
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
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
It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At this moment, this is what you feel," I said. "There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
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
You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"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
The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As long as you are identified with the mind, you have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say, you get your sense of who you are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality—and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality—this is also its definition: complete identification with form—physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it—who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that is to say, what is or what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not. Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real. Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is—which is the only sane way to live—there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good—which includes the "bad." Seen from the perspective of the mind, however, there is good-bad, like-dislike, love-hate. Hence, in the Book of Genesis, it is said that Adam and Eve were no longer allowed to dwell in "paradise" when they "ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The energy form that lies behind hostility and attack finds the presence of love absolutely intolerable. If ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To create suffering without recognizing it -- this is the essence of unconscious living...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you hate what you are doing, complain about your surroundings, curse things that are happening or have happened, or when your internal dialogue consists of shoulds and shouldn'ts, of blaming and accusing, then you are arguing with what is, arguing with that which is always already the case. You are making Life into an enemy and Life says, "War is what you want, and war is what you get." External reality, which always reflects back to you your inner state, is then experienced as hostile.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
If you are run by your mind, although you have no choice you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will eventually force you out of your unconscious state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
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
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The wise man's "maybe" signifies a refusal to judge anything that happens. Instead of judging what is, he accepts it and so enters into conscious alignment with the higher order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
But 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
As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents." That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the premordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
However, the irruption of disorder into a person's life, and the resultant collapse of a mentally defined meaning, can become the opening into a higher order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
On the positive side, you are "in love" with your partner. This is at first a deeply satisfying state. You feel intensely alive. Your existence has suddenly become meaningful because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel special, and you do the same for him or her. When you are together, you feel whole. The feeling can become so intense that the rest of the world fades into insignificance. However, you may also have noticed that there is a neediness and a clinging quality to that intensity. You become addicted to the other person. He or she acts on you like a drug. You are on a high when the drug is available, but even the possibility or the thought that he or she might no longer be there for you can lead to jealousy, possessiveness, attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail, blaming and accusing—fear of loss. If the other person does leave you, this can give rise to the most intense hostility or the most profound grief and despair. In an instant, loving tenderness can turn into a savage attack or dreadful grief. Where is the love now? Can love change into its opposite in an instant? Was it love in the first place, or just an addictive grasping and clinging? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
— 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
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
"To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction'' and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you 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
Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" ofego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
in it. It means consciousness is lost in its own dream. You get taken in by every thought, every emotion, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
BEAUTY ARISES IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements, yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion that is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none. The truth is: you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling, or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds? You say, "I want to know myself." You are the "I." You are the Knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself. There is nothing to know beyond that, and yet all knowing arises out of it. The "I" cannot make itself into an object of knowledge, of consciousness. So you cannot become an object to yourself. That is the very reason the illusion of egoic identity arose—because mentally you made yourself into an object. "That's me," you say. And then you begin to have a relationship with yourself, and tell others and yourself your story. By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self-seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words: what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form—no more and no less.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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 your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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
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
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
Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a relatively shallow and shortlived one. Concealed within it remains a deep seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of "not enough." "I don't have enough yet," by which the ego really means, "I am not enough yet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life—as opposed to imaginary mind projections—is this moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future—nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In 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
The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are in engaged in doing anything at all—from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information—this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Silence is helpful, but you don't need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself. You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most people don't inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you are awake enough, aware enough, to be able to observe how you interact with other people, you may detect subtle changes in your speech, attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are interacting with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sometimes the 'fault' you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
"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
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 I was walking with a friend through a beautiful nature reserve near Malibu in California, we came upon the ruins of what had been once a country house, destroyed by a fire several decades ago. As we approached the property, long overgrown with trees and all kinds of magnificent plants, there was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: danger. all structures are unstable. I said to my friend, "That's a profound sutra [sacred scripture]." And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it "eternal life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
It is no so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the negative and the positive polarities are faces of the same coin, are both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from the mind-identified egoic state of consciousness. There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain—this is what I want to talk about now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How you are seen by others becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you are. The ego's sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"fed up with being unhappy." Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
awareness of the inner body has other benefits in the physical realm. One of them is a significant slowing down of the aging of the physical body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Your life situation may be full of problems—most life situations are—but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
[The ego] cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a matter of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness—not through thinking—can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see: There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes's statement "I think, therefore I am" very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, "The consciousness that says ‘I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says "I am." If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. Many people still live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
"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
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
That is why the most sacred thing in life is death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
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
compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love—even the most simple action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you 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
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
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
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
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 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
Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment—allow it to be as it is—then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Due to a complete lack of self-awareness, they cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the event.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life - to allow life to live through you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position—a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
After all, the past determines who we are, as well as how we perceive and behave in the present. And our future goals determine which actions we take in the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself. At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much "noise.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. 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
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth".
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable. Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?"—if anybody were there to ask it—would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?" Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in. The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past. If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and others, if you no longer want to add to the residue of past pain that still lives on in you, then don't create any more time, or at least no more than is necessary to deal with the practical aspects of your life. How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life—and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In present-day humans, consciousness is completely identified with its disguise. It only knows itself as form and therefore lives in fear of the annihilation of its physical or psychological form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
You also realize that all the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you 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
Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Emotion literally means "disturbance." The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning "to disturb.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
I have also met many others who may be technically good at what they do but whose ego constantly sabotages their work. Only part of their attention is on the work they perform; the other part is on themselves. Their ego demands personal recognition and wastes energy in resentment if it doesn't get enough—and it's never enough. "Is someone else getting more recognition than me?" Or their main focus of attention is profit or power, and their work is no more than a means to that end. When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You are that awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"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
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen. You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other words, you would rather be in pain—be the pain-body—than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Die to the past every moment. You don't need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
As much as possible in everyday life, use awareness of the inner body to create space. When waiting, when listening to someone, when pausing to look at the sky, a tree, a flower, your partner, or child, feel the aliveness within at the same time. This means part of your attention or consciousness remains formless, and the rest is available for the outer world of form. Whenever you "inhabit" your body in this way, it serves as an anchor for staying present in the Now. It prevents you from losing yourself in thinking, in emotions, or in external situations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
But as long as negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that reminds you to be more present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.
— 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
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
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
"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
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
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
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already another form of violence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
"Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?"—if anybody were there to ask it—would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of "what someone did to me" or "what someone did to us." A grievance ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What did Jesus tell his disciples? "Heaven is right here in the midst of you."6 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood. He says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."7 In modern versions of the Bible, "meek" is translated as humble. Who are the meek or the humble, and what does it mean that they shall inherit the earth? The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their, essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all "others," all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth. A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 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
When I don't mind what happens, what does that imply? It implies that internally I am in alignment with what happens. "What happens," of course, refers to the suchness of this moment, which always already is as it is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course. Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Every challenge that it contains is actually a disguised opportunity for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know that you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger—just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the "off" button? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm by being there fully. Be still. Look. Listen. See how every animal and every plant is completely itself. Unlike humans, they have not split themselves in two. They do not live through mental images of themselves, so they do not need to be concerned with trying to protect and enhance those images. The deer is itself. The daffodil is itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When 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
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
What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"? It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
When you feel the pain-body, don't fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into the problem -- the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
"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
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
You cannot receive what you don't give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Of course different people fulfill different functions in this world. It cannot be otherwise. As far as intellectual or physical abilities are concerned—knowledge, skills, talents, and energy levels—human beings differ widely. What really matters is not what function you fulfill in this world, but whether you identify with your function to such an extent that it takes you over and becomes a role that you play. When you play roles, you are unconscious. When you catch yourself playing a role, that recognition creates a space between you and the role. It is the beginning of freedom from the role. When you are completely identified with a role, you confuse a pattern of behavior with who you are, and you take yourself very seriously. You also automatically assign roles to others that correspond to yours. For example, when you visit doctors who are totally identified with their role, to them you will not be a human being but a patient or a case history.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
awareness is the main dilemma of human existence. I looked upon the professors as sages who had all the answers and upon the university as the temple of knowledge. How could an insane person like her ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
most humans see only the outer forms, unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their own essence and identify only with their own physical and psychological form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up. In a world of role-playing ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply. If you cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your hands or feet. That's good enough for the moment. Just focus on the feeling. Your body is coming alive. Later, we will practice some more. Please open your eyes now, but keep some attention in the inner energy field of the body even as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies"—his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As you read, a shift takes place within you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself is being yourself, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Buddha taught that the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
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
Death is not an anomaly or the most dreadful of all events as modern culture would have you believe, but the most natural thing in the world, inseparable from and just as natural as its polarity—birth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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 forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When 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
You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS All of the above are assumptions, unexamined thoughts that are confused with reality. They are stories the ego creates to convince you that you cannot be at peace now or cannot be fully yourself now. Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one. The ego says: Maybe at some point in the future, I can be at peace—if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that. Or it says: I can never be at peace because of something that happened in the past. Listen to people's stories and they could all be entitled "Why I Cannot Be at Peace Now." The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now. Or maybe it does know, and it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego. How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
— 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
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have fifty cents left in my bank account" is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering. Be ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A 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
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The positive already contains within itself the as yet unmanifested negative.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You say that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind says "no" while the emotion says "yes," or the other way around. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.
— 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
"I think" is just as false a statement as "I digest" or "I circulate my blood." Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. Ask yourself often: "What can I give here; how can I be of service to this person, this situation?" You don't need to own anything to feel abundant, although if you feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
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
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
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
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
Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now—nobody else is—and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
No thought can encapsulate the vastness of the totality. Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments. This gives rise to fundamental misperceptions, for example, that there are separate things and events, or that this is the cause of that. Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by its very nature, implies limitation, which ultimately means that it is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought. Seen from beyond the limitation of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
they are no more than unconscious players in the egoic game, a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose. It is, in the words of Shakespeare, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."1 Amazingly, Shakespeare arrived at this conclusion without having the benefit of television. If the egoic ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, the newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don't project a mind-made image -- and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world -- but function from the deeper core of their Being, those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world. They are the bringers of the new consciousness. Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the purpose of the whole. Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence -- simple, natural, unassuming -- has a transformational effect on whoever they come into contact with. When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. ... 'How can I be myself?' is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. ... If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. ... Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you look and listen in this way, you may become aware of a subtle and at first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm. Some people feel it as a stillness in the background. Others call it peace. When consciousness is no longer totally absorbed by thinking, some of it remains in its formless, unconditioned, original state. This is inner space.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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 end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you 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
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power—not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Abundance comes only to those who already have it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Furthermore, any teaching that puts the spotlight of attention on the workings of the ego will necessarily provoke egoic reaction, resistance, and attack.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
"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
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
This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Alienation means you don't feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get 'home' but never feel at home.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
surrender, non-judgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the loving embrace of your knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation, indignation, and often anger against the perceived enemy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness." That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and relationships. Your reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Are you worried? Do you have many "what if" thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist. It's a mental phantom. You can stop this health-and life-corroding insanity simply by acknowledging the present moment. Become aware of your breathing. Feel the air flowing in and out of your body. Feel your inner energy field. All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life—as opposed to imaginary mind projections—is this moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future—nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you realize that what you react to in others is also in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 8o to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are. We could say "God" if the word had not been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence. Existence is form, content, "what happens." Existence is the foreground of life; Being is the background, as it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story," that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative,"3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreactor if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
every person carries the seed of enlightenment within, ...
— 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
All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word chaos means order.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won't make much difference to your life. To realize this truth, you need to live it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person.What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention—instead of using it as a means to an end—you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them—your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past—and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Can you give some more examples of ordinary unconsciousness? See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. 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
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
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
You can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer. Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
According to the Buddha, the human mind in its normal state generates "dukkha," which can be translated as suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or just plain misery. He sees it as a characteristic of the human condition. Wherever you go, whatever you do, says the Buddha, you will encounter dukkha, and it will manifest in every situation sooner or later.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to feel and be in her body, so she is naturally closer to Being and potentially closer to enlightenment than a man.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes its vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form—it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. FOCUS ATTENTION ON THE FEELING INSIDE YOU. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"What is being born is a new consciousness and, as its inevitable reflection, a new world. This is also foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems. Although it is a simple choice, it is also very radical. You won't make that choice unless you are truly fed up with suffering, unless you have truly had enough. And you won't be able to go through with it unless you access the power of the Now. If you create no more pain for yourself, then you create no more pain for others. You also no longer contaminate the beautiful Earth, your inner space, and the collective human psyche with the negativity of problem-making.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Feel yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid "wall" inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It is a mind-structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
So don't seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
"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 powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example, when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself—do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner speciousness that feels intensely alive. You haven't been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute non-reaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image. Through becoming less (in the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. That's another role. It's called "natural, spontaneous me." As soon as you are trying to be this or that, you are playing a role.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You 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
"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
FREEDOM FROM UNHAPPINESS Do you resent doing what you are doing? It may be your job, or you may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but part of you resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken resentment toward a person close to you? Do you realize that the energy you thus emanate is so harmful in its effects that you are in fact contaminating yourself as well as those around you? Have a good look inside. Is there even the slightest trace of resentment, unwillingness? If there is, observe it on both the mental and the emotional levels. What thoughts is your mind creating around this situation? Then look at the emotion, which is the body's reaction to those thoughts. Feel the emotion. Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant? Is it an energy that you would actually choose to have inside you? Do you have a choice? Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space. Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation. In fact, in most cases it keeps you stuck in it, blocking real change. Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune—that is, highly conscious. Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.
— 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. What an incredible liberation this is! ...
— 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
Anyone who is still totally identified with the voice in their head—the stream of involuntary and incessant thinking—will inevitably fail to see what The Power of Now is all about. Some enthusiastic readers gave a copy of the book to a friend or relative and were surprised and disappointed when the recipient found it quite meaningless and could not get beyond the first few pages. "Mumbo jumbo" was all that Time magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe found life-changing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
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
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
Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment—the observing consciousness—cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists—all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm—and yet all worlds are ultimately one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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
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
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
Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life—to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness—without doing anything—simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
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
Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
THE EGO'S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem. no sutterns. nothing that is not wro you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time: it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear. If you take any action—leaving or changing your situation—drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case, you are free. Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
THE 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
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
According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin." Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
... nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain. Even if both of your parents were enlightened, you would still find yourself growing up in a largely unconscious world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In either case, you can only go beyond it by taking responsibility for your inner state now. Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no "I" except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Whenever any kind of deep loss occurs in your life—such as loss of possessions, your home, a close relationship; or loss of your reputation, job, or physical abilities—something inside you dies. You feel diminished in your sense of who you are. There may also be a certain disorientation. "Without this... who am I?" When a form that you had unconsciously identified with as part of yourself leaves you or dissolves, that can be extremely painful. It leaves a hole, so to speak, in the fabric of your existence. When this happens, don't deny or ignore the pain or the sadness that you feel. Accept that it is there. Beware of your mind's tendency to construct a story around that loss in which you are assigned the role of victim. Fear, anger, resentment, or self-pity are the emotions that go with that role. Then become aware of what lies behind those emotions as well as behind the mind-made story: that hole, that empty space. Can you face and accept that strange sense of emptiness? If you do, you may find that it is no longer a fearful place. You may be surprised to find peace emanating from it. Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. That is why the peace of God can come to you through the contemplation and acceptance of death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
North America. In deep love and appreciation, I would like to thank those exceptional ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances, whether there is someone in your life you have not completely forgiven, an "enemy." If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
... next time you say, «I have nothing in common with this person,» remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. [... ] In that sense , there is total equality between you and every other creature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, don't you agree? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love is a state of being. Your love is not outside, it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. What do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place - from the Unmanifested itself. It is "the peace of God, which passes all understanding." Compared to that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant peace comes the realization - not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being - that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form—or a species—will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering—and free of the egoic mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
"Instead of trying to be a mountain, teaches the ancient Tao Te Ching, "Be the valley of the universe."4 In this way, you are restored to wholeness and so "all things will come to you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
"The inability or rather unwillingness of the human mind to let go of the past is beautifully illustrated in the story of two Zen monks, Tanzan and Ekido, who were walking along a country road that had become extremely muddy after heavy rains. Near a village, they came upon a young woman who was trying to cross the road, but the mud was so deep it would have ruined the silk kimono she was wearing. Tanzan at once picked her up and carried her to the other side. The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn't restrain himself any longer. "Why did you carry that girl across the road?" he asked. "We monks are not supposed to do things like that." "I put the girl down hours ago," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Naming and labeling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practicing "not naming" with small things. If you miss the plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the "isness" of that moment? Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
— 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
You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
unless you learn to recognize the false as false—as not you—there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Kasan, a Zen teacher and monk, was to officiate at a funeral of a famous nobleman. As he stood there waiting for the governor of the province and other lords and ladies to arrive, he noticed that the palms of his hands were sweaty.The next day he called his disciples together and confessed he was not yet ready to be a true teacher. He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human. He then left and became the pupil of another master. He returned to his former disciples eight years later, enlightened.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
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
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
And then, just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place—from the Unmanifested itself. It is "the peace of God, which passes all understanding." Compared to that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant peace comes the realization—not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being—that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"How dare you serve me cold soup…." That's complaining. There is a "me" here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a "me" that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the ego doesn't really want change so that it can go on complaining.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Perceiving presence is what true awakening is all about.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The fact is: Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. You are withholding it because deep down you think you are small and that you have nothing to give.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[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
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
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
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
You are awareness, disguised as a person.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes, much like a light that grows brighter as you turn up the dimmer switch and so increase the flow of electricity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Ultimately, of course, there is no other and you are always meeting yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A new dimension of consciousness has come in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock time" - but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the 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
Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
A range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into effect between two human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there is: this one.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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
FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by "watching the thinker"? When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
... welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes,...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All it means it that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, andnot enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all formsof nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
With the seeing comes the power of choice...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time: it cannot survive in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"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
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
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
"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
Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive.
— 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
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
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
A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current state of mind dominance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If 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
The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?" Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not create or participate in drama anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
In the timeless realm where God dwells, which is also your home, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, are one, and the essence of everything that ever has been and ever will be is eternally present in an unmanifested state of oneness and perfection—totally beyond anything the human mind can ever imagine or comprehend.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Being can be felt as the ever-present I am that is beyond name and form. To feel and thus to know that you are and to abide in that deeply rooted state is enlightenment, is the truth that Jesus says will make you free.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Become conscious of being conscious.
— 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
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
Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you were able to observe the physiological changes that take place inside your body when possessed by such negative states, how they adversely affect the functioning of the heart, the digestive and immune systems, and countless other bodily functions, it would become abundantly clear that such states are indeed pathological, are forms of suffering and not pleasure. Whenever ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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 you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
[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
Even mainstream medicine, although it knows very little about how the ego operates yet, is beginning to recognize the connection between negative emotional states and physical disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought—or the emotion or sense perception ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This diminishment of the ego gives rise to empathy and compassion beyond tribal, racial, national, or religious affiliations.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its insanity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"St. Paul expressed this universal principle beautifully: "Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. So don't turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it—don't think about it! Express it if necessary, but don't create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it. Don't let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift. So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don't act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present—present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you found yourself in paradise, it wouldn't be long before your mind would say "yes, but... ." Ultimately, this is not about solving your problems. It's about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations—to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the "isness" of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind—or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Jesus gave the key to the creative use of mind and to the conscious manifestation of form when he said, "Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."4 ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. Wanting is structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as long as that mental structure remains in place. Intense wanting that has no specific can often be found in the still-developing ego of teenagers, some of whom are in a permanent state of negativity and dissatisfaction.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself. In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"Become at ease with the state of "not knowing.
— 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
If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea... . Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self—beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.
— 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
Presence is pure consciousness—consciousness that has been reclaimed from the mind, from the world of form. The inner body is your link with the Unmanifested, and in its deepest aspect is the Unmanifested: the Source from which consciousness emanates, as light emanates from the sun. Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Don't get attached to any one word. You can substitute "Christ" for presence, if that is more meaningful to you. Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.
— 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
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
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
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
Fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It is always of something that *might* happen, not of something that is happening now. *You* are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. You cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some women who are already conscious enough to have relinquished their victim identity on the personal level are still holding on to a collective victim identity: "what men did to women." They are right—and they are also wrong. They are right in as much as the collective female pain-body is in large part due to male violence inflicted on women and repression of the female principle throughout the planet over millennia. They are wrong if they derive a sense of self from this fact and thereby keep themselves imprisoned in a collective victim identity. If a woman is still holding on to anger, resentment, or condemnation, she is holding on to her pain-body. This may give her a comforting sense of identity, of solidarity with other women, but it is keeping her in bondage to the past and blocking full access to her essence and true power. If women exclude themselves from men, that fosters a sense of separation and therefore a strengthening of the ego. And the stronger the ego, the more distant you are from your true nature.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
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
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind." When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair—and one step away from enlightenment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
She said she was ready to listen. I asked: "Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss?" There were a few minutes of silence after the last question.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks, and acts, as well as the recognition of the collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the unawakened state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
you cannot cope with the future.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them—while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.
— 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
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
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
Being is the very Intelligence whose visible manifestation is the physical universe.
— 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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You do not need to wait for the world to become sane, or for somebody else to become conscious, before you can be enlightened ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the time-bound state of consciousness. There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy. Let us look at them in turn, so that when this pattern operates in you, you can recognize it and—decide again. To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal, and it is insane. "Problem" means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Who was responsible for this fear of the feminine that could only be described as acute collective paranoia? We could say: Of course, men were responsible. But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Celtic were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn't, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
[T]he moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens—and it happens continuously for most people—you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Mind can neither recognize nor create beauty. Only for a few seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty or that sacredness there.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way. The ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
There is no substitute for finding true purpose. But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
There is nothing that you need to understand before you can become present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Learn to disidentify from your mind.
— 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
Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how complaining, say, about a traffic jam, about politicians, about the "greedy wealthy" or the "lazy unemployed," or your colleagues or ex-spouse, men or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why. When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
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
If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You 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
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
A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare some change?" mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger. Then he asked: "What's that you are sitting on?" "Nothing," replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember." "Ever looked inside?" asked the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What's the point? There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
So it is essential to bring more consciousness into your life in ordinary situations when everything is going relatively smoothly. In this way, you grow in presence power. It generates an energy field in you and around you of a high vibrational frequency.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't we? Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real. Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is—which is the only sane way to live—there is no "good" or "bad" in your life anymore. There is only a higher good—which includes the "bad.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the 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
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
"Surrender comes when you no longer ask, "Why is this happening to me? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
"If there is nothing you can do, face what is and say, 'Well, right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or make myself miserable." The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The seeing is freeing.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Love as a continuous state is as yet very rare—as rare as conscious human beings.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. You have "overcome the world," in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have "crossed over to the other shore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time—a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago—yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To 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
"I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." That's the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and as such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When you 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
Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
When listening to another person, don't just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space—space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Most ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Nobody's life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn't it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"the present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not "this moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you 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
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
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
You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens—and it happens continuously for most people—you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self—your invisible and indestructible reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
— 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
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
You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
It is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
I was convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect, that is to say, by thinking. I didn't realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
"what is God's self-definition in the Bible? Did God say, "I have always been and I always will be?" Of course not. That would have made the past and future a reality. God said, "I am that I am." No time here, just presence. The "Second Coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness – not the arrival of some man or woman. If Christ were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you other than "I am the Truth… I am divine presence. I am eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Not projecting the old emotion into situations means facing it directly within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem. The ego, of course, loves that. It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self, and it will readily attach itself to your problems. This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy.The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now—that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
— 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
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
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
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 psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment. It represents the most profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, (and if you are reading this, you almost certainly have), you are able to decide what kind of a relationship you want to have with the present moment. Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again—until it becomes natural to live in such a way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
no-mind and presence—external space and time continue to exist for you, but they become much less important. The world, too, continues to exist for you, but it will not bind you anymore.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about what you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute. It would be even more accurate to say that the illusion is defending itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You will be free to let go of unhappiness the moment you recognize it as unintelligent. Negativity is not intelligent. ... The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. ... Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
... making yourself right and others wrong is one of the principal ego mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
In the greater scheme of things, human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings, and those who don't will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The 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
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
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
It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans—all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I don't know' is not confusion. Confusion is: 'I don't know, but I should know' or 'I don't know, but I need to know.' Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Take responsibility for your life. Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant inner Being nor the Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The 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
"Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?" She became quiet again. "I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?" She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, "This is weird. I'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less." This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
We can never understand this higher order through thinking about it because whatever we think about is content; ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Our duck's lesson is this: Flap your wings—which translates as "let go of the story"—and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
"Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality: Whatever you think people are withholding from you—praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on—give it to them. You don't have it? Just act as if you had it, and it will come. Then, soon after you start giving, you will start receiving. You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance. The law that outflow determines inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: "Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
This 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
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
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
You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"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
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
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
After you have tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points? It really is no more than an obsessive attachment ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
True intelligence operates silently.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
As you become more conscious of your present reality, you may suddenly get certain insights as to why your conditioning functions in those particular ways—for example, why your relationships follow certain patterns—and you may remember things that happened in the past or see them more clearly.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be is not just out there in space—it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth—an attribute of the one transcendental reality.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Do not fight against the body, for in doing so you are fighting against your own reality. You are your body. The body that you can see and touch is only a thin illusory veil. Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into Being, into Life Unmanifested. Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life—birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner body, you are forever one with God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
This is my secret,' he said. 'I don't mind what happens.'... To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to reenact the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
I have lived with several Zen masters—all of them cats.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I feel that the book has taken on a life and momentum of its own.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I can see the truth of what you are saying, but I still think that we must have purpose on our life's journey; otherwise we just drift, and purpose means future, doesn't it? How do we reconcile that with living in the present? When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don't forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is. Your life's journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey's inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If you think you are so enlightened," Ram Dass said, "go and spend a week with your parents.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind always wants to categorize and compare, ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When instead of reacting against a situation, you merge with it, the solution arises out of the situation itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What about people who want to use me, manipulate or control me? Am I to surrender to them? They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt to get energy and power from you. It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated. If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say "no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself—in joy in my self.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought—or the emotion or sense perception—happens.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling—mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore; spontaneous right action happens, and "you" are not doing it. Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
When you see and accept the impermanent nature of all life forms, a strange sense of peace comes upon you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can participate in the dance of creation and be active without attachment to outcome and without placing unreasonable demands upon the world: fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world can not give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self-created suffering comes to an end.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity—the thinker.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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 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
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
They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that is always already here, that lies beyond what is happening or not happening, beyond form. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
Should a situation arise that you need to deal with now, your action will be clear and incisive if it arises out of present-moment awareness. It is also more likely to be effective. It will not be a reaction coming from the past conditioning of your mind but an intuitive response to the situation. In other instances, when the time-bound mind would have reacted, you will find it more effective to do nothing—just stay centered in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
reading The Power of Now ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person's attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity manifests for you in various ways.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
For awhile, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
whatever you fight, you strengthyen. What you resist, persists. "A New Earth":War is a mind set ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
It is our purpose and destiny to bring a new dimension into this world by living in conscious oneness with the totality and conscious alignment with universal intelligence.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
You can 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
"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
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 doing becomes infused with the timeless quality of Being, that is success.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If in your relationships you experience both "love" and the opposite of love—attack, emotional violence, and so on—then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
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
"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
Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
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
The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself. Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ego doesn't know that mind and mental positions have nothing to do with who you are because the ego is the unobserved mind itself. In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions." What does that mean? Let ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
— 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.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
"Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never is the truth. That's why Buddhists say "The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
The other more serious reason for the illusion of separateness is compulsive thinking. It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping stone to the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world. If they have any ambitions, they usually don't go beyond finding something to do that gives them a degree of independence. Some of them find it hard to fit into this world. Some are lucky enough to find a protective niche where they can lead a relatively sheltered life, a job that provides them with a regular income or a small business of their own. Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of a society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being. In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through "just being." In this way, they endow the seemingly insignificant with profound meaning. Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being absolutely present in whatever they do. There is consciousness and therefore quality in what they do, even the simplest task. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred manner. As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity. Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
You may have heard the Buddhist saying: "If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment." It is through the world and ultimately through you that the Unmanifested knows itself. You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are! ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
One of the most common ego-repair mechanisms is anger, which causes a temporary but huge ego inflation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 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
"This is not to say that all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become "I.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you"—the mind—did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death. Jesus called it "eternal life.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Enthusiasm and the ego cannot coexist.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Acute crises and dysfunction always precede or coincide with any evolutionary advancement or gain in consciousness. All life-forms need obstacles and challenges in order to evolve. In the case of the ego, most of the challenges it encounters are self-created through its unconscious patterns. Eventually, the ego brings about its own demise. In that sense, it can be considered a necessary precursor for the next stage in human evolution, which is the awakening of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Unhappiness is an ego-created mental-emotional disease that has reached epidemic proportions. It is the inner equivalent of the environmental pollution of our planet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
"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
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
Accept your parents' behavior with compassion, without needing to react to it, that is to say, without personalizing it. Be aware also of your own unconscious assumptions or expectations that lie behind your old, habitual reactions to them. 'My parents should approve of what I do. They should understand me and accept me for who I am.' Really? Why should they? The fact is they don't because they can't. Their evolving consciousness hasn't made the quantum leap to the level of awareness yet.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong—defending the mental position with which you have identified—is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down. Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"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
Become at ease with the state of "not knowing." This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
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
Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
"In 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
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
"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 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
Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Transformation is through the body, not away from it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
As long as you don't recognize those thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not finding—because when those thought forms operate, no possession, place, person, or condition will ever satisfy you.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
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
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
If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created. I sometimes refer to those things as "drama." When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego operates and how it creates drama. Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
"The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
There is something that needs to happen in my life before I can be at peace (happy, fulfilled, etc.). And I resent that it hasn't happened yet. Maybe my resentment will finally make it happen." "Something happened in the past that should not have happened, and I resent that. If that hadn't happened, I would be at peace now." "Something is happening now that should not be happening, and it is preventing me from being at peace now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
What you react to in another you strengthen within yourself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled. There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come. I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. "At this moment, this is what you feel." I said. "There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?" She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, "No, I don't want to accept this." "Who is speaking?" I asked her. "You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?" She became quiet again. "I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?" She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, "This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less."This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called "The Unhappy Me." Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past—the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities are needed: surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it[.] ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The moment you see the dysfunction, it begins to dissolve. Some people laugh out loud when they see this. With ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain becomes fuel for the flame of your consciousness, which then burns more brightly as a result.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened—before you have freed yourself from your mind—you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature, which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a "normal" addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Be present as the watcher of your mind—of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
Flap your wings -- which translates as 'let go of the story' -- and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
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
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
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 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 future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.‘I cannot live with myself any longer.' This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I' and the ‘self' that ‘I' cannot live with.' ‘Maybe,' I thought, ‘only one of them is real.'I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing,' as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marvelling at the beauty and aliveness of it all. That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey's inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment. The outer purpose belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension of the timeless Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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 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
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don't feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you. The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from Stillness Speaks
The ego's greatest enemy is the present moment, which is to say, life itself ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
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
finding your true nature beyond name and form.
— 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
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
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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
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
Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of ...
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
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
If you feel your life lacks significance or is too stressful or tedious, it is because you haven't brought that dimension into your life yet. Being conscious in what you do has not yet become your main aim. The new earth arises as more and more people discover that their main purpose in life is to bring the light of consciousness into this world and so use whatever they do as a vehicle for consciousness. The joy of Being is the joy of being conscious.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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
I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the fate of the ego.
— Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep you inner space clear.
— Eckhart Tolle
from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
When Being becomes conscious of itself—that's presence.
— 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
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