Eckhart Tolle

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Eckhart Tolle (born Ulrich Tolle, 16 February 1948) is a German / Canadian spiritual teacher, motivational speaker, and writer.


Contents

[edit] Sourced

[edit] The Power of Now (1997)

  • You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
  • 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 an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
  • 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 you need to work hard for and struggle to attain. Many people never realize that there can be no salvation in anything that they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realize it, often become world weary and depressed...when you reach this point, you are one step away from despair, and one step away from enlightenment...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.
  • Everybody could probably feel the presence, but not everybody is interested. Many people are still in the grip of the ego and completely identified with their thoughts.
  • I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already.
  • 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.
  • Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested - at one with 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!
  • Identification with the mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate "other". You then forget the essential fact that underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By "forget", I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
  • You are unconsciously identified with the mind, 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.

[edit] A New Earth (2005)

  • 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.
  • Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.
  • When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.
  • 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.
  • Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment...you can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.
  • The more unconscious individuals, groups, or nations are, the more likely it is that egoic pathology will assume the form of physical violence. Violence is a primitive but still very widespread way in which the ego attempts to assert itself, to prove itself right or another wrong. With very unconscious people, arguments can easily lead to physical violence.
  • Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    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.
  • Instead of asking "what do I want from life?", a more powerful question is, "what does life want from me?".
  • You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
  • 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?
  • All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.
  • You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
  • When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.
  • Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
  • A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!
  • Being must be felt. It can't be thought.
  • Listen to people's stories and they all could be entitled "Why I Cannot Be At Peace Now" The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now.
  • Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.
  • Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.
  • Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
  • When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.
  • The human condition: lost in thought.
  • Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
  • What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.
  • We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.....
  • When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.
  • Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.

[edit] Unsourced

  • Love is the recognition of the formless in the other.
  • The World can only change from within.
  • Meet everyone and everything through stillness rather than mental noise.
  • When you live in surrender, something comes through you into the world of duality that is not of this world.
  • Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world.
  • What is the now? Not the content that fills this moment with sense perceptions, with experiences, with thoughts and emotions. Not the content that fills this moment. That's not the now. That's what happens in the now, the content. The now is deeper, the now is who you are as the space of conscious presence that makes it all possible, that makes the whole world possible. (via Facebook Oct 9 2009)

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