Eckhart Tolle
German / Canadian spiritual teacher, motivational speaker, and writer.
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.
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.
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.....
Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.
Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it. ... Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
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.
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.
A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!
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.
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.
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)
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.
The human condition: lost in thought.
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.
Every outer purpose is doomed to “fail” sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.
Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?
Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?
Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.