Eckhart Tolle
German / Canadian spiritual teacher, motivational speaker, and writer.
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.
Being must be felt. It can't be thought.
The World can only change from within.
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
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.
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?
Presence is a state of inner spaciousness.
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.....
Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
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.
Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With the awareness comes transformation and freedom.
All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.
What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.
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's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive.
When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.
“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.”
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.
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.
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. ... Both are illusions.