Eckhart Tolle
German / Canadian spiritual teacher, motivational speaker, and writer.
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)
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.
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.
A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!
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 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.
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
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.
Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?
The ego ... reduces the present to a means to an end.
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of the consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
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.