Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolleis a German-born resident of Canada, best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to your Life's Purpose. In 2011, he was listed by Watkins Review as the most spiritually influential person in the world. In 2008, a New York Times writer called Tolle "the most popular spiritual author in the United States"...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth16 February 1948
CityLunen, Germany
CountryGermany
True freedom is living as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience in this moment. This inner alignment with the Now is the end of suffering.
To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.
The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul. That is who you are in essence.
Above all, the only thing you have to heal is the present thought. Get that right and the whole picture will change into one of harmony and joy.
Not to be able to stop thinking is an affliction, but we don't realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it.
You can't think about presence, and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is being present.
Be alert and present and see that your identity is not from your past story; who you truly are is the alert presence that is inseparable from the present moment. You are this, which has no name and no form.
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.
For a relationship to deepen, at some point the spiritual dimension needs to come in. You don't even need to be fully awakened for this to happen, but if it does happen it certainly means you are awakening.
Meditate or spend silent time in nature with your partner. 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.
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.
The future does not exist, because nobody has ever experienced it. You can only ever experience a present moment.
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.
Often suffering is the trigger, or a spiritual teaching, or both. Call it readiness, or grace. This is the beginning of the awakening process.