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
Teaching a practice can also be a hindrance if it becomes one's identity. To be a spiritual teacher is a temporary function. I'm a spiritual teacher when somebody comes to me and some teaching happens, but the moment they leave I'm no longer a spiritual teacher. If I carry the identity of spiritual teacher, it will cause suffering.
Your primary purpose is to enable consciousness to flow into what you do. The secondary purpose is whatever you want to achieve through the doing.
Quality requires your Presence.
Every human being in the human form has limitations.
Stress is a form of suffering. Look at your body and see what stress does to the body and its functions - what it does to the heart, the circulation, the immune system, the digestive function, the liver.
The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.
I feel that I need to return to the pure stillness periodically. And then, when the teaching happens, just allow it to arise out of the stillness. So the teaching and stillness are very closely connected. The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.
People look to the future for salvation, but the future never arrives.
You can be effective in this world without stress.
Probably, if you are successful in this world you are stressed, and if you are a failure, you are bored!
Ultimately, there is no such thing as "my consciousness," but just the one consciousness and to sense your connectedness with the one (I can sense that continuously, which is why I can say that I know this for sure) to sense that connectedness with the one consciousness that pervades the universe, which in some traditions is called God, to sense that frees you of fear, from anxiety, and takes you to a very deep place of peace, but also of heightened aliveness.
Resistance keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind, and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.
When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.
It is much more likely that help comes in when what you are doing is done while you are in a state of inner peace, rather than resistance.