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
If you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.
If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?
To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates stillness inside you.
If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.
You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against darkness. The light of consciousness is all that is necessary. You are that light.
What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for you inner state at any given moment. That means now
Being is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.
I don't believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn't say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It's an ongoing process.
When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously, even if it's just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment.
Stressful energy arises when you think some future moment is more important than the present moment, and the doing becomes only a means to an end.