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
I've always enjoyed being in the background, sitting in a cafe, watching people. But now, when I sit in a cafe, sometimes people watch me. It's a challenge. But it's usually people who want to say 'your book transformed my life', or something... so then I'm joyful. One moment before, I didn't want them to recognise me, but when they do, I'm glad.
If there are people you haven't forgiven, you're not going to really awaken. You have to let go.
The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can no longer truly relate to that person. . . It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.
Look around the room a few times a day as if you had just been born into that room.
Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there" or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everybody else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane.
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for.
The ego is a false sense based on mental concepts. It is identification with the body and the mind-primarily identification with thought form.
The ego is just waiting to identify with anything. Whether it's your misery or being a great meditator, it seeks some identification.
The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.
Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There's a vast spaciousness. There's a vast stillness and there's a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn't separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.
To make money, to gather knowledge, to learn a new skill, to explore new territory, even to get from A to B - for all these things you need time. For almost everything you need time, except for one thing: to embrace the present moment.
When you meet another human being, you meet the physical self, then you meet the psychological self that's behind it, which is their mental conditioning, their patterns of behavior and so on. And then, there is a deeper level to every human being that transcends all of that. I can only sense that in another human being and relate to another human being on that deeper level if I have gone deep enough within myself.
Work to recognize the primary importance of the present moment.
If you don't have a good relationship with the now, you don't have a good relationship with life.