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
Don't wait to be successful at some future point, have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.
The ego is just waiting to identify with anything. Whether it's your misery or being a great meditator, it seeks some identification.
You don't have to wait for something 'meaningful' to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The 'waiting to start living' syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state.
I never went out and said, "I want to do this." I never do that. I wait for things to come to me, either within or without, and I go along with it.
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.
You can't wait for the end of your problems for you to be present. It has to be done whereever you are - which is now
Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting...snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be and enjoy being.
Presence is when you're no longer waiting for the next moment, believing that the next moment will be more fulfilling than this one.
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say 'recognize' because you're not... it's not new.
Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' I think if he lived nowadays, instead of 'kingdom,' he would have said, 'dimension.' And 'heaven' refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness.
You are the universe, you aren't in the universe.
Was Jesus the son of God? Yes. But so are you. You just haven't realized it yet.
If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that's a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.