Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

The power is in you. The answer is in you. And you are the answer to all your searches: you are the goal. You are the answer. It's never outside.

My main life interest and purpose is to bring spiritual awakening into this world, to be a vehicle for the flowering of consciousness, to help people to live more consciously with less unnecessary suffering and self-generated unhappiness.

Without perceiving things through the old filter of past conditioning and conceptualization, one can sense the universe is intensely alive. Even so-called inanimate objects - I often pick up little objects and just look at them and sense that they are alive. Physicists actually confirm that what we perceive as dead matter is not dead at all. Everything is an intensely alive energy field. That aliveness is only an aspect of the aliveness or life that I am.

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.

Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and being...Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth. At best, it can point to it. For example, it can say: "All things are intrinsically one (The Pearl of Great Price)." That is a pointer, not an explanation. Understanding these words means feeling deep within you the truth to which they point.

Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.

Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, 'I don't have time.' But that's the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.

When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what's around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.

The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.

Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don't know who they are. You say: "He lost his life" or "my life," as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That?

Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.

When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.

Most people want to get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this moment.

Surrender comes when you no longer ask, 'Why is this happening to me?'

There's something in everybody that longs for that awakening to be more true to yourself.

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.

Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time.

The energy that flows into what you do, although it may be high energy, is very peaceful energy. It is not out of alignment with life.

Use whatever challenge comes into your life as a kind of fuel for the flame of consciousness. That is done through surrender to what is. Some people may need more of that than others. If you choose presence in your daily life you may not need the drastic challenges.

True communication is communion-the realization of oneness, which is love.

One could say that everybody in this world has a spiritual teacher. For most people, their losses and disasters represent the teacher; their suffering is the teacher.

Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You then continue to meet people, to be involved in experience and activities, but without the wants and fears of the egoic self. That is to say, you no longer demand that a situation, person, place, or event should satisfy you or make you happy. It's passing and imperfect nature is allowed to be.

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

Sometimes people need to experience acute suffering before the thinking and the awareness of the consciousness separate. People then realize there is another dimension in them that is not thinking but the ability to be aware of thinking. It is not emotion but the ability to be aware of emotion.

Allow whatever this moment contains. No matter what event or happening or situation, say 'yes' to it. Allow it to be.

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.

Man made God in his own image.

The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first.

To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right !

The story of the Zen Master whose only response was always "Is that so?" shows the good that comes through inner nonresistance to events, that is to say, being at one with what happens. The story of the man whose comment was invariably a laconic "Maybe" illustrates the wisdom of nonjudgment, and the story of the ring points to the fact of impermanence which, when recognized, leads to nonattachment. Nonresistance, nonjudgement, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

On the deepest level, what I know for sure is that who I am, essentially, is consciousness and consciousness is timeless and it transcends the body; it transcends the psychological "me," the egoic self. Everybody can know themselves as consciousness.

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.

If your mind is still... You can sense the peace that emanates from the earth.

Whereas the notion of purpose before was always associated with future, there is now a deeper purpose that can only be found in the present, through denial of time.

Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep-seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is.

Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.

Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.

If you find here & now intolerable, you have options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.