Eckhart Tolle Quotes

How many situations can be resolved with less thinking?

The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind.

The ego is not only the unobserved mind, the voice in the head which pretends to be you, but also the unobserved emotions that are the body's reaction to what the voice in the head is saying.

The world can only change from within.

Forgive yourself for not being at peace.

Man Made 'God' in his own image. The eternal, the infinate, the unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as 'my god' or 'our god'.

Enlightened groups can exist, as long as the individuals' sense of identity is not derived from a mentally defined image of us.

Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, "I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have 50 cents left in my bank account" is a fact.

Transcending the world does not mean to withdraw from the world, to no longer take action, or to stop interacting with people. Transcendence of the world is to act and to interact without any self-seeking.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.

People are amazed to realize they can enjoy the moment rather than be stressed by it when hurrying to an appointment. You can enjoy the energy movement of the moment when you do not have a mental projection of a future moment you need to get to. You still know that you need to get there, but it is the secondary consideration.

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.

The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

The ego says, I shouldn't have to suffer, and that thought makes you suffer so much more.

The flower of #‎ consciousness needs the mud out of which it grows.

The present moment is all you ever have.

Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves. Until this happens, however, most humans see only the outer forms, unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their own essence and identify only with their own physical and psychological form.

Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

You need no time to open yourself to the power of now and so awaken to who you are beyond name and form and realize that in the depth of your being, you are already complete, whole, one with the timeless essence of all life.

You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.

When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.

Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

Humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming.

Oprah [Winfrey] and I share a similar consciousness of spirit that is manifested in what some may call God or simply Spirit but others call it the Godhead manifestation of karmic virtue.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego-but not until you suffer consciously.

That is the real spiritual awakening, when something emerges from within you that is deeper than who you thought you were. So, the person is still there, but one could almost say that something more powerful shines through the person.

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.

If there are people you haven't forgiven, you're not going to really awaken. You have to let go.

Many adults play roles when they speak to young children. They use silly words and sounds. They talk down to the child. They don't treat the child as an equal. The fact that you temporarily know more, or you're bigger does not mean the child is not your equal.

Every challenge takes you a little deeper and awakens you again and again. Without the challenges, you probably would go to back to sleep. The challenges keep you awake.

Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.

I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.

How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That's all there ever is.

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.

True salvation is freedom from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.

There can be associations - enlightened businesses, for example - that do not work on the basis of us against them or wanting profit as the main motivating force behind what they do.

Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, 'What a pretty flower,' but that's just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don't truly see the flower, don't feel it's essence, it's holiness-just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own essence, their own holiness.

Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless.

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

No matter how long your journey appears to be, there is never more than this: one step, one breath, one moment... Now.

Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.

Ultimately, every great endeavor consists of many little steps.

Every challenge is a disguised opportunity for salvation.