Category: Quotes

There’s a whispering wind I feel it inside

Like a place I can feel but I never will see…

Moby – Whispering Wind

Our body changes, our mind changes, everything changes except one thing within you. And that one thing has to be discovered, because that is your reality. To know it is to live in bliss. To know it is to go beyond fear. To know it is to know God.

Future means more time. The trouble is: no amount of time will satisfy you if you cannot feel the timeless dimension within you. Right now, put your attention not on what you are conscious of, but of consciousness itself. Feel the I AM. That’s it.

If the pursuit of success or any goal leads to loss of inner peace… what’s the point of it all? When you remember that inner (your state of consciousness) is primary, outer secondary, you have already succeeded in the game of life (and become a much better player).

You can intersperse your life with brief moments of presence. For example now. Become alert. Aware of your surroundings, of your sense perceptions. At this moment, allow everything to be as it is. Then become aware that there is an awareness here, a consciousness,  and that THAT is more truly who you are than anything else.

If the only prayer you say in your whole life is “thank you”, that would suffice.  I sometimes say: Becoming friendly with the present moment is the only spiritual practice you really need.

 

Personal Notes from Eckhart Tolle

Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now, otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.

If mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great.

The acceptance of suffering is a journey into death. Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death – and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody “fails” sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity – which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (Extras – Transformation)

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life – and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.

Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being. You have found the life underneath your life situation.

When your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear. When this is your state of Being, how can you not succeed? You have succeeded already.

Die to the past every moment. You don’ t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.

Zen question: What is wrong with this moment?

What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God.

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (Extras – Present Moment)

Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word. The Unmanifested is present in this world as silence. Nothing in this world is so like God as silence. You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within. Silence without, stillness within.

The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental projection away from the Now.

Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this is how it works.

The ego is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can become conscious of God but that you are not conscious of God.

Most humans alternate not between consciousness and unconsciousness but only between different levels of unconsciousness.

Don’t let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it.

Anything “bad” that happens in your life – use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness – and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.

Because every form is highly unstable, they live in fear. This fear causes a deep misperception of themselves and of other humans, a distortion in their vision of the world.

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 its essence, its holiness – just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.

Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. Well?

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (Extras – Mind, Ego, Thinking)

If the whole existence is one; and if the existence goes on taking care of trees, of animals, of mountains, of oceans — from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star — then it will take care of you to. Why be possessive? The possessiveness shows simply one thing — that you cannot trust existence. You have to arrange separate security for yourself, safety for yourself; you cannot trust existence.  Non-possessiveness is basically trust in existence. There is no need to possess because the whole is already is ours.

True salvation is a state of freedom – from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time – that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete. You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can’t get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You ‘get’ there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God. So there is no only way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no particular condition is needed. However, there is only one point of access: the Now. There can be no salvation away from this moment. This may be hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future. There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment.

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (True Salvation) 

As long as a condition is judged as “good” by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same condition that made you happy, then makes you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow. Or a condition disappears, so its absence makes you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (“Good Things”)