Eckhart Tolle - Stillness Speaks (2003)

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On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

Eckhart Tolle
A simple but radical spiritual practice is to accept whatever arises in the Now, within and without.

Eckhart Tolle
The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.

Eckhart Tolle
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.

Eckhart Tolle
Give yourself completely to the act of listening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater, a sacredness that cannot be understood through thought.

Eckhart Tolle
Space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer 'other.' In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle
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.

Eckhart Tolle
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

Eckhart Tolle
A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you already know in the depth of your being

Eckhart Tolle
To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need to know anything about them - their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness.

Eckhart Tolle
To have your attention in the Now is not a denial of what is needed in your life. It is recognition of what is primary.

Eckhart Tolle
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.

Eckhart Tolle
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.

Eckhart Tolle
When you say yes to the isness of life, when you accept this moment as it is, you can feel a sense of spaciousness within you that is deeply peaceful.

Eckhart Tolle
Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

Eckhart Tolle
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

Eckhart Tolle
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Eckhart Tolle
Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it. … Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?

Eckhart Tolle
Throughout history humans have inflicted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of? Jesus' words, Forgive them for they do not know what they do, also apply to yourself.

Eckhart Tolle
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.

Eckhart Tolle
How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.

Eckhart Tolle
Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth.

Eckhart Tolle
Is suffering really necessary?
Yes and no.
If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you, no humility, no compassion.

Eckhart Tolle
I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle
Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.

Eckhart Tolle
The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

Eckhart Tolle
The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

Eckhart Tolle
When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.

Eckhart Tolle
The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

Eckhart Tolle
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

Eckhart Tolle