Eckhart Tolle - Stillness Speaks (2003)

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Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth.

Eckhart Tolle
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.

Eckhart Tolle
When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form --the thought or the emotion-- to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form -- spacious awareness.

Eckhart Tolle
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.

Eckhart Tolle
When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them - your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past - and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.

Eckhart Tolle
In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness.

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

Eckhart Tolle
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship.

Eckhart Tolle
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Eckhart Tolle
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.

Eckhart Tolle
Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is - no matter what form it takes - you are still, you are at peace.

Eckhart Tolle
Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

Eckhart Tolle
The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.

Eckhart Tolle
Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.

Eckhart Tolle
The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.

Eckhart Tolle
When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness.

Eckhart Tolle
To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.

Eckhart Tolle
Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?
Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.

Eckhart Tolle
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too

Eckhart Tolle
Feel the energy of your inner body. Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases. Feel it in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest. Feel the life that you are, the life that animates the body. The body then becomes a doorway, so to speak, into a deeper sense of aliveness underneath the fluctuating emotions and underneath your thinking.

Eckhart Tolle
Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.

Eckhart Tolle
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

Eckhart Tolle
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now.

Eckhart Tolle
To let go of judgment does not mean that you don't see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don't construct an identity out of it for that person.
That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind.
with mind.

Eckhart Tolle
A great silent space holds all of nature in its embrace. It also holds you.

Eckhart Tolle
Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure conciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.

Eckhart Tolle
What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

Eckhart Tolle
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.

Eckhart Tolle
Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less. These two movements obscure the fact that Being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, Now.

Eckhart Tolle
Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?

Eckhart Tolle