Top 1167 Quotes & Sayings by Eckhart Tolle - Page 17

Ultimately, every great endeavor consists of many little steps.

The way I feel is that there is a balance in my life between being alone and interacting with people, between Being and doing.

Vipassana is fine until it becomes a technique that has many stages and that takes time to develop. That can be okay for people for a while, but then you have to leave the technique behind.

Whatever you do in your daily life - driving from here to there, trying to reach someone on the phone, doing this or that - you always are going toward somewhere. That's inevitable.

Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect.

When there's a teacher who embodies presence, then it seems to come for a while through that opening. The teacher is an opening to presence.

Whenever you are engaged in something and there is an outpouring of energy, you are in enthusiasm.

Sometimes people need to experience great loss to really be driven deeper.

When great loss happens - deaths close to you or your own approaching death - this is an opportunity for stepping completely out of identification with form and realizing the essence of who you are, or that the essence of anyone who is suffering or dying is beyond death.

Some groups and individuals still are immersed totally in the egoic consciousness. Others already are free or in the process of stepping out of ego. The arising of the new consciousness already has started for many people. They are not yet recognizable as groups, but they are here and there.

Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep.

The essence of every form is the deathless. Even the essence of a blade of grass is the deathless. And that's why the world of form is sacred.

Future success is dependent upon and inseparable from the consciousness out of which the actions emanate

Peace can be threatening because peace is the absence of problems and conflict. There is something, perhaps in the personal you, that does not want freedom or peace, or the absence of problems. There's something that wants the opposite.

Look at all the conflict between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies, because they provide the sense of separateness on which their collective egoic identity depends.

Especially for those of us living in the Western culture, death to a large extent is still a taboo subject. It's considered something dreadful that shouldn't be happening. It's usually denied. The fact of death is not faced. What we don't realize in Western culture is that death has a redemptive dimension.

Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it's getting them to the next one.

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.

People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.

I believe from what I can see there is a good chance the shift will happen in humanity before it is too late.

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

Humanity had to go through egoic madness and then outgrow it.

The future never comes. Life is always now.

The dog is still in the natural state. And you can easily see that, because you have problems and your dog doesn't. And while your happy moments may be rare, your dog celebrates life continuously.

If increased meta-knowledge is not counter-balanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness then the likelihood of psycho-spiritual dysfunction is great.

Some of the first human beings in whom the new consciousness emerged fully became the great teachers of humanity, such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Jesus, although their teachings were greatly misunderstood, especially when they turned into organized religion. They were the first manifestations of the flowering of human consciousness.

You create a good future by creating a good present.

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.

Consciousness is evolving throughout the universe in billions of forms. So even if we didn't make it, this wouldn't matter on cosmic scale. No gain in consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself through some other form. But the very fact that I am speaking here and you are listening or reading this is a clear sign that the new consciousness is gaining a foothold on the planet.

There is another side to death. Whether death happens through an act of violence to a large number of people or to an individual, whether death comes prematurely through illness or accident, or whether death comes through old age, death is always an opening. So a great opportunity comes whenever we face death.

When you recognize the sacredness, the beauty, the incredible stillness and dignity in which a flower or a tree exists, you add something to the flower or the tree. Through your recognition, your awareness, nature too comes to know itself. It comes to know its own beauty and sacredness through you.

You have to be still for a moment to even notice that there is silence outside.

There are many things that are still uncertain and that probably nobody knows, because so many factors determine what form the transformation of consciousness on our planet takes.

The ego is a false sense based on mental concepts. It is identification with the body and the mind-primarily identification with thought form.

The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.

When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.

Attention is the vital thing and there is no tension in attention. It just happens to be a similar word. It's not concentration or straining. Attention has the openness of a young child not yet dominated by the conceptual mind.

Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

Each human needs to find his or her timeless and formless essence identity

Most people are so distracted by their thoughts, so identified with the voices in their heads, they no longer feel the aliveness within them. To be unable to feel the life that animates the physical body, the very life that you are, is the greatest deprivation that can happen to you.

Stress is a form of suffering.

If you are trying to get from here to there, and you already are late, you know that you are late, and yet you are aligned with the present moment while you are stuck in a traffic jam. You are totally accepting of the moment.

Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

If you walk into a forest - you hear all kinds of subtle sounds - but underneath there is an all pervasive silence.

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

Focus your attention on the Now and tell me what problem you have at this moment.

When Doing becomes infused with the timeless quality of being, that is success

A new species is arising on the planet, it is arising now and you are it.

Enthusiasm is the power that transfers the mental blueprint into the physical dimension.

All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.

I can sometimes sit for two hours in a room with almost no thought. Just complete stillness. Sometimes when I go for walks, there's also complete stillness; there's no mental labeling of sense perceptions. There's simply a sense of awe or wonder or openness, and that's beautiful.

Be alert as you watch a dog at play or at rest. Let the animal teach you to feel at home in the now, to celebrate life by being completely present. You just watch the tail ... with some dogs you just look at them - just a little look is enough - and their tail goes ...'Life is good! Life is good!' And they are not telling themselves a story of why life is good. It's a direct realization.

Whatever is arising in this moment, whatever condition, is part of the isness of life and therefore accepting it fully makes you an expression of the enormous power of life itself-true intelligence, which only comes when you stop obstructing the power of the present moment.

In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that give life to the physical body.

You don't need to condemn. Just observe, That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness. Above all, don't forget to observe your own mind. Seek out the root of the insanity there.

We are destined not to go back to the level of animals that we've come from but to return to being by going beyond thinking.

Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.

The word 'heart' can refer to an emotional bond between people, and also to the precious faculty of empathy, an 'open heart', which means sharing the feelings of another and includes an outflow of goodwill towards our fellow humans and all life forms. This, of course, is what the Dalai Lama refers to when he says "my religion is kindness", and is closely related to the ability to feel compassion.