Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Your body and your mind can be receptacles to perceive the whole cosmos - if only you do not identify yourself with them.

All manifestation of fear is a reflection of the fact that humanity has forgotten its spiritual identity. In beginning to remember it, we put fear on notice that its days are numbered.

Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.

The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom.

I think that we are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves.

Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments.

Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

I think that all the spiritual training is just to be able to allow you to experience this from a slightly different perspective - one that's a little more stabilized.

When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

When you are in the present without thinking, you are for the first time spiritual.

It's a paradox of the true spiritual path, but the more conscious we become of what limits us, the more limitless becomes our life.

Real freedom is not something to be acquired, it is the outcome of intelligence.

Become aware, awake. Then you will see that everything comes and goes, all things come and pass. Life is a flux. Your consciousness is the only thing that is immovable, that is eternal. To attain it is freedom. To attain it is the goal of life. If you miss it you have missed your life and you have missed a tremendously great gift, a great opportunity.

Our thoughts are always pulling us into the future or the past, away from the present. But it is in the present moment that we find Spirit, our essential being and the force that animates all life.

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

Inward is not a direction. Inward is a dimension.

Rather, Spirit, and enlightement, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now. Something you are already looking at right now... We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it. We have all the necessary cognition, but not the recognition.

I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being.

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.

This is the secret of spiritual life: to think that I am the Atman and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings...scenes on a canvas...of which I am the witness.

After many years of training myself, strong emotions are now a trigger for me to look at something. I think that all emotions are triggers for us to grow in our level of consciousness.

Meditation means you don't have anything, any object to think about. You are just in a state of absolute aloneness. You don't have anything on which you can focus yourself - not a sutra, not a mantra, not any great value of life, just pure space all around you. Then you are in meditation. Meditation is never about something. Meditation is a state.

The essence of spirituality is, to be constantly aware of the oneness of all; at the same time to celebrate the uniqueness of the individual.

There is no other greater ecstasy, no other greater blissfulness, than to know who you are. To know the inner space is to know all. It is unlimited silence but not dead, it is alive with songs of its own, with dances of its own.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.