Eckhart Tolle Quotes

It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open. The emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: being? What do you do with it?

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself.

Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.

I don't want to be empty on the inside.

Spiritual emptiness is a universal disease.

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, suffering, and surrender.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

The problems facing humanity today are spiritual problems, and they can only be solved by taking a long, hard look at what it is we all believe.

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man's life, and it is the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?

I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.

...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.

Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.

The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.