Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolleis a German-born resident of Canada, best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to your Life's Purpose. In 2011, he was listed by Watkins Review as the most spiritually influential person in the world. In 2008, a New York Times writer called Tolle "the most popular spiritual author in the United States"...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth16 February 1948
CityLunen, Germany
CountryGermany
Whenever you meet anybody, it is a holy encounter. The primary event is the energy field of presence between you and the other human being that arises. You enjoy it. There is deep joy in the meeting.
Sometimes people need to experience great loss to really be driven deeper.
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.
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.
The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.
When you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment.
Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.
The other person's presence ultimately is the same as your presence, because it is in presence that there is true meeting.
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.
Quality requires your Presence.
The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.
Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There's a vast spaciousness. There's a vast stillness and there's a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn't separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.
Words that arise spontaneously out of the state of presence are charged with spiritual power: the power to awaken.
Some people are stuck in tedious things, like their jobs, and they are bored. Other people experience one stressful thing after another.