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
Personally, I don't teach practices as such. The power of the teaching is sufficient without needing to go for any practice.
Now if a teacher gives you a practice, he or she would perhaps point out when you don't need it anymore or you realize yourself when you don't need it anymore.
No practice can take you to liberation. That is important to know. It can be a little step that is useful until you realize you don't need it anymore, because after a certain point it becomes a hindrance.
People believe that when they say "yes" to this moment, things won't change anymore. They're afraid that if they accept what is, whatever form this moment takes, they're going to be stuck forever in this moment that they don't like: this job or relationship or whatever situation they're in that they don't like. But this is not true.
Death means that a form of life dissolves or that the imminent possibility of dissolution exists, whether through our own death or through illness or old age.
Because we all carry the Truth within us as our essence, we recognize it immediately.
Humanity as a species must change dramatically and radically or our survival is at stake...
Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.
Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.
This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not within the confines of the established religions, but outside of those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival.
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.
When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.
For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering.
Humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming.