Stillness Speaks

by Eckhart Tolle

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.

The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth. It says: this is how it is.

Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention.

Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don’t want to be where you are. Here, Now.

And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know.”

Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

The mind exists in a state of “not enough” and so is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours,” not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

Feel the energy of your inner body. Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases.

Become at ease with the state of “not knowing.”This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing.

Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works.

The mind is incessantly looking not only for food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self.

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash — one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made “me.”

When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

The egoic self is always engaged in seeking. It is seeking more of this or that to add to itself, to make itself feel more complete. This explains the ego’s compulsive preoccupation with future.

By giving your full attention to this moment, an intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life.

When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end.

When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning. Your doing then becomes not only a great deal more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful.

Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important.

“No self. No problem,” said the Buddhist Master when asked to explain the deeper meaning of Buddhism.

This one moment — Now — is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now.

Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it?

When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.

The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now.I Am.

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.

When you don’t know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self.

Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.

You cannot find yourself in the past or future.The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.