Stillness Speaks

by Eckhart Tolle

remember that, to feel that, as you read. The words are no more than signposts. That to which they point is not to be found within the realm of thought, but a dimension within yourself that is deeper and infinitely vaster than thought.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Whenever there is some silence around you — listen to it. That means just notice it. Pay attention to it. Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.

Pay attention to the gap — the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and out-breath.

Let stillness direct your words and actions.

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

Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the

aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.

There is an aliveness in you that you can feel with your entire Being, not just in the head. Every cell is alive in that presence in which you don’t need to think. Yet, in that

Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

The moment you become aware of a plant’s emanation of stillness and peace, that plant becomes your teacher.

Watch an animal, a flower, a tree, and see how it rests in Being. It is itself. It has enormous

aware of your breathing and learning to hold your attention there. This is a healing and deeply empowering thing to do. It brings about a shift in consciousness from the conceptual world of thought to the inner realm of unconditioned consciousness.

“pain-body” is an energy field within you that sporadically takes you over because it needs to experience more emotional pain for it to feed on and replenish itself. It will try to control your thinking and make it deeply negative. It loves your negative thoughts, since it resonates with their frequency and so can feed on them. It will also provoke negative emotional reactions in people close to you, especially your partner, in order to feed

Become aware of it. Realize that it is not who you are, and recognize it for what it is: past pain. Witness it as it happens in your partner or in yourself.When your unconscious identification with it is broken, when you are able to observe it within yourself, you don’t feed it anymore, and it will gradually lose its energy charge.

When you sit with a dying person, do not deny any aspect of that experience. Do not deny what is happening and do not deny your feelings.