The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God.

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily.

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.

However, it’s more important to observe it in yourself than in someone else.

This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on.

This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships.

Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly.

None of these is you.

Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?

In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time.

As far as your life situation is concerned, there may be things to be attained or acquired.

when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from fear.

When this is your state of Being, how can you not succeed? You have succeeded already.

or rather: the core delusion that turns a mere situation, event, or emotion into a personal problem and into suffering. Loss of Now is loss of Being.

It is a state not of acute pain or unhappiness but of an almost continuous low level of unease, discontent, boredom, or nervousness — a kind of background static. You may not realize this because it is so much a part of “normal” living,

No unconsciousness, no negativity, no discord or violence can enter that field and survive, just as darkness cannot survive in the presence of light.

“Am I at ease at this moment?” is a good question to ask yourself frequently. Or you can ask: “What’s going on inside me at this moment?”

Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important.

Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That’s not a judgment. It’s a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.

When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now.

Life is your deepest inner Being.

None other than the power of your presence, your consciousness liberated from thought forms.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.

Although group work is invaluable, it is not enough, and you must not come to depend on it. Nor must you come to depend on a teacher or a master, except during the transitional period, when you are learning the meaning and practice of presence.

Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points? It really is no more than an obsessive attachment to a signpost, a mental idol.

You are no more than an animal.”

This took the form of denial of sense pleasures and of sexuality in particular, fasting, and other ascetic practices.

Transformation is through the body, not away from it.

they are obviously no more than collections of words — and a word is nothing but a signpost, as we talked about earlier.

negativity cannot affect you anymore, and you tend to attract new circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.

See if you can be in touch with your inner body at the same time. Keep some of your attention within. Don’t let it all flow out.

This is especially true when something “goes wrong” or there is some loss or upset. Your conditioned reaction will then be involuntary, automatic, and predictable, fueled by the one basic emotion that underlies the mind-identified state of consciousness: fear.

Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life — to allow life to live through you.

That which cannot be spoken, thought, or imagined.

Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.

the inner body does not change with time, except that you may feel it more deeply and become it more fully.

“flood” your body with consciousness.

You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what happens out here. You become a bridge between the Unmanifested and the manifested,

When you dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both directly and indirectly.

cessation of thinking.

There are many ways to create a gap in the incessant stream of thought. This is what meditation is all about.

Surrender — the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is — also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested.

Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds.

Most humans are completely unconscious of this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They are out of balance.

And because every form is highly unstable, they live in fear.

You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much.

Nothing that is of value, nothing that is real, is ever lost.

The end of illusion — that’s all that death is.