The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to “know God” — not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.

True salvation is a state of freedom — from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your

Their drama makes them feel alive.

am speaking here of what are commonly called romantic relationships — not of true love, which has no opposite because it arises from beyond the mind.

to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state.

This is why it is the most deeply satisfying experience the physical realm can offer.

That is to say, you get your sense of who you are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on. This false, mind-made self, the ego, feels vulnerable, insecure, and is always seeking new things to identify with to give it a feeling that it exists. But nothing is ever enough to give it lasting fulfillment. Its fear remains; its sense of lack and neediness remains.

confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love.

They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.

The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.

The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice. If you observe unconscious behavior in your partner, hold it in the loving embrace of your knowing so that you won’t react.

If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again.

When the mind took over and humans lost touch with the reality of their divine essence, they started to think of God as a male figure. Society became male-dominated, and the female was made subordinate to the male.

This God is a projection of the human mind.

Your form may continue to have certain needs, but Being has none. It is already complete and whole. If those needs are met, that is beautiful, but whether or not they are met makes no difference to your deep inner state.

But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can’t you just be yourself?

An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other person’s position.

When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair — and one step away from enlightenment.

I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

All negativity is resistance.

This is natural wisdom, and it is easy for them because they do not have a mind that keeps the past alive unnecessarily and then builds an identity around

recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a message, as do illnesses.

Source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under threat. So it creates the illusion that you are a body, a dense, physical vehicle that is constantly under threat.

If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other.

Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identification with form. You are then no longer

You can still enjoy the passing pleasures of this world, but there is no fear of loss anymore, so you don’t need to cling to them.

But who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.

As more humans awaken, the word work is going to disappear from our vocabulary, and perhaps a new word will be created to replace it.

They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt to get energy and power from you.

When you say “no” to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment.

All it means is that any “doing” becomes nonreactive.

When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection. We spoke about this earlier.

With this radiant peace comes the realization — not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being — that you are indestructible, immortal.

surrender each moment to the reality of that moment.

God is Being itself, not a being.

unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind.

by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar.

in which intimacy and abuse are inseparably linked.

It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion.

This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are.