The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, that’s drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, that’s drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time — the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.

Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person.

Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure.

Impermanence is also central to Jesus’s teaching: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal. . . .”

As long as a condition is judged as “good” by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume.

The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you.

Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.

A Buddhist monk once told me: “All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.”

A Course in Miracles rightly points out that, whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness “buys” you what you want. If “you” — the mind — did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only “useful” function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.

So whenever you feel negativity arising within you, whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a voice saying “Attention. Here and Now. Wake up.”

Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.

When you accept what is, every piece of meat — every moment — is the best. That is enlightenment.

Next time you say, “I have nothing in common with this person,” remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now — two years or seventy years, it doesn’t make much difference — both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all.

Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.

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.

Although you can enjoy sensory pleasures, the craving for sensory experience is gone, as is the constant search for fulfillment through psychological gratification, through feeding the ego.

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.

Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so you cannot fight unconsciousness. If you try to do so, the polar opposites will become strengthened and more deeply entrenched. You will become identified with one of the polarities, you will create an “enemy,” and so be drawn into unconsciousness yourself.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation.

If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.

Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change, or achieving goals. But in the surrendered state a totally different energy, a different quality, flows into your doing.

In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time.

Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it, or remove myself from it?” If so, you take appropriate action. Focus not on the one hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now.

But make sure you don’t start to run “mental movies,” project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now.

When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and cooperative.

Start by acknowledging that there is resistance. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises.

Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive?

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. Let it be a nonreactive “no,” a high-quality “no,” a “no” that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.

if you continuously make the Now into a means to an end in the future, you will also make every person you encounter or relate with into a means to an end. The relationship — the human being — is then of secondary importance to you, or of no importance at all.