The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.

Park bench joy

To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

Mind disease

there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.

Beyond thought

This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.

Addiction

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important.

Ego tense

So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think

Stop thinking

but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!

Stop thinking

So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Joy vs pain

And every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time.

High is pain

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

The now

Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.

Accept the present moment

dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become “

anger

Now remember that an emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind.

emotion

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.

true power

The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.

death secret