The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if t...

Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously,...

Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.

As you move, work, run — do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment.

THE INNER PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE’S JOURNEY

When you are on a journey,

The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment.

The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.

Whenever you watch the mind, you withdraw consciousness from mind forms, and it then becomes what we call the watcher or the witness.

Consequently, the watcher — pure consciousness beyond form — becomes stronger, and the mental formations become weaker.

When consciousness frees itself from its identification with physical and mental forms, it becomes what we may call pure or enlightened consciousness, or presence.

If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it.

Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don’t get off, you will go down with it.

While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation.

Consciousness is evolving throughout the universe in billions of forms. So even if we didn’t make it, this wouldn’t matter on a cosmic scale.

No gain in consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself through some other form.

But the very fact that I am speaking here and you are listening or reading this is a clear sign that the new consciousness i...

So to “inhabit the body” is to feel the body from within, to feel the life inside the body and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form.

Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived or spoken of — yet I am speaking of it now.

You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention.

The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff.

Your whole sense of who you are is then derived fr...

Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as...

To become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind.

A very effective way of doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.

The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply.

On the level of the body, humans are very close to animals.

A long time after their fall from a state of grace and oneness into illusion, humans suddenly woke up in what seemed to be an animal body — and they found this very disturbing.

Adam and Eve saw that they were naked, and they became afraid. Unconscious denial of their animal nature set in very quickly.

They began to disassociate from their body. They now saw themselves as having a body, rather than just being it.

Countless people in East and West throughout the ages have tried to find God, salvation, or enlightenment through denial of the body.

The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the

body or through an out-of-body experience.

Transformation is through the body, not away from it.

All spiritual teachings originate from the same Source.

I am that master, and so are you, once you are able to access the Source within. And the way to it is through the inner body.

once they become verbalized and written down they are obviously no more than collections of words — and a word is nothing but a signpost, as we talked about earlier. All such teachings are signposts pointing the way back to the Source.

Do not fight against the body, for in doing so you are fighting against your own reality. You are your body.

Through the inner body, you are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life — birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner body, you are forever one with God.

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body — to feel it at all times.

Inner Body - why fitness is important

A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self.

Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.

Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn’t.

They are as they are.

And when you live in complete acceptance of what is — which is the only sane way to live — there is no “good” or “bad” in your life anymore.

There is only a higher good — which inclu...

Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past.

Do what you have to do. In the meantime, accept what is.