The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept — before they

As soon as they do, one of the greatest miracles happens:

the awakening of Being-consciousness through what appears as evil, the transmutation of s...

The ultimate effect of all the evil and suffering in the world is that it will force humans into realizing wh...

This, however, does not become true for you except through forgiveness.

Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is,

the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without.

Whoever or whatever enters that field of consciousness will be affected by it, sometimes visibly and immediately, sometimes at deeper levels with v...

Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people’s lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather ego-created.

When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore.

The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack.

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.

Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life.

What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.

You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person.

An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction ...

You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack.

“No one who is at one with himself can even conceive of conflict,” states A Course in Miracles.

All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance.

There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen.

If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.

Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization.

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

You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms and circumstances, but you won’t be identified with them.

You do not need them to give you a sense of self.

The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.

The Buddha made this a central part of his teaching.

All conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux, or, as he put it, impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life.

Jesus’s teaching: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thi...

When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it.

If she had been able to connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of serenity and peace.

to seek something through them that they cannot give — an identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment — is a recipe for frustration and suffering.

The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy.

Nothing can give you joy.

Joy is uncaused and arises from within as th...

Many people never realize that there can be no “salvation” in anything they do, possess, or attain.

The Old Testament prophet must have arrived at such a realization when he wrote: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

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.