Eckhart Tolle

Pain is the fuel that lights the flame of our enlightenment

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.

When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is - no matter what form it takes - you are still, you are at peace.

The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

With stillness comes the benediction of peace”._x000D_ “Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but seems very real while you are trapped in it.

Enlightenment means choosing to dwell in a state of presence rather than in time. It means saying yes to what is.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.

Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.

Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.

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

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

Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

God is not a personality outside of you. What God is, is inextricably part of what you are. God is the dimension of depth within you.

The ego says, I shouldn't have to suffer, and that thought makes you suffer so much more.

True salvation is freedom from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.

A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivate by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.