Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature - The rustling of leaves in the wind, Raindrops falling, The humming of an insect, The first birdsong at dawn.
Eckhart TolleRead
When your consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realises its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the difference between external focus and internal awareness, highlighting the journey to one's true self.
Eckhart Tolle's quote suggests that when we focus our consciousness outwardly, we become engaged with the world around us, perceiving both our thoughts and the environment as distinct entities. In contrast, directing our awareness inward allows us to connect with our deeper essence, moving beyond the materialistic world to discover a state of being that is unified and pure, referred to as the 'Unmanifested'.
In practice
In a meditation class, one might use this quote to encourage participants to look inward for tranquility.
Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature - The rustling of leaves in the wind, Raindrops falling, The humming of an insect, The first birdsong at dawn.
Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. It also strengthens the immune system and the bodyβs ability to heal itself.
Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.
The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
Suppose... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? .... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
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