I would like to share with you my most favorite quotes from a book that had a great influence on me and increased my self-awareness – The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This is a kind of book that can transfer you from a place of grief and insecurity to the state of joy and love. Just start reading – and I promise, that your life will start changing immediately.
Right when I begin reading it, I immediately start feeling something inside me transforming – almost on a physical level. What’s really amazing to me is that I noticed, that before I start reading this book, I don’t necessarily feel pain or suffer. But as I am reading through, I start noticing how much easier and happier I become. Naturally we don’t recognize being unhappy just like people who have a drinking or drug problem would deny they do. Being inside suffering doesn’t let us see we suffer…
Whatever Eckhart has written in the book, is truly magical, because I was able to observe and witness myself moving from one dimension to another, from unawareness of my misery to a consciously happy state of mind that transformed myself, my life, and my mind on the go!
Here are a few quotes I highlighted when I was reading The Power of Now.
- “I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.”
- “The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. 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.”
- “All the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind.”
- “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness”
- “Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind – or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.”
- “It wasn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.”
- “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.”
- “Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.”
- “Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”
- “Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind.”
- “Nobody’s life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn’t it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them? The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.”
- “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.”
- “The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”
- “An emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind.”
- “Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.”
- “The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”
- “Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” – and find that there is no death.”
- “When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is a wonderful tool. Disfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.”
- “To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.”
- “Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”
- “Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”
- “The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future – which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.”
- “Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
- “To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”
- “Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”
- “Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”
- “You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.”
- “…words in themselves are not important. They are not the Truth; they only point to it.”
- “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.”
- “At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.”
- “…the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in the transcendence of the world.”
- “You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God.”
- “[Relationships] do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you”
- “As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter”
- “Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time”
- “It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept – before they will forgive.”
- “You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.”
- “Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disappointments before you realize that truth.”
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