Shyla N. > Shyla's Quotes

“You don’t need fear to avoid unnecessary danger — just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Note: The mind is a superb interment 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. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. “I have nothing to give you,” said the stranger. Then he asked: “What’s that you are sitting on?” “Nothing,” replied the beggar. “Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.” “Ever looked inside?” asked the stranger. “No,” said the beggar. “What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.” “Have a look inside,” insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Don’t seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“When you awaken, nature awakens, too.”
― Eckhart Tolle, Eckhart Tolle's Findhorn Retreat: Stillness Amidst the World

“Why does the ego play roles? Because of one unexamined assumption, one fundamental error, one unconscious thought. That thought is: I am not enough. Other unconscious thoughts follow: I need to play a role in order to get what I need to be fully myself; I need to get more so that I can be more. But you cannot be more than you are because underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being. In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same. THE PATHOLOGICAL EGO In a wider sense of the word, the ego itself is pathological, no matter what form it takes. When we look at the ancient Greek root of the word pathological, we discover just how appropriate that term is when applied to the ego. Although the word is normally used to describe a condition of disease, it is derived from pathos, which means suffering. This is, of course, exactly what the Buddha already discovered 2,600 years ago as a characteristic of the human condition. A person in the grip of ego, however, does not recognize suffering as suffering, but will look upon it as the only appropriate response in any given”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the “problem.” Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Don't look for peace.
Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance.

Forgive yourself for not being peace.
The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.
Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.

This is the miracle of surrender.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it,”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“The true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, Oneness With All Life Treasury Edition: Inspirational Selections from A New Earth

“Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“And it is from inner space, the unconditioned consciousness itself, that true happiness, the joy of Being, emanates.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The voice in the head that never stops speaking becomes a civilization that is obsessed with form and therefore knows nothing of the most important dimension of human existence: the sacred, the stillness, the formless, the divine.”
― Eckhart Tolle, Eckhart Tolle's Findhorn Retreat: Stillness Amidst the World

“Let go of excessive thinking and see how everything changes. Your relationships change because you don't demand that the other person should do something for you to enhance your sense of self. You don't compare yourself to others or try to be more than someone else to strengthen your sense of identity.”
― Eckhart Tolle, Eckhart Tolle's Findhorn Retreat: Stillness Amidst the World

“in it. It means consciousness is lost in its own dream. You get taken in by every thought, every emotion,”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Surrender — the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is — also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are bound to the world of form, the harder and more impenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat “transparent,” as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“earth drama has any purpose at all, it is an indirect one: It creates more and more suffering on the planet, and suffering, although largely ego-created, is in the end also ego-destructive. It is the fire in which the ego burns itself up. In a world of role-playing”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“But to know that you are not present is a great success:”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment