Book ♬ | The Power of Now

Author: Eckhart Tolle

Treasure Hunter

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Wisdom Drops

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9 min read

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May 2, 2020

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You are not your mind

• Underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. Thinking has become a disease. The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however it becomes very destructive. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
• The mind loves to get its teeth into problems
• The mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave.
• The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
• Listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. There is the voice and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
• As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. Realm of no-mind. The state of pure consciousness.
• You feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it.
• Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. Compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only the past and future are considered important. The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind. Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought.
• Gathering, storing and analyzing information — this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative.
• Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. An attack thought or a hostile thought will create a build-up of energy in the body that we call anger.
• If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions. Thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on. The harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.
• Love, joy and peace are deep states of Being or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.

Consciousness: The Way out of Pain

• The more you are able to honour and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering and free of the egoic mind. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.

Freedom from Unhappiness

• You are resisting what is.
• Drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.
• Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space, nobody else is. By recognising that you don’t want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it.

Wherever you are, be there totally

• Complain is always nonacceptance of what is. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it.
• Remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No Excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
• Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. This is called surrender. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power.

The inner body

• Don’t get stuck on the level of words. If a word doesn’t work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work.
• You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. To become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind.
• The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body — to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life. The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes, much like a light that grows brighter as you turn up the dimmer switch and so increase the flow of electricity. At this higher energy level, negativity cannot affect you anymore, and you tend to attract new circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.
• Attention is the key to transformation.
• Check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern such as blame, self-pity or resentment that is feeding the motion.
• Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life — to allow life to live through you. The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind.
• Anything that vibrates at a lower frequency such as fear, anger, depression and so on, now exists in what is virtually a different order of reality.
• Feel the stillness deep inside you. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. Surrender — the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is.

Enlightened Relationships

• You are waiting for an event in time to save you. Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now. True salvation is fulfilment, peace, life in all its fullness. True salvation is a state of freedom — from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. The truth is that here and now is the only point where you can get there. You get there by realizing that you are there already. you find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God. Enter the Now from there.
• True love as a continuous state is as yet very rare- as rare as conscious human beings.
• Confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You can not love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. A strong ego need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
• When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behaviour, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain.
• Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. You are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.
• The love and joy underneath the pain is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour, especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.
• First, you stop judging yourself, then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is the complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. Love is a state of Being. you can never lose it.
• True communication is communion — the realization of oneness which is love. Love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain body.
• If there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right and inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain of any kind — whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing. 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. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.
• Giving space to others and yourself is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
• You will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no oppositive. The ego needs problems, conflict and enemies to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends.
• To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities are needed: surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the loving embrace of your knowing. Being-energy is soft and yielding and yet infinitely more powerful than the mind.

Beyond Unhappiness there is peace

• Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters and what doesn't. Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. When you live in complete acceptance of what is.
• When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not create or participate in drama anymore. When you feel sorry for yourself, that’s drama. When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.
• 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. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension.
• Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low and as well as high energy. There are large cycles and small cycles within these large ones. Many illnesses are created by fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identify from external factors such as achievement is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.
• The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked with the impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a central part of his teaching. All conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux. Impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you. Impermanence is also central to Jesus teachings: Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.

The meaning of Surrender

• Keep feeling the grief, the fear the dread the loneliness whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present — present with your whole being. You are. bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness. Full attention is full acceptance is surrender. By giving full attention, you use the power of the Now, which is the power of your presence. Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering no negativity can survive.