Tag: Eckhart Tolle
‘The Bedsit Epiphany’ by Oliver Burkeman, THE GUARDIAN (UK) – on Eckhart Tolle
The Bedsit Epiphany – By Oliver Burkeman, THE GUARDIAN (UK) – Eckhart Tolle – b. February 16, 1948 (68 in 2016!)
Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey’s favourite guru, has sold more books than almost any other spiritual author.
Eckhart Tolle – new insights about him?
Some very interesting information about Eckhart Tolle.
http://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,73107,83297
I don’t think it changes the high esteem in which I hold him.
I still want to know about where the money goes and about those who manage his operation.
NB Some of the ‘cult watchers’ seem willing to rubbish anything and anyone – this would probably include saints and prophets!
Alternatives to ‘resting in awareness’ – Rupert Spira and Eckhart Tolle
Alternatives to ‘resting in awareness’ – Rupert Spira and Eckhart Tolle
Rupert Spira in answer to a questioner says;
“To ‘take one’s stand as Awareness’ would perhaps be better phrased as ‘understand or see clearly that you are Awareness and be that knowingly.’”
SOURCE http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/read/taking_our_stand_as_awareness
Rupert’s teaching here is of course close to Eckhart Tolle’s focus on ‘living in the now’
‘The Power of Now and the End of Suffering’
Tami Simon, of ‘Sounds True’, interviewed Eckhart Tolle. Tami asks some great questions that evoke interesting material concerning awakening and Tolle’s ‘restructuring of his self’ event;
‘The Power of Now and the End of Suffering’ – By Tami Simon
For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a “mystic,” and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives. It sounds like fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known worldwide for his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the present moment. His first book, The Power of Now, is an international bestseller, and has been translated into 17 languages. More than 20 years have passed since Eckhart Tolle answered his first question on that park bench. While his audience has grown, his message remains the same: that it is possible to stop struggling in your life, and find joy and fulfillment in this moment, and no other.
Sounds True: Can you describe to us your own experience of spiritual awakening (and of course, can you define spiritual awakening as well)? Was there a singular event that occurred or has it been a gradual process?………………’
To read the interview go here;
https://www.eckharttolle.com/article/The-Power-Of-Now-Spirituality-And-The-End-Of-Suffering
Hi Everyone As someone with sleep apnea an…
Hi Everyone
As someone with sleep apnea, an extremely alarming dysrhythmic heart and the no-cure killer disease Pulmonary Fibrosis – death within 33 months on average – I have a more than normal interest in breath and breathing. Here is a quotation from Eckhart Tolle on the subject;
ON THE BREATH – Eckhart Tolle in his book ‘A New Earth’ chap 8 – p243
“Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and
it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it’s free.”
Discover inner space by creating gaps in the stream of thinking. Without those gaps, your thinking becomes repetitive, uninspired, devoid or any creative spark, which is how it still is for most people on the planet. You don’t need to be concerned with the duration of those gaps. A few seconds is good enough. Gradually, they will lengthen by themselves, without any effort on your part. More important than their length is to bring them in frequently so that your daily activities and your stream of thinking become interspersed with space.
Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organization. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, on of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. “I don’t know,” I said. “They all look so interesting. But I do know this,” I added. “Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it’s free.”
Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension.
Be aware of your breathing. Notice the sensation of the breath. Feel the air moving in and out of your body. Notice how the chest and abdomen expand and contract slightly with the in and out breath. One conscious breath is enough to make some space where before there was the uninterrupted succession of one thought after another. One conscious breath (two or three would be even better), taken many times a day, is an excellent way of bringing space into your life. Even if you meditated on your breathing for two hours or more, which some people do, one breath is all you ever need to be aware of, indeed ever can be aware of. The rest is memory or anticipation, which is to say, thought. Breathing isn’t really something that you do but something that you witness as it happens. Breathing happens by itself. The intelligence within the body is doing it. All you have to do is watch it happening. There is no strain or effort involved. Also, notice the brief cessation of the breath, particularly the still point at the end of the outbreath, before you start breathing in again.
Many people’s breath is unnaturally shallow. The more you are aware of the breath, the more its natural depth will reestablish itself.
Because breath has no form as such, it has since ancient times been equated with spirit the formless one Life. “God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature.”5 The German word for breathing – atmen – is derived from the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word Atman, meaning the indwelling divine spirit or God within.
The fact that breath has no form is one of the reasons why breath awareness is an extremely effective way of bringing space into your life, of generating consciousness. It is an excellent meditation object precisely because it is not an object; has no shape or form. The other reason is that breath is one of the most subtle and seemingly insignificant phenomena, the “least thing” that according to Nietzsche makes up the “best happiness.” Whether or not you practice breath awareness as an actual formal meditation is up to you. Formal meditation, however, is no substitute for bringing space consciousness into everyday life.
Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment – the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of the breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing. Conscious breathing stops your mind. But far from being in a trance or half asleep, you are fully awake and highly alert. You are not falling below thinking, but rising above it. And if you look more closely, you will find that those two things – coming fully into the present moment and ceasing thinking without loss of consciousness – are actually one and the same: the arising of space consciousness. -0-
In the matter of breath and breathing Tolle is brilliant as he is on so many other aspects of life and inter-spirituality!
What is arising now is …
What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion,
spiritual ideology, or mythology. We are coming to the end not only of
mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes
deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at
the heart of the new consciousness is the transcendence of thought, the
newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within
yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.
You then no longer derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from the incessant stream of
thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself. What a
liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I
then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the
space in which the thought – or the emotion or sense perception – happens.
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily
means thought forms. If evil has any reality – and it has a relative, not an
absolute, reality – this is also its definition: complete identification with
form – physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in a total
unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with
every “other” as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin,
suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and
governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create? T
Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth
“What is the reality of being human on the way to realizing enlightenment?
We are using these quotations in our discussions at present;
TOPIC: The Reality of Being Human on the Way to Realizing Enlightenment
QUESTION: “What is the reality of being human on the way to realizing enlightenment?
.
1 “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the
world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is
incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” …….“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”― Abraham Joshua Heschel
2 “Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the
individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the
selfsame tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the
tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.
.
“The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the
divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he
recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self, and beholds his
glory, he grieves no more.”
.
3 Don’t contemplate
as mere activity
Be void contemplating void. p221 365 Tao – Deng Ming-Dao
.
4 After scaling the high summits of wonderment the wayfarer cometh to the Valley of True
Poverty and Absolute Nothingness.
This station is the dying from self and the living in God, the being poor in self and rich in the
Desired One.
From ‘The Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness’ the 7th valley in Baha’u’llah’s 7 Valleys
.
5 The experience of one’s own identity or “I”, is a source of great wonder……..Spiritual attainment
is a fundamental transformation of the “I” from a separate, limited, and contracted identity into a
rich and infinite one. It is a movement from separation to union.
p85 Living Presence A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self – by Shaikh Kabir Helminski
.
6 You say, “I want to know myself.” You are the “I”. You are the Knowing. You are the
consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself.
consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself.
p55/56 Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle
-0-
About religion Max Muller said, ““He who knows one, knows none.”
Eckhart Tolle See also Goodreads http www goodreads…
Eckhart Tolle (See also Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4493.Eckhart_Tolle)
1- To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for you inner state at any given moment. That means now.
2- For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
3- Instead of asking “what do I want from life?,” a more powerful question is, “what does life want from me?”
4- 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. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.
5- Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
6- Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
7- You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.
8- Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. … When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative.
9- All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind.
10- If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me
11- Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
12- Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real.
13- Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become “I.”
14- Space has no “existence.” “To exist” literally means “to stand out.” You cannot understand space because it doesn’t stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the Unmanifested.
15- Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
16- Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
17- 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. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
18- What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
19- “How” is always more important that “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
20- The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.
Eckhart Tolle resources http://www.inner…
Eckhart Tolle resources http://www.inner-growth.info/power_of_now_tolle/eckhart_tolle_home.htm
Quotations Treasury - a sub-blog of Soul Needs - 'One Garden' 