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Excerpts from A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle:
“I didn’t
realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma
of human existence.”
“I would spend
the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely identified
with my mind.”
“One thing we do
know: 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.”
“The ego isn’t
wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself,
you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously.
When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may
even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long?
Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are.
If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just
more ego.”
“As we have seen,
having—the concept of ownership—is a fiction created by the
ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make itself stand out,
make itself special. Since you cannot find yourself through having,
however, there is another more powerful drive underneath it that
pertains to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we
could also call “wanting.” No ego can last for long without the
need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than
having. The ego wants to want more that it wants to have. And so the
shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.
This is the psychological need for more, that is to say, more things
to identify with. It is an addictive need, not an authentic one.”
“Most egos have
conflicting wants. They want different things at different times or
may not even know what they want except that they don’t want what
is: the present moment. Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety,
dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting. Wanting is
structural, so no amount of content can provide lasting fulfillment as
long as that mental structure remains in place.”
“No content will
satisfy you, as long as the egoic structure remains in place. No
matter what you have or get, you won’t be happy. You will always be
looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that
promises to make your incomplete sense of self complete and fill that
sense of lack you feel within.”
“Ego is always
identification with form, seeking yourself and thereby losing yourself
in some form. Forms are not just material objects and physical bodies.
More fundamental than external forms—things and bodies—are the
thought forms that continuously arise in the field of consciousness.”
“When every
thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified
with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it that
you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are
totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is
a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned
mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense
of self. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of “I Am,” which
is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the
meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary
error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a
nightmare.”
“Most people are
so completely identified with the voice in the head—the incessant
stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that
accompany it—that we may describe them as being possessed by their
mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the
thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind.”
"Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triumph over others: "jerk, bastard, bitch"--all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence."
"Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the 'fault' that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react in another, you strengthen in yourself."
“Nonreaction to
the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going
beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human
ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can
recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an
expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize
it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it
were.”
“The ego’s
greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to
say, life itself.”
“To refrain from
complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or
behavior.”
“See if you can
catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the
very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it
is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a
thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that
you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you
are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there
is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker.
In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved
mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly
speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern.
Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old
mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while
because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human
unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is
weakened.”
“Being right
places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to
the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is
that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances
itself.”
“Spiritual
realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think,
or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all
those things that continuously pass away.”
“What remains is
the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences,
thoughts, and feelings come and go. That is Being, that is the deeper,
true I. When I know myself as that, whatever happens in my life is no
longer of absolute but only of relative importance. I honor it, but it
loses its absolute seriousness, its heaviness.”
“Once you realize
and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the
seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is
because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you
to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond
death.”
“When you are no
longer totally identified with forms, consciousness—who you
are—becomes freed from its imprisonment in form. This freedom is the
arising of inner space. It comes as a stillness, a subtle peace deep
within you, even in the face of something seemingly bad. This, too,
will pass. Suddenly, there is space around the event. There is
also space around the emotional highs and lows, even around pain. And
above all, there is space between your thoughts. And from that space
emanates a peace that is not “of this world,” because this world
is form, and the peace is space. This is the peace of God.”
“Now you can
enjoy and honor the things of this world without giving them an
importance and significance they don’t have. You can participate in
the dance of creation and be active without attachment to outcome and
without placing unreasonable demands upon the world: Fulfill me, make
me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give
you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all
self-created suffering comes to an end. All such suffering is due to
an overvaluation of form and an unawareness of the dimension of inner
space. When that dimension is present in your life, you can enjoy
things, experiences, and the pleasures of the senses without losing
yourself in them, without inner attachment to them, that is to say,
without becoming addicted to the world.”
“Most people’s
lives are cluttered up with things: material things, things to do,
things to think about. Their lives are like the history of humanity,
which Winston Churchill defined ‘as one damn thing after another.’
Their minds are filled up with the clutter of thoughts, one thought
after another. This is the dimension of object consciousness that is
many people’s predominant reality, and that is why their lives are
so out of balance. Object consciousness needs to be balanced with
space consciousness for sanity to return to our planet and for
humanity to fulfill its destiny. The arising of space consciousness is
the next stage in the evolution of humanity.”
“If you are not
spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety,
depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are
able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or
the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or
be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental
stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete
stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or
her…it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in
the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind.
When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace,
even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps
barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient
sages of India called ananda—the bliss of Being.”
“This common
element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the
invisible background without which these experiences would not be
possible.”
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