Eckhart Tolle

People are amazed to realize they can enjoy the moment rather than be stressed by it when hurrying to an appointment. You can enjoy the energy movement of the moment when you do not have a mental projection of a future moment you need to get to. You still know that you need to get there, but it is the secondary consideration.

Even running to catch a train or a taxi, you can enjoy the high energy of the moment.

Let's say you have to catch a plane, and you are packing your suitcase and moving fast. Most people would call that stress. Most people live stressed like that all the time.

If you are trying to get from here to there, and you already are late, you know that you are late, and yet you are aligned with the present moment while you are stuck in a traffic jam. You are totally accepting of the moment.

The ego always looks toward the next moment for some kind of fulfillment.

Whatever you do in your daily life - driving from here to there, trying to reach someone on the phone, doing this or that - you always are going toward somewhere. That's inevitable.

An enlightened person or business is not concerned primarily with making money, because when you are concerned with making money you want the future more than the present. Whenever you want the future more than you want the present, true intelligence cannot flow into what you do, because it can do so only when you are totally aligned with the present moment.

Whatever you do in your business comes out of a state of inner alignment with life and the source of life itself, so peace flows into whatever you do.

The habit patterns of the human mind are very strong and make it seem that the hard way is easy and the easy way is hard.

Some people say it is hard to live in such a way, being completely one with the present moment. Of course, it is not hard. The opposite is hard. Not being one with life is hard, and that is how most people live.

The difference between you, if you consider yourself not enlightened, and an enlightened master is not that the enlightened master has more knowledge. University professors have knowledge, and many enlightened masters have very little knowledge. Jesus probably had less knowledge than any university professor alive today in terms of raw information. Even a relatively uneducated person has more information than Jesus or Buddha ever had about things, such as political things and so on.

The future is only a thought form. Work with the present moment. Be with what is.

You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state - enlightenment, or whatever they call it - they want to achieve.

Every challenge takes you a little deeper and awakens you again and again. Without the challenges, you probably would go to back to sleep. The challenges keep you awake.

By learning to accept the small things immediately as they happen, you can be free of having to react to things at all. You still can respond when action is needed, but you can be free, internally, of events.

When you observe yourself reacting to what are minor things in your life, you will find that the mechanism is the same as when major things seem to go wrong in your life and there is upset.

Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.

Acceptance is the embracing of what happens. Acceptance is a way of getting in touch with the deeper, timeless dimension of aware presence, simply through accepting that this is what is happening or this is what I am feeling or thinking.

If you cannot accept an external event immediately, then some kind of resistance will come up. And there may be some external events you cannot accept at all.

You accept whatever happens in the present moment, the only place where it can happen. Internally, you fully accept what is happening, and what is happening may include an emotion, a stream of anxiety that suddenly comes up within you.

Life always is now. Life is inseparable from now.

The formless dimension of life is this moment. This moment is timeless and formless - the eternal itself.

Life always is now, but the form the now takes changes continuously. Most people equate the form the now takes with the now itself, and so they believe there are many different moments.

You are not what happens in your life. You are the space in which it happens, which is consciousness itself.

Sometimes people need to experience acute suffering before the thinking and the awareness of the consciousness separate. People then realize there is another dimension in them that is not thinking but the ability to be aware of thinking. It is not emotion but the ability to be aware of emotion.

A self - a me - exists in every thought and every emotion. Suffering arises through complete identification with thinking and emotions.

The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.

You need to learn to be with the suffering that inevitably arises in your life.

In certain extreme cases, medication may be necessary. But it is given far too often, too easily, and too readily. Millions of children already are on tranquilizers, for example, and that is absurd.

If you are not in alignment with the moment, life is a struggle. Really, all you have to do is take responsibility for your inner alignment with now.