Stillness Speaks – Eckhart Tolle

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.  When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself.  You connect with it at a very deep level.  You feel a oneness with whatever your perceive in and through stillness.  Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.

Is stillness just the absence of noise and content? No, it is intelligence itself – the underlying consciousness out of which every form is born.  And how could that be separate from who you are? The form that you think you are came out of that and is being sustained by it.

Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is.  You don’t want to be where you are.  Here, Now.

When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are.  When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences.  I am not the content of my life.  I am Life.  I am the space in which all things happen.  I am consciousness.  I am the Now.  I Am.

Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.

It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world.  It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated.  It matters whether you are rich or poor – it certainly makes a difference in your life.  Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don’t matter absolutely.

…..finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.