Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.
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.
When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements. Yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion which is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none.
By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form.
To let go of judgment does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person.
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.
Only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word.
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.
Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.
Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.
Various Eckhart Tolle quotations.
The fear of being punished for supposed 'sin' is a strong one, but all I can say is this: any deity that promotes that is simply a reflection of the human ego, and neither loving nor spirit: a shadow on the wall.
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Quote:
"A memory is something that has to be consciously recalled, right? But it's different from a memory locked deep within your heart. Words aren't the only way to tell someone how you feel...As long as I'm with you, as long as you're by my side, I won't give up even if I'm scared." Tifa Lockheart, Final Fantasy VII