Eckhart Tolle Thinking Quotations

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

Thinking is a wonderful tool if it's applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you're dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.

How many situations can be resolved with less thinking?

The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

Stressful energy arises when you think some future moment is more important than the present moment, and the doing becomes only a means to an end.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.

In today's rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.

Don't think of yourself as having a past, don't think of yourself as having a future. What's left?

Be aware of your breathing. Notice how this takes attention away from your thinking and creates space.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.

One way of pointing to this realization is, when you think you have big problems, ask yourself, "What problem do I have at this moment?" Usually, you will find that you don't have a problem at this moment because you're sitting here and you're breathing, you're looking out the window, and it's fine.

Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

When you awaken spiritually, in fact, you can use thought much more effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought. It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a tiny aspect.

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.

Actually, the ability to choose presence depends on the degree of presence that's emerging in you. Ultimately, you are not choosing, there's nobody there to choose. When you think you are choosing, presence is simply emerging in that moment.

Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking. I cannot tell you anything that deep within you don't already know. When you have reached a certain stage of inner connectedness, you recognize the truth when you hear it. If you haven't reached that stage yet, the practice of body awareness will bring about the deepening that is necessary.

What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.

With stillness comes the benediction of peace”. “Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but seems very real while you are trapped in it.

A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivate by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.

Go within. Use the inner body as a starting point for going deeper and taking your attention away from where it's usually lodged, in the thinking mind.

The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.

One way to become aware many times during the day is to take a conscious breath. Doing so breaks the stream of thinking.

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

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone else's Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.

When listening to another person, don't just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen.That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space-space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give.

Not to be able to stop thinking is an affliction, but we don't realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it.

Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world.

Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

Instead of 'watching the thinker,' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

Music creates a bridge for people to move out of thinking and into presence.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.

Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.

You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance.

You can't think about presence, and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

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.

The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

In any relationship, especially marriage, be as free of compulsive thinking as possible. In other words, the more space there is in the relationship - inner space - the more love there is because love arises out of the inner spaciousness.

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.

Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.

When you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment.

Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of "me" based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.

You create a good future by creating a good present.

We get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. Nature can show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds.

Space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer 'other.' In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.

If you have a strong ego [and] something good happens to an acquaintance of yours, [it] makes you feel bad. It's called envy. ... The ego thinks something has been taken away from you because somebody else has received something good. It's a complete illusion, but that's the madness of the ego.

Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

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.

Feel the energy of your inner body. Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases. Feel it in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest. Feel the life that you are, the life that animates the body. The body then becomes a doorway, so to speak, into a deeper sense of aliveness underneath the fluctuating emotions and underneath your thinking.

To become aware of the subtlety of nature you need to be alert. The moment you become alert you become still... thinking subsides. That is actually a higher state of consciousness than thinking.

Create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form --the thought or the emotion-- to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form -- spacious awareness.

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.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

If the thought of lack -whether it be money, recognition, or love has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is already in your life, all you see is lack.

Consciousness is a vast ocean and thinking is the waves & ripples on the surface of the ocean.

Some people say, the world can be so alive! It always is, you just do not know it because of the screen of your thinking. You notice it as you become more awake.

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much.

Whatever you think people are withholding from you-praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on-give it to them.

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.

The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn't mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.

Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.

The evolutionary impulse is towards disidentification from thinking and the arising of awareness or presence, but the gravitational pull of the old consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, is still quite heavy. It's been around for thousands of years.

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

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.

Humans eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly, they start cutting reality up into bits and pieces, which is what the thinking mind does.

The thinking mind can be so noisy that it cannot relate to stillness. It doesn't even recognize it and certainly can't remember it.

Everybody who is not awake spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking mind - the incessant voice in the head.

Although an increasing number of humans are undergoing a process of awakening, identification with thinking is still the prevalent state of consciousness. Thinking is potentially a powerful tool, but it has taken us over, and a lot of it is dysfunctional and negative.

For many years I had been deeply identified with thinking and the painful, heavy emotions that had accumulated inside. My thought activity was mostly negative, and my sense of identity was also mostly negative, although I tried hard to prove to myself and to the world that I was good enough by working very hard academically. But even after I had achieved academic success, I was happy for two weeks or three and then the depression and anxiety came back.

The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.

The consciousness of the animal begins to change when it interacts with a human who's gone beyond thinking. It's not only the animals assisting us; we are also assisting the animals.

In fact, people think you have to be stressed to be successful. They think if you are not stressed, something is wrong with you.

For a long time humans probably were in touch on a deeper level with the depths of their being, unconsciously so, the same way an animal or a tree is. Gradually, though, more and more of their identity went into the movement of thought. They identified more and more with the movement of thinking.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

So one could say that the only real problem is dysfunctional thinking, the rest are challenges, not problems.

Space really means the level of awareness or presence, not thinking. So, can you look at your partner and not think? Two conscious beings realize that the essence of the relationship is the space in it. Even when there is an egoic overlay, it is not too dense or heavy for you to sense the essence underneath it. You don't need to react to the egoic overlay. When you don't react to it you don't strengthen it.

We are destined not to go back to the level of animals that we've come from but to return to being by going beyond thinking.