Quotes from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“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 the moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“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. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“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.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“This is my secret," he said. "I don't mind what happens.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Whenever you
become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight
of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is
primary, all else secondary.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Man made God in his own image...”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“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.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You have so much to learn from your enemies.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled.

There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation.

She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.

I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it.

Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, “No, I don't want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.”

This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.

When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

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