July 2006
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July 1st 2006
From Consciousness -- Gaps of Alert Attention
Throughout the day, there is a continuously changing succession of things that you see and hear. In the first moment of seeing something or hearing a sound -- and more so if it is unfamiliar -- before the mind names or interprets what you see or hear, there is usually a gap of alert attention in which the perception occurs....
The frequency and duration of those gaps or spaces determine your ability to enjoy life, to feel an inner connectedness with other human beings as well as nature. It also determines the degree to which you are free of ego because ego implies complete unawareness of the dimension of space.
When you become conscious of these brief spaces as they happen naturally, they will lengthen, and as they do, you will experience with increasing frequency the joy of perceiving with little or no interference of thinking.
The world around you then feels fresh, new, and alive. The more you perceive life through a mental screen of abstraction and conceptualization, the more lifeless and flat the world around you becomes.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 2nd 2006
From Consciousness -- In Becoming Less We Become More
Inner space also arises whenever you let go of the need to emphasize your form-identity. That need is of the ego. It is not a true need.
Whenever you relinquish one of these behavior patterns, inner space emerges. You become more truly yourself.
To the ego it will seem as if you were losing yourself, but the opposite is the case. Jesus already taught that you need to lose yourself to find yourself.
Whenever you let go of one of these patterns, you de-emphasize who you are on the level of form and who you are beyond form emerges more fully. You become less, so you can be more.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 3rd 2006
From Consciousness -- Stillness
Becoming conscious of stillness whenever we encounter it in our lives will connect us with the formless and timeless dimension within ourselves, that which is beyond thought, beyond ego.
Stillness has no form -- that is why through thinking we cannot become aware of it. Thought is form. Being aware of stillness means to be still. To be still is to be conscious without thought.
You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves.
When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness -- unconditioned, formless, eternal.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 4th 2006
From Consciousness -- Finding True Purpose
Many people long for the freedom and expansion that prosperity promises. Others already enjoy the relative freedom that comes with prosperity and discover that even that is not enough to endow their lives with meaning. There is no substitute for finding true purpose.
The true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are -- that is to say, your state of consciousness.
So the most important thing to realize is this: Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose.
Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary. Inner and outer, however, are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to speak of one without referring to the other.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 5th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Purpose of Humanity
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet -- because it is the purpose of humanity.
Your inner purpose is an essential part of the purpose of the whole, the universe and its emerging intelligence. Your outer purpose can change over time. It varies greatly from person to person.
Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose. It is the basis for true success.
Without that alignment, you can still achieve certain things through effort, struggle, determination, and sheer hard work or cunning. But there is no joy in such endeavor, and it invariably ends in some form of suffering.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 6th 2006
From Consciousness -- A Shift in Consciousness
Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people it is not an event but a process they undergo.
Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake 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.
Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 7th 2006
From Consciousness -- Living From Truth
There's no occasion in our working or leisure life when it's inappropriate or inefficient to live from the truth. The truth, so easy to see, is so hard to keep on seeing. But is life without it less hard? Is life lived from a many-sided lie a practical proposition?
It's never practical or healthy to live from a lie of any sort, but when that lie is about one's essential Nature -- look out! Or rather, look in!
Attend, as if for the first time, to the one Spot in the world that only you are in a position to inspect, to the Point that only you have inside information about, and witness its immediate explosion to worldwide dimensions.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 8th 2006
From Consciousness -- Living From Space
Do what you like to me, I will live from what I 'see' is here, not from what you 'say' is here. I will tell the world about it, and I will take the consequences.
Meanwhile, I swear to you that to live from this is really to live, which is to live Godly.
The primary and saving whole truth is that we are all living from our Space and not our face, all doing it right, all firmly and forever established in our True Nature.
To be at all is to be Being. In this sense all are awakened. In the last resort there's no other experience than this Experience. Only our Void Nature is aware.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 9th 2006
From Consciousness -- Energy
So thoroughly have we insulated the human from the cosmic that when at last they are brought together the effect may well prove overwhelming, as the pent-up energy is discharged in a flash of illumination revealing undreamed-of beauty.
Seeing Who I am is a strangely physical experience.
It is like an energy; it is like an empowering, a physical tone, an uplift, a rootedness, courage, a faring forth into the world.
It is enlivening.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 10th 2006
From Consciousness -- Outcome
The initial seeing into your Nature is simplicity itself: once noticed, Nothing is so obvious! But it is operative only in so far as it is practical. The results -- freedom from greed and hate and fear and delusion -- are assured only while the One they belong to isn't overlooked.
Absence is for acceptance as absence, not as the presence of a well-concealed gold mine. The gold comes out all right, but unsought, in its own good time and unpredictable shape.
it would be difficult to overstate the practical importance of this discovery, its consequences for everyday living.
All alienation, all separation, the many-sided threat of hostile things and persons and situations -- these are no more than bad dreams. Be patient. Don't demand that these or any other blessings be apparent at once.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 11th 2006
From Consciousness -- Yes!
I don't mean gritting your teeth and putting on a ghastly smile and saying YES! to all that's happening to you, regardless, as a duty and a discipline. That could lead to self-deception and harmful repression of your feelings -- to sweeping your personal garbage, and the world's, under a carpet that doesn't exist.
No: See things for what they are, exactly as given in your Emptiness -- in this Openness which manifestly has no preferences, no resistances or resentments, no checklist of good and bad things, no categories of beautiful and ugly, acceptable and unacceptable.
And see what comes from paying attention to the way you already are. See how perfectly you are built for this job of willing what is. See how proper and natural it is for you.
And just allow (don't force) the joy to arise, the peace that comes from having nothing to complain about. Given half a chance, it surely will, perhaps much sooner than you imagine possible.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 12th 2006
From Consciousness -- Mind At Large
My mind, with all its thoughts and feelings, is centrifugal. Ceasing to be a small, local, private, personal possession abstracted from the universe there, and shut up in a brain-box here (as if it could be!), my mind is at large, one with the universe, blown sky-high.
The world, so seen, is the same old world, yet utterly different.
It is replete with a mind and meaning I no longer abstract from it. It is It is 'all there', because I claim none of it for myself. It is sane. It makes sense. It is loved.
I'm free at last to enjoy people and the world just as they come, from this their Empty Source.
From: Open to the Source, by Douglas E. Harding. Edited by Richard Lang. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang. Reprinted by arrangement with Inner Directions, Carlsbad, California. www.InnerDirections.org
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July 13th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Process of Awakening
Only the first awakening, the first glimpse of consciousness without thought, happens by grace, without any doing on your part.
If you find these daily offerings incomprehensible or meaningless, it has not yet happened to you. If something within you responds to them, however, if you somehow recognize the truth in them, it means the process of awakening has begun. Once it has done so, it cannot be reversed, although it can be delayed by the ego.
For some people, the reading of these quotes will initiate the awakening process. For others, the function of these quotes is to help them recognize that they have already begun to awaken and to intensify and accelerate the process.
Another function of these quotes is to help people recognize the ego within them whenever it tries to regain control and obscure the arising awareness.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 14th 2006
From Consciousness -- Aware of Thought
For some, the awakening happens as they suddenly become aware of the kinds of thoughts they habitually think, especially persistent negative thoughts that they may have been identified with all of their lives.
Suddenly there is an awareness that is aware of thought but is not part of it.
What is the relationship between awareness and thinking?
Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 15th 2006
From Consciousness -- When Awakening Happens
Once you have had a glimpse of awareness or Presence, you know it firsthand. It is no longer just a concept in your mind.
You can then make a conscious choice to be present rather than to indulge in useless thinking. You can invite Presence into your life, that is to say, make space.
With the grace of awakening comes responsibility. You can either try to go on as if nothing has happened, or you can see its significance and recognize the arising of awareness as the most important thing that can happen to you.
Opening yourself to the emerging consciousness and bringing its light into this world then becomes the primary purpose of your life.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 16th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Mind of God
"I want to know the mind of God," Einstein said. "The rest are details."
What is the mind of God? Consciousness.
What does it mean to know the mind of God? To be aware. What are the details? Your outer purpose, and whatever happens outwardly.
So while you are perhaps still waiting for something significant to happen in your life, you may not realize that the most significant thing that can happen to a human being has already happened within you: the beginning of the separation process of thinking and awareness.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 17th 2006
From Consciousness -- Fulfilling Your Primary Purpose
Without living in alignment with your primary purpose, whatever purpose you come up with, even if it is to create heaven on earth, will be of the ego or become destroyed by time. Sooner or later, it will lead to suffering.
If you ignore your inner purpose, no matter what you do, even if it looks spiritual, the ego will creep into how you do it, and so the means will corrupt the end. The common saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" points to this truth.
In other words, not your aims or your actions are primary, but the state of consciousness out of which they come.
Fulfilling your primary purpose is laying the foundation for a new reality, a new earth. Once that foundation is there, your external purpose becomes charged with spiritual power because your aims and intentions will be one with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 18th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Great Arises Out of Small Things
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things.
Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it Iies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power.
Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power. Or it may be more true to say that it then has access to you and through you to this world.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 19th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Moment of Recognition
The trance of conditioned thoughts can be deep and complex, but it has no defense against something as simple as "stop." When you consciously recognize this point of stopping, you have a real choice.
Before that recognition, your thoughts are just mechanical actions of mind based on past conditioning, on desire, or on aversion. After that recognition, you can consciously choose to tell the truth about what is always present before thought, after thought, and during thought.
Can presence be thought? This question, in effect, crumbles the neat patterns of the mind. It causes a dropping, a release, and relief from the huge illusory world of thought. The balancing and re-balancing and re-forming and re-inventing of what you call "me" is only a thought, with another thought processed on top of that, and then another thought.
The moment of recognizing what cannot be thought is the moment of recognizing who you are. It is a moment of the mind's surrender to silence.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 20th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Still Mind
I speak a lot about stopping, but perhaps I haven't yet really spoken about it in a way that can be understood.
Stopping is, first of all, recognizing that as thoughts arise you have a choice: your mind can either follow the thoughts or be still, letting them arise without touching them.
My invitation to stop is to not build thought upon thought, to not fantasize or replay old events.
The choice is for the mind to be still, and in that choice is the possibility of recognizing what is always still, whether there are thoughts or no thoughts.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 21st 2006
From Consciousness -- To Stop Is Effortless
Stopping first occurs by recognizing the activity of the mind and not following it.
Not following mind activity is different from resisting the mind or repressing thoughts. Not following thought has a relaxing, opening quality.
Although it may feel unfamiliar, and the fear of the unfamiliar may in itself generate mind activity, to stop following thoughts is effortless.
In following thoughts and further spinning our stories, the simple and profound ease of being is overlooked.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 22nd 2006
From Consciousness -- Tied to the Truth
My invitation in this moment is to do nothing. A thought may appear -- do nothing with it.
Relax into any thought or emotion that arises, and allow the natural ease, the natural truth of who you are to take precedence over the thought.
In this stopping, you can freshly recognize the truth of what is always here, the truth of who you are. Now, in this moment, with your mind, choose that truth.
Tie your mind to that truth so that whatever challenges may appear, they meet a mind that is tied to the truth, a truth that is confirmed whenever the mind stops.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 23rd 2006
From Consciousness -- Your True Face
Stopping is not a practice. It is simply the opportunity to see that within this seemingly endless flow of thoughts, there is a choice to not follow the thoughts.
In not following thoughts, the mind stops and what is here, what is silent, and what is always stopped can be revealed.
In an instant of recognizing the silence that is always here, you recognize your true face. You recognize the presence of God. You realize truth.
Then you can address the challenges of life, of bodily pain, emotional turmoil, or mental confusion, with greater clarity and insight, because you no longer identify these states with who you are.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 24th 2006
From Consciousness -- God's Theatre
You are existence itself. Existence is consciousness, which is alive, and in love with itself. This theatre of you, me, circumstances, emotions, good events, and bad events is God's theatre.
It is not to be avoided, but enjoyed. It is to thrill with, to weep with, but also to recognize, "Oh my God, what a play! What a theatre!" -- and in that recognition, to know who you are.
You, as consciousness, are the stage upon which the actors move, the screen upon which the film of life is projected, and the animating force present in each actor.
Whoever you imagine yourself to be, whatever role you imagine yourself to play, the truth of who you are now is deeper than that role, closer than that role, and also beyond that role. Not who you will be someday, but right now: who you are and have always been.
Gangaji -- The Diamond In Your Pocket www.gangaji.org
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July 25th 2006
From Consciousness -- One Small Error
Jesus was referring to the power of Being when he said, "It is not I but the Father within me who does the works." And "I can of my own self do nothing.''
Anxiety, stress, and negativity cut you off from that power. The illusion that you are separate from the power that runs the universe returns. You feel yourself to be alone again, struggling against something or trying to achieve this or that.
But why did anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. You forgot your main purpose.
One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 26th 2006
From Consciousness -- The Power of Life
Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called "God."
As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny.
Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 27th 2006
From Consciousness -- Rootedness in Being
The sapling doesn't want anything because it is at one with the totality, and the totality acts through it. "Look the lilies of the field, how they grow" said Jesus, "they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.''
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. It is as surrendered in death as it is in life.
It senses, no matter how obscurely, its rootedness in Being, the formless and eternal one Life.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 28th 2006
From Consciousness -- A Deeper Purpose
Be true to life by being true to your inner purpose. As you become present and thereby total in what you do, your actions become charged with spiritual power.
At first there may be no noticeable change in what you do -- only the how changes.
Your primary purpose is now to enable consciousness to flow into what you do. The secondary purpose is whatever you want to achieve through the doing.
Whereas the notion of purpose before was always associated with future, there is now a deeper purpose that can only be found in the present, through the denial of time.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 29th 2006
From Consciousness -- A Unifying Field of Awareness
When you meet with people, at work or wherever it may be, give them your fullest attention. You are no longer there primarily as a person, but as a field of awareness, of alert Presence.
The original reason for interacting with the other person -- buying or selling something, requesting or giving information, and so on -- now becomes secondary.
The field of awareness that arises between you becomes the primary purpose for the interaction. That space of awareness becomes more important than what you may be talking about, more important than physical or thought objects. The human Being becomes more important than the things of this world.
The arising of that unifying field of awareness between human beings is the most essential factor in relationships on the new earth.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 30th 2006
From Consciousness -- A Sense of Quality
The conventional notion of success is concerned with the outcome of what you do.
Some say that success is the result of a combination of hard work and luck, or determination and talent, or being in the right place at the right time: While any of these may be determinants of success, they are not its essence.
What the world doesn't tell you -- because it doesn't know -- is that you cannot 'become' successful. You can only 'be' successful. Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.
And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action. Quality implies care and attention, which come with awareness. Quality requires your Presence.
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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July 31st 2006
From Consciousness -- This One Step
As you already know, your secondary or outer purpose lies within the dimension of time, while your main purpose is inseparable from the Now and therefore requires the negation of time.
How are they reconciled? By realizing that your entire life journey ultimately consists of the step you are taking at this moment.
There is always only this one step, and so you give it your fullest attention. This doesn't mean you don't know where you are going; it just means this step is primary, the destination secondary.
And what you encounter at your destination once you get there depends on the quality of this one step. Another way of putting it: What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now:
Eckhart Tolle -- A New Earth www.eckharttolle.com
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