The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

Question 1

• Free yourself from enslavement to the mind and enter into an enlightened state of consciousness.
• Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but everybody is suffering from it so it’s considered normal. Thinking has become a disease. Most people live with a tormentor in their head which drains them of vital energy.
• Take any routine activity and give it your fullest attention so that it becomes an end in itself. Be totally present. The present moment holds the key to liberation. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.
• The single most important step is to learn to disidentify from your mind. Don’t take your mind too seriously. Make it a habit to ask yourself: what’s going on inside of me at the moment?
• Once you have understood the basic principle of being the watcher of what happens inside you, you have at your disposal the most potent transformational tool.
• You are in the here and now whilst your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.
• The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete or true present danger.
• As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot be truly at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled.
• Compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification. To the ego the present hardly exists; it’s only past and future which are important.
• When you are fully present your mind will be sharper and more focussed.
• To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfilment. It represents the most profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine.
• The promise of salvation is not in some illusory future, but is here right now.

Answer 1

• We need to become capable of breaking out of inherited collective mind-patterns that have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.
• Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.
• Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance.
• You have the power to stop the continuous monologues and dialogues. The voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited.
• Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
• About 80 to 90% 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.
• Realise deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
• Once you have understood the basic principle of being present as the watcher of what happens inside you - and you “understand” it by experiencing it - you have at your disposal the most potent transformational tool.
• Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending?
• An intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing.
• As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot be truly at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled.

Question 2

• To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live most exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and unwillingness to honour and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfilment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
• Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Past and future have no reality of their own.
• Psychological time is a mental disease if you look at its collective manifestations. They occur, for example, in the form of ideologies such as communism, national socialism or any nationalism, or rigid religious belief systems, which operate under the implicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means.
• Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
• Being free of psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the need to become someone.
• To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfilment. It represents the most profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine.
• Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their “here” is never good enough.
• Accept the consequences of your decisions. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.
• Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there”, or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.
• Your mind may say “You should be working. You are wasting time.” Observe the mind. Smile at it.

Answer 2

• “One day I’ll make it.” Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment as a means to an end? Are you waiting to start living?
• “Large-scale waiting” is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”
• Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future.
• Every outer purpose is doomed to “fail” sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.
• The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet. As long as you are run by the egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity.
• We tend to disassociate from our bodies. In truth, we don’t have bodies. We are bodies.
• Most people don’t know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.
• Time is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You “get” there by realising that you are there already. This may be hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future.
• Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher.
• The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.
• Many people never realise that there can be no “salvation” in anything they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realise it, often become world-weary and depressed.