Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks (and Shri Mataji's Thoughtless Awareness) can be seen as a revival for the present age of the oldest form of recorded spiritual teachings

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Introduction (from the book):

 

A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the

conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add

to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The

only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which

separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you

already know in the depth of your being. The spiritual teacher is

there to uncover and reveal to you that dimension of inner depth that

is also peace.

 

If you come to a spiritual teacher — or this book — looking for

stimulating ideas, theories, beliefs, intellectual discussions, then

you will be disappointed. In other words: if you are looking for food

for thought, you won't find it, and you will miss the very essence of

the teaching, the essence of this book, which is not in the words but

within yourself. It is good to remember that, to feel that, as you

read. The words are no more than signposts. That to which they point

is not to be found within the realm of thought, but a dimension

within yourself that is deeper and infinitely vaster than thought. A

vibrantly alive peace is one of the characteristics of that

dimension, so whenever you feel inner peace arising as you read, the

book is doing its work and fulfilling its function as your teacher:

it is reminding you of who you are and pointing the way back home.

 

This is not a book to be read from cover to cover and then put away.

Live with it, pick it up frequently, and more importantly, put it

down frequently, or spend more time holding it than reading it. Many

readers will feel naturally inclined to stop reading after each

entry, to pause, reflect, become still. It is always more helpful and

more important to stop reading than to continue reading. Allow the

book to do its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your

repetitive and conditioned thinking.

 

The form of this book can be seen as a revival for the present age of

the oldest form of recorded spiritual teachings: the sutras of

ancient India. Sutras are powerful pointers to the truth in the form

of aphorisms or short sayings, with little conceptual elaboration.

The Vedas and Upanishads are the early sacred teachings recorded in

the form of sutras, as are the words of the Buddha. The sayings and

parables of Jesus, too, when taken out of their narrative context,

could be regarded as sutras, as well as the profound teachings

contained in the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom.

The advantage of the sutra form lies in its brevity. It does not

engage the thinking mind more than is necessary. What it doesn't say –

but only points to – is more important than what it says. The sutra-

like character of the writings in this book is particularly marked in

Chapter One ( " Silence & Stillness " ), which contains only the briefest

of entries. This chapter already contains the essence of the entire

book and may be all that some readers require. The other chapters are

there for those who need a few more signposts.

 

Just as the ancient sutras, the writings contained within this book

are sacred and have come out of a state of consciousness we may call

stillness. Unlike those ancient sutras, however, they don't belong to

any one religion or spiritual tradition, but are immediately

accessible to the whole of humanity. There is also an added sense of

urgency here. The transformation of human consciousness is no longer

a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals,

but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself. At the present

time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the

new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse

and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent

because it makes so much " noise " .

 

This book, of course, uses words which in the act of reading become

thoughts in your mind. But those are not ordinary thoughts —

repetitive, noisy, self-serving, clamoring for attention. Just like

every true spiritual teacher, just like the ancient sutras, the

thoughts within this book don't say: " Look at me " , but " Look beyond

me. " Because the thoughts came out of stillness, they have power —

the power to take you back into the same stillness from which they

arose. That stillness is also inner peace, and that stillness and

peace is the essence of your Being. It is the stillness that will

save and transform the world.

 

 

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Quotes:

 

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with

yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the

world.

 

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from

stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

 

* * *

 

The mind exists in a state of " not enough " and so is always greedy

for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and

restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more

stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being

satisfied.

 

When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind's hunger by picking up

a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the

web, going shopping, or — and this is not uncommon — transferring the

mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it

briefly by ingesting more food.

 

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to

be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there

is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little

at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of

boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even

boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

 

You discover that a " bored person " is not who you are. Boredom is

simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an

angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are

not " yours, " not personal. They are conditions of the human mind.

They come and go.

 

Nothing that comes and goes is you.

" I am bored. " Who knows this?

" I am angry, sad, afraid. " Who knows this?

You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

 

* * *

 

The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever

comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth. At best, it can

point to it. For example, it can say: " All things are intrinsically

one (The Pearl of Great Price). " That is a pointer, not an

explanation. Understanding these words means feeling deep within you

the truth to which they point.

 

* * *

 

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you

identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested

with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made " me. " That

mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why

fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating

forces.

 

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.

 

Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

 

* * *

 

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many,

many moments. Each day of your life appears to consists of thousands

of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more

deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not " this

moment? "

 

This one moment — Now — the only thing you can never escape from, the

one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter

how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it's always Now.

 

Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, become

friendly with it?

 

* * *

 

Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters

absolutely.

 

It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It

matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are

educated or not educated. It matter whether you are rich or poor — it

certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things

matter, relatively speaking, but they don't matter absolutely.

 

There is something that matters more than any of those things and

that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived

entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.

 

* * *

 

For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a

house, become an expert, make a cup of tea. . . .Time is useless,

however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that

really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are

beyond the surface self — beyond your name, your physical form, your

history, your story.

 

You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where

you can find yourself is in the Now.

 

Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the

future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is

what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until

you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.

 

* * *

 

Most people's lives are run by desire and fear.

 

Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be

yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and

thereby becoming diminished and being less.

 

These two movements obscure the fact that Being cannot be given or

taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, Now.

 

* * *

 

Whenever you are able, have a " look " inside yourself to see whether

you are unconsciously creating conflict between the inner and the

outer, between your external circumstances at that moment — where you

are, who you are with, or what you are doing — and your thoughts and

feelings. Can you feel how painful it is to internally stand in

opposition to what is?

 

When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to

give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.

 

* * *

 

Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words — the

realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness,

particularly into your close relationships.

 

No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that

comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature

together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home,

become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot

and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is

already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.

 

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated

by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If

stillness is there, it can contain anything.

 

* * *

 

As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions,

and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then

either want or fear something from the other person.

 

What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain,

recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of

self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have,

or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the

case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.

 

When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention —

instead of using it as a means to an end — you go beyond the ego and

beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end,

the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give

your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take

past and future out of the relationship, except for practical

matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you

relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them — your

interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past — and

are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear.

Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.

 

How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships.

Love does not want or fear anything.

 

* * *

 

To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need

to know anything about them — their past, their history, their story.

We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-

conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different

modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless.

One operates through thought, the other through stillness.

 

Knowing about is helpful for practical purposes. On that level, we

cannot do without it. When it is the predominant modality in

relationships, however, it becomes very limiting, even destructive.

Thoughts and concepts create an artificial barrier, a separation

between human beings. Your interactions are then not rooted in Being,

but become mind-based. Without the conceptual barriers, love is

naturally present in all human interactions.

 

* * *

 

True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the

relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of

stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship.

But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a

person's attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may

be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they

may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.

 

True listening goes far beyond auditory perception. It is the arising

of alert attention, a space of presence in which the words are being

received. The words now become secondary. They may be meaningful or

they may not make sense. Far more important than what you are

listening to is the act of listening itself, the space of conscious

presence that arises as you listen. That 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.

 

* * *

 

When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward

them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within

you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the

essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who

you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection

of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty

can never leave you, although all outer forms will.

 

* * *

 

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if

you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this

moment.

 

This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.

Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no.

 

If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you

as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be

reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then

comes a point when it has served its purpose.

 

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

 

 

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Reviews:

 

Once again Eckhart Tolle brings us a gift of enlightenment that

speaks to our soul. I read this book from cover to cover, enthralled

by the simplicity of the messages and their important application to

my life. What I love about this book is how wonderful it is to go

back to and re-read even a simple sentence, and how much of a

difference that sentence makes when our ego has us caught in

appearances, rather than in simply Being.

 

Thank you Eckhart Tolle for adding much needed Light to our world.

This book is a classic, a wonderful contribution, and will certainly

raise the peacefulness within the consciousness of humanity for all

who are wise to take in the messages you brought us. Highly

recommended. -- Barbara Rose, author of: If God Was Like Man

 

* * *

 

As an author in this same genre, I really appreciate the courage it

took for Eckhart Tolle to write this. However, I do believe that only

those who have come to the point in their spiritual practice where

they are working at humbling themselves and opening to the more vast

reality that is beyond thinking and conceptualizing will appreciate

it. Globally speaking, this is a pretty small audience. Mr. Tolle had

to have known that many, who are still seeking philosophical or

psychological entertainment as a means to enlightenment, simply

wouldn't understand this work. He had to have known that writing in

this way wouldn't/couldn't be as popular as his first book. And yet

it seems he followed his heart to produce the work that he felt he

needed to produce. This has been inspirational for me.

Reviews here on Amazon seem to hold considerable sway over potential

readers - but I wouldn't let the negative reviews here deter you from

exploring this work. I would encourage anyone who feels drawn to go

deeper from where The Power of Now was able to take you, to really

open your heart and follow Eckhart's recommendations for slowing

digesting the words he's presented here. Let them sink in deep. I've

received precious gifts from this book and believe with all my heart

that others can and will as well... -- Shannon Duncan, Author of

Present Moment Awareness

 

* * *

 

This is another great gift from the delightful Mr. Tolle, a soul who

has done the nearly impossible: achieved stillness in a human

incarnation.

I have called the Power of Now the best self-help book ever and have

listened to it over a hundred times. I always hear something new

because my ego feels threatened and doesn't want me to learn this

stuff.

 

My ego almost fooled me once again when I first listened to Stillness

Speaks. It said to me " Eckhart is just rehashing stuff in aphorisms " .

But soon I found that there is much richness and wisdom to be mined

here and if I can just take the principles to heart and start

practicing them I might very well achieve inner peace in this

lifetime. The deeper truth about this work is that it is divinely

inspired and is of incredible depth and value.

 

What we do with this priceless gift is up to us. -- Michael Indgin

 

 

* * *

 

If you are new to Eckhart Tolle, I would suggest 'The Power of Now'

and the wonderful 'Realizing the Power of Now' as introductions to

this amazing material.

Personally, after studying Mr Tolle's work for several years I got to

a point where no more explanation was really necessary. I think he

would say that it's essentially a simple message, but it can be

difficult for it to get through our years of habitual and continual

mental chatter.

 

Once you finally find that quiet place, a wonderful little handbook

of 'signposts' like 'Stillness Speaks' is really all you need to help

get back in that quiet place when you lose it.

 

I highly recommend this book to those who have experienced for

themselves the stillness that Eckhart tries to help us find in

ourselves.

 

Great stuff! -- an amazon.com reviewer

 

* * *

 

Life is full of contradictions. I prefer to refer to them as " divine

dichotomies. " A divine dichotomy is when two apparently contradictory

truths exist simultaneously in the same space. For instance, the idea

that stillness speaks.

 

Everyone who has done any kind of contemplative work in her or his

life is aware of this dichotomy. From stillness can come the loudest

voice, the grandest message, the greatest wisdom.

 

Now comes a book that is not a book, to express and demonstrate this

dichotomy fully and wonderfully. Its title is (aha!) Stillness

Speaks, and its author, Eckhart Tolle, is the person who gave us The

Power of Now. I call this " a book that is not a book " because this is

not a tome that takes us from one place and drops us off in another.

It is not a story with a beginning and an end, nor is it a treatise

with an outline and a pathway of logic that takes us from here to

there.

 

Stillness Speaks (New World Library, $17.) is nothing more — and

nothing less — than a series of thoughts. These are ideas that have

occurred to Tolle. I suspect these ideas have occurred to many

people. For most of us, however, these wonderful wisdoms passed

through our minds and kept on going. Tolle remained still enough to

notice them. He recorded them in his moments of clarity. And he has

placed them in print.

 

But a word here, please. Do not expect this book to track with any

kind of logic. Its purpose, as I alluded to before, is not to take

you to any place, to convince you of any idea, or to show you

anything in particular. Its purpose is simply to allow you to be with

the wisdom and the insight, and then to allow you to see for yourself

where — if anywhere — that takes you.

 

" In other words, if you are looking for food for thought, you won't

find it, and you will miss the very essence of the teaching, the

essence of this book, which is not in the words but within yourself, "

Tolle writes in his introduction. " The words are no more than

signposts. That to which they point is not to be found within the

realm of thought, but a dimension within yourself that is deeper and

infinitely vaster than thought. "

 

And so, Stillness Speaks is a gentle journey, one that could take you

to a spectacular and very special place of new awareness and deeper

understanding. Yet one that leads nowhere in particular.

 

Tolle is very much aware that it is in the nowhere that the

everywhere exists, that it is in the nothing that everything is

found. This is not an easy concept for most people to grasp. It

becomes easier through visiting these entries, placed under headings

such as " Beyond the Thinking Mind, " " Who You Truly Are, " " Acceptance

and Surrender, " " Relationships, " " Suffering and the End of

Suffering. "

 

The trick with Tolle's work is to not think about it. Most people,

the author says, are lost in thought. The idea is to be out of your

mind and into your experience of exactly what is happening, right

here, right now.

 

This is what we are invited to do with the material in Stillness

Speaks. If we think about it, if we begin to analyze it, if we start

to argue with it or try to " figure it out, " we'll become lost in

thought. No one gets anywhere trying to figure out a sunrise. A

sunrise is something you just be with. And you get from it whatever

you get from it. If you try to analyze a sunrise, the experience the

sunrise has for you will go away.

 

Stillness Speaks feels to me like a sunrise of the soul. Thinking

about it, analyzing it, will make it go away. Even writing this

review of it has been difficult for me, because the more I say about

it, the less I say about it. So I'm going to stop trying to talk

about what's in it, and talk just a bit more about what experience it

produced in me.

 

Peace.

 

Joy.

 

Aliveness.

 

Serenity.

 

Excitement, again, about Life.

 

Happiness.

 

Sureness, and a sense of having something confirmed that I felt I

knew, deep within me.

 

Oneness, unity.

 

And, not the least of my feelings, gratitude. Tolle has given me a

peek into his mind, and thus into my own. His words reminded me about

the sacred place that exists between us, where we mix our being and

share our common essence and produce our collective experience.

His " book that isn't " allowed me to venture forth more solidly, more

confidently, and more joyously to play my individuated role in our co-

created reality. Stillness Speaks has enriched my life. -- Neale

Donald Walsch, Author of Conversations with God