02/06/2025
“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.”
“The egoic self is always engaged in seeking. It is seeking more of this or that to add to itself, to make itself feel more complete. This explains the ego’s compulsive preoccupation with future.”
“Whenever you become aware of yourself “living for the next moment,” you have already stepped out of that egoic mind pattern, and the possibility of choosing to give your full attention to this moment arises simultaneously.”
“By giving your full attention to this moment, an intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life.”~~
~Eckhart Tolle
Excerpt from Stillness Speaks
art: Erica Wexler