Man made GOD in his own image

FROM ECKHART TOLLE

The past has no power over the present moment.�

�Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize
that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.�

�The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your
thoughts about it.�

�Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the
foundation for all abundance.�

�Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than
defending or hanging on.�

�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.�

�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.�

�To love is to recognize yourself in another.�

�Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.�

�Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW
the primary focus of your life.�

�Life is the dancer and you are the dance.�

�You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose
something that you are.�

�You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but
by realizing who you are at the deepest level.�

�Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.�

�Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.�

�A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with
its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is
an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in
which there is no wanting whatsoever.�

�Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.�

�The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought
about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them
from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.�

�Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life
is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.�

�Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and
everything to do with your state of consciousness.�

�Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose�

�Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes.
Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner
peace does not.�

�This, too, will pass.�

�Time isn�t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you
perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of
time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on
time�past and future�the more you miss the Now, the most precious
thing there is.�

�Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as
if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.�

�Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective.
It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity
is not the love of God but the "love" of ego. However, the intensity
with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who
reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than
others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said
that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that
connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with
the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a
flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.�

�All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of
no-mind, from inner stillness.�

�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.�

�Always say �yes� to the present moment. What could be more futile,
more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what
could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and
always now? Surrender to what is. Say �yes� to life � and see how life
suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.�

�Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy
arises from within.�

�All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and
inner peace arise from beyond the mind.�

�Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people
have of you is inauthentic living.�

�Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have.�

�Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the
evolution of your consciousness.�

�Being must be felt. It can't be thought.�

�To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease,
and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things
being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet
when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of
your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people,
or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come
to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to
enjoy and appreciate them - while they last. All those things, of
course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with
dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with
ease.�

�If not now, when?�

�Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a
successful present moment.�

�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.�

�Awareness is the greatest agent for change.�

�Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have
been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a
mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a
mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.�

�If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.�

�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.�

�Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because
seeking is the antithesis of happiness�

�Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. � If the
structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up
re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.�

�...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of
salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.�

�What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.�

�Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing
conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out?�

�All problems are illusions of the mind.�

�Man made God in his own image...�