Eckhart Tolle

Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists. (Ch 7)

To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness.

...the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive. (Ch 8)

We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating–lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.

When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future.

Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are. Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home: I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am. (Ch 4)

To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

It has been said: wherever you go, there you are. In other words: you are here. Always. Is it so hard to accept that? (Ch 6)

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.(Ch 9)

The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of “a new heaven and a new earth." We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus.

When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war. (Ch 6)

We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be–to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now. (Ch 7)