What’s the best spirituality book of all time? Do a quick Google search and you’ll find one book from the SBNR era comes up more than any other: The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. First published in 1997, The Power of Now has sold over 16 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 languages.
Now 76 years of age, Tolle has written only a handful of books over his lifetime and none since a picture book in 2009. It’s as if he said all he had to say in The Power of Now, with his follow-up books being riffs on his central themes. One such book is Stillness Speaks: Whispers of Now in which he distilled the key thoughts from The Power of Now into a series of short chapters.
If you’ve seen Tolle during one of his many appearances on Oprah, you’ll know he comes across as someone who has figured out how life works. As one book critic said about Tolle, he “puts us in touch with the deepest source of our being.”He reveals who we are at our core and how we can settle into the truest version of ourselves.
Perhaps Tolle’s most important message: We need to keep our ego in check.
What’s the problem with the ego? Plenty. It overanalyzes. It overreacts. It complains a lot. And we often do nothing to control it. Sam Harris compares it to letting a maniac in your house who follows you from room to room shouting at you. And if this happens to you, you’re not alone, this voice is a constant companion for many of us.
Tolle identifies the nagging narrator in our heads as “the egoic self.” The ego is a voice you might falsely identify as yourself, “a mind-made me” in the words of Tolle. But it’s not the real you. There’s another voice that lives within you—the deep and steady awareness at your core that is the real you.
In Stillness Speaks, Tolle tells us that when we place the egoic voice in charge, it’s hard to feel real peace or contentment. That’s due to the unsteady nature of the ego. Your moments of happiness are fleeting, because the ego is always moving on to the next thing, never satisfied, always looks for new conflicts and conquests.
Tolle has plenty else to say in Stillness Speaks. I’ve identified what I believe are the most important themes from that book and edited them down to ten key points. What’s left is the essence of Tolle’s teachings on how being still can help us realize the power of being in “the Now.”
10 Key Teachings from Eckhart Tolle
- Find your inner stillness. Get in touch with your innermost self. Rest there.
- Embrace the silence: Listen and pay attention to the silence within you and around you. It is through this silence and stillness that you connect with your inner being.
- Pay attention to the gaps. Observe the spaces between your thoughts. The space between words in a conversation. The space between your in-breath and out-breath. These gaps are doorways to inner peace.
- Be still and listen. Wisdom comes with the ability to be still, look and listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the intelligence within you. Let this stillness direct your words and actions.
- Recognize the ego. Acknowledge the incessant chatter in your head, the voice that pretends to be you and won’t stop speaking. Then…
- Step back from the chatter. Realize that you are not the ego. You are the awareness that observes the voice of the ego. You are the deeper “I” that has nothing to do with the past or the future. The deeper ‘I,’ the real you, lives in the Now.
- Learn from nature. Observe the stillness of trees and flowers. Allow nature to teach you the art of being present. When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself.
- Realize you are much vaster and deeper than your thoughts. You are not your thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. You are not the content of your life. You are life. You are the space in which all things happen. You are consciousness.
- Embrace the Now.The present moment, the moment right now, is all you truly have. Drop all thoughts of past or future.
- Make the Now the foundation of your life. When you are aligned with the Now and it is your primary focus, your life unfolds with ease.