Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Have you ever thought of your life as needing to be the way it has been up until this point?

Most humans live with a strong resistance to the state their find their lives to be in. They cannot conceive of things being required to be as they are because of the way everyone and everything is interconnected.

Eckhart Tolle tells us at the start of the tenth and final chapter of his book Stillness Speaks:

In the traditional Newtonian view of the universe, we are individuals with the capacity for free choice. The model used to describe such a universe is the classic clockwork machine. It’s a four-dimensional universe—three dimensions of space and one of time.

In such a clockwork universe, the outcome of our lives is self-determined, in a linear fashion. You make your choices, you reap the outcome. It’s a simple matter of cause and effect, and it places the responsibility for how your life turns out squarely on your shoulders.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make choices that aren’t influenced by less-than-helpful patterns that we picked up in childhood?

The reality is that most of the choices we make as human beings simply aren’t free choices. They are conditioned by emotional programming that runs relentlessly, and mostly undercover, deep within us.

How many of us have good intentions in all kinds of areas of our life, and yet if we look back sometime later, we see that most of our intentions went nowhere. That’s because we were unable to harness our will.

Personal freedom is a value those of us in what we refer to as the “free world” prize highly. Yet even in societies that call themselves free, real freedom eludes almost everyone.

The reason is that freedom requires a lot more than simply living in a “free country.” It’s about whether we are free within our own being.

How many of us can decide to change some aspect of our life, then just make the change?