Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Death appears to be a lonely journey. And yet there is actually nothing lonely about it.

You see, there is no loneliness in the world. There's isn't! We are all part of a vast fabric that is interwoven. 

We are connected up with reality, the cosmos, in more ways than we can imagine. Life is a vast tapestry, with each of us its threads. 

We appear on the surface to be discrete entities, separate, worlds unto ourselves. But we’re not.

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

In the British television soap EastEnders, an elderly character called Dot says that at lonely times in life, she always had herself, so that she was never totally lonely.

Her concern about the fact she’s aging is: what if she loses herself as she grows older?

All of us are going to lose what we think of as “ourselves.” It’s an inevitable part of aging. Eventually we shall irrevocably surrender up this mortal form we have experienced.

Once we are in touch with our authentic center, we discover that it’s nature is love. So much so that you might say love is what we are.

I’m not talking about love toward a particular person, a pet, something in nature, or an activity. I mean just love, with no object.

I don’t think we are used to thinking of love this way. We almost always want to tie it to someone or something that evokes love in us. We think love has to have an object.

In both the eastern and western spiritual traditions, all creativity arises out of nothingness.

Creation itself arises out of this nothingness.

In the West, the expression used for a very long time has been the Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing.”

In the East, such as in the Buddhist tradition, everything emerges out of what is referred to as “the Void.”

You might say that God, the source of all, is nothing.

When we make choices that aren’t smart and that get us into problems, there are consequences—often ones we can't foresee. Living life unconsciously can be an extremely painful way to do things.

At the same time, no choice is beyond redemption. We simply save ourselves a lot of pain when we awaken to our true being more quickly instead of having to be forced into it.

The last two days we’ve been learning from the insights in the movie The Guitar. Though it's fictional, it has much to teach us about becoming true to who we are.

I was surprised how many insights are in a movie I rented from Netflix that I knew nothing about. Called The Guitar, it illustrates how, if we are true to ourselves, doors can open that we never imagined.

Similarly, when we lack integrity in our actions, it can take us down some exceedingly painful paths—and yet even these can bring us where we need to go, if we are true to our essential being.