Bizah and Tonga had finished with their schooling and chores for the day, so they decided to sit down by the lake.

Tonga was the first to break the silence.

“Bizah,” he said, “my sister just lost her husband and is in the deepest grief imaginable. She is in anguish night and day. She says she doesn’t want to be here anymore, doesn’t want to go on living alone without her husband.”

One  morning, Bizah went to his Master to admit he had just discovered that he had  been making up his bed incorrectly for the last four years.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Bizah,” said the Master. “That way was the way to do it then. This is the way to do it now. You have been a student long enough to learn the better way. This makes me happy.”

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

How do you know whether you have surrendered to the present moment with all it’s discomfort—or, conversely, with all it’s joy?

For the fact is that we resist the bliss of being every bit as much as we don’t like pain—indeed, more so, which is why the world is in the sad state in which we find it.

Eckhart Tolle in his book Stillness Speaks gives us a simple test:

When we go through a negative experience usually we form a belief as: “I have a problem,” or, “I am not able to make it,” or “I have to run out of it.” If you believe in these statements, you are allowing imprints in your energy field, and they start having a separate life from the rest of your being. ‘Problems’ always trigger intense emotional reactions of being flooded, in between being numb and unable to feel fully alive; it keeps reinforcing non-thriving, untruthful negative beliefs about you and life; it motivates destructive maladaptive behaviors.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

When you enter into the place of stillness that’s the essence of your being, you step into a paradigm that’s the exact opposite of how most of our world runs.

As you observe the world from this still center, you begin to see what a farce the world’s way is. You understand why spiritual masters like Jesus said “be in the world, but not of it.”

From politics to economics to religion, the world runs on ego. And each ego is on a stage of its own imagining.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Do you find yourself getting into arguments, or even verbal fights with others?

It’s a proclivity of the ego to do combat. We engage in it as individuals, as groups, and as nations. Sometimes it spills over into real wars, not just rhetoric.

This week in the news North Korea is threatening South Korea with a nuclear nightmare if the South, Japan, and the U.S. continue to provoke them, as they see it.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Many of us are stressed out and long for a bit of peace and quiet. For many, a vacation is a chance to get away from things so that they can relax. It’s a chance for a break with their routine, an opportunity either for a change of pace or for relaxing and doing nothing for a change.

Given the economic situation at the moment, many are having to forgo their usual vacation. So the stress they are experiencing feels unrelenting.

Eckhart Tolle explains in Stillness Speaks that while the wisdom contained in ancient sutras was available only to certain groups, today these insights are being made available to the whole of humanity because there is “an added sense or urgency,” given that humans now have the technology to wreak unimaginable horror.

The Compassionate Eye is changing its direction from today. Eckhart Tolle wrote a book that followed The Power of Now—a second book, which was published before he wrote the book Oprah picked for her book club, A New Earth.

This book is called Stillness Speaks and it’s a wonderfully insightful and incredibly powerful read. So we are going to begin slowly working our way through it in this daily blog.