This is a curated selection of Eckhart Tolle quotes on free will (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Eckhart Tolle’s books (Amazon).
10 Eckhart Tolle Quotes on Free Will
“Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The seeing is the arising Presence. The moment you see the dysfunction, it begins to dissolve. Some people laugh out loud when they see this. With the seeing comes the power of choice – the choice of saying yes to the Now, of making it into your friend.” — Eckhart Tolle
“On the level of egoic unconsciousness, you are a conditioned entity—your mental-emotional makeup is totally conditioned by the past—and you are completely identified with the conditioning of your mind. In that state—that, spiritually speaking, is the ‘unconscious state’—it is obvious that there is no freedom at all because you are forced to act out the unconscious conditioning of your mind with which you are completely identified. Your actions are determined by your conditioned mind. You are forced to act as you do because there’s no choice—choice would imply some awareness.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Human beings are meant to move out of the unconscious state. If they are not moving out of the unconscious state, they create suffering. And, they will have to suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness, which eventually awakens them.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Then awareness comes in. The human being begins to awaken. Then it appears—I’m not saying it is the case, it appears—that freedom begins to be a possibility because you can choose to step out of the conditioning of your mind. You can recognize a conditioned thought, and you are no longer compelled to act it out because there is an awareness there. You can choose a certain course of action—not from the conditioning of your mind, but from presence. So, you can act and you have much more freedom, that before you could not have. Freedom comes with awareness. So, relative to the unconscious state, there is now freedom to act.” — Eckhart Tolle
“In relative terms, there is freedom relative to the unconscious state when you become more conscious. Even there, there is not absolute freedom because you do not exist as an independent entity. You are part of the web of interconnectedness that is the whole universe. So, in that sense, there is no freedom of choice of the individual because ultimately there is no individual.” — Eckhart Tolle
“You are connected with the totality of consciousness. You’re only an expression of the totality of consciousness. You are not really a separate entity. Was it Alan Watts who said, ‘In the same way that the wave is something that the ocean is doing, you are something that the whole universe is doing’? You realize that even there, one cannot say that you are choosing this. You are expression of consciousness, and consciousness, one could say, is ‘choosing’—and you think you are doing it.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Free will would be the illusion that we have absolute separateness—that you are a separate entity and that the totality is not moving through you. That’s an illusory view of things. The totality is continuously moving through you. You are an essential part of that. Since you are an essential part of the totality of life or consciousness, you cannot really ever truthfully say on the deepest level, ‘I have free will’—unless you equate the ‘I’ with the universal I which is ultimately the case. But, then what you experience is that the universal I, the intelligence, acts through you as you.” — Eckhart Tolle
“Everybody is doing their best. Nobody can act beyond their level of consciousness.” — Eckhart Tolle
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