“In most cases, we cannot begin to understand what role a seemingly senseless event may have within the totality of the cosmos but recognizing its inevitability within the vastness of the whole can be the beginning of an inner acceptance of what is and thus a realignment with the wholeness of life.”

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 10

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In most cases, we cannot begin to understand what role a seemingly senseless event may have within the totality of the …" by Eckhart Tolle?

Eckhart Tolle251

German writer 1948

Related quotes

“All of life and the cosmos can be seen as concinnous (harmoniously congruous, neat, elegant) wholes with a whole, unless in chaos; and, even then, chaos occurs (or is avoided) within systems (whether minute or vast) that are themselves balanced, or concinnous.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clear-cut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Source: Productive thinking, 1945, p. 84

“[T]his is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 231)

“Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Italian Report (1955)

“I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that… so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon.”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

Meaningoflife.tv interview, 2013

“Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

1880s, The Sentiment of Rationality (1882)
Context: Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

“The wholeness of life becomes fragmented through our thinking. Yet the totality of life has brought this event about. It is part of the web of interconnectedness that is the cosmos. This means whatever is could not be otherwise.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 10