During the premiere episode of Oprah’s Lifeclass, Oprah opened up about one of her biggest regrets: wheeling out a wagon filled with fat after losing weight. During the live webcast that followed the show, Oprah was joined by author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle to discuss the false power of ego with viewers and members of the studio audience. Watch the complete conversation now.
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Tag Archive: Eckhart Tolle
Experience a work considered one of the greatest spiritual treasures of humanity, as Eckhart guides us through the transcendent Bhagavad Gita.
This ‘conversation’ answers Neale’s inquiry as to how to access to that level of awareness in our daily life 24/7, and whenever our ‘alarm clock’ tells us that our mind has taken over our life, we need to relinquish it voluntarily and invite PRESENCE and shift our attention to that place of grandeur inner awareness – knowing that the world creates moments of seduction that would get ourselves trapped in the attachment to our mind.
Enjoy the conversation.
evolutionarymystic.
Biography:
Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. With an early interest in religion and a deeply felt connection to spirituality, Neale spent the majority of his life thriving professionally, yet searching for spiritual meaning before beginning his now famous conversation with God. His With God series of books has been translated into 27 languages, touching millions of lives and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives.
Eckhart Tolle stops by Google for a fireside chat with Bradley Horowitz. The subject is: “Living with Meaning, Purpose and Wisdom in the Digital Age.”
KE: During my travels, one of the most frequently asked question is “What is it like to be in relationship with an enlightened being?” Why this question? Perhaps they have the idea or image of an ideal relationship,and want to know more about it. Perhaps their mind wants to project itself to a future time when they, too,will be in an ideal relationship and find themselves through it. What is it like to be in relationship with an enlightened being?
As long as I have the idea in my head “I have a relationship” or “I am in a relationship,” no matter with whom, I suffer. This I have learnt.With the concept of “relationship” come expectations, memories of past relationships, and further personally and culturally conditioned mental concepts of what a “relationship” should be like. Then I would try to make reality conform to these concepts. And it never does. And again I suffer. The fact of the matter is: there are no relationships. There is only the present moment, and in the moment there is only relating.How we relate, or rather how well we love, depends on how empty we are of ideas, concepts,expectations.
Recently, I asked Eckhart to say a few words on the ego’s search for “love relationships.” our conversation quickly went deeper to touch upon some of the most profound aspects of human existence.Here’s what he said:
ET: What is conventionally called “love” is an ego strategy to avoid surrender. You are looking to someone to give you that which can only come to you in the state of surrender. The ego uses that persona s a substitute to avoid having to surrender. The Spanish language is the most honest in this respect. It uses the same verb, te quiero, for “I love you” and “I want you.” To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.
The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of “not enough,” of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state.When the ego singles something out and says “I love” this or that, it’s an unconscious attempt to cover up or remove the deep-seated feelings that always accompany the ego: the discontent, the unhappiness, the sense of insufficiency that is so familiar.
For a little while, the illusion actually works. Then inevitably, at some point, the person you singled out, or made special in your eyes, fails to function as a cover up for your pain, hate, discontent or unhappiness which all have their origin in that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness. Then, out comes the feeling that was covered up, and it gets projected onto the person that had been singled out and made special – who you thought would ultimately “save you.” Suddenly love turns to hate.
The ego doesn’t realize that the hatred is a projection of the universal pain that you feel inside. The ego believes that this person is causing the pain. It doesn’t realize that the pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being – not being at one with yourself.The object of love is interchangeable, as interchangeable as the object of egoic wanting. Some people go through many relationships. They fall in love and out of love many times. They love a person for a while until it doesn’t work anymore, because no person can permanently cover up that pain.Only surrender can give you what you were looking for in the object of your love.
The ego says surrender is not necessary because I love this person. It’s an unconscious process of course. The moment you accept completely what is, something inside you emerges that had been covered up by egoic wanting. It is an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It is the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It is what you had been looking for in the love object. It is yourself. When that happens, a completely different kind of love is present which is not subject to love / hate. It doesn’t single out one thing or personas special. It’s absurd to even use the same word for it. Now it can happen that even in a normal love / hate relationship, occasionally, you enter the state of surrender.
Temporarily, briefly, it happens: you experience a deeper universal love and a complete acceptance that can sometimes shine through, even in an otherwise egoic relationship. If surrender is not sustained, however, it gets covered up again with the old egoic patterns. So, I’m not saying that the deeper, true love cannot be present occasionally, even in a normal love / hate relationship. But it is rare and usually short-lived.
Whenever you accept what is, something deeper emerges then what is. So, you can be trapped in the most painful dilemma, external or internal, the most painful feelings or situation, and the moment you accept what is, you go beyond it, you transcend it. Even if you feel hatred, the moment you accept that this is what you feel, you transcend it. It may still be there, but suddenly you are at a deeper place where it doesn’t matter that much anymore.The entire phenomenal universe exists because of the tension between the opposites. Hot and cold,growth and decay, gain and loss, success and failure, the polarities that are part of existence, and of course part of every relationship.
KE: Then it’s correct to say, we can never get rid of the polarities?
ET: We cannot get rid of polarities on the level of form. However, you can transcend the polarities through surrender. You are then in touch with a deeper place within yourself where, as it were, the polarities no longer exist. They continue to exist on the outer level. However, even there, something changes in the way in which the polarities manifest in your life when you are in a state of acceptance or surrender. The polarities manifest in a more benign and gentle way.The more unconscious you are, the more you are identified with form. The essence of unconsciousness is this:
identification with form, whether it is an external form (a situation, place, event or experience), a thought form or an emotion. The more attached to form, the more unsurrendered you are, and the more extreme, violent or harsh your experience of the polarities becomes.
There are people on this planet who live virtually in hell and on the same planet there are others who live a relatively peaceful life. The ones who are at peace inside will still experience the polarities, but in a much more benign way, not the extreme way in which many humans still experience them. So, the way in which the polarities are experienced does change. The polarities themselves cannot be removed, but one could say, the whole universe becomes somewhat more benevolent. It’s no longer so threatening. The world is no longer perceived as hostile, which is how the ego perceives it.
KE: If awakening or living a life in an awakened state does not change the natural order of things, duality,the tension between the opposites, what does living a life in the awakened state do? Does it affect the world, or only one’s subjective experience of the world?
ET: When you live in surrender, something comes through you into the world of duality that is not of this world.
KE: Does that actually change the outer world?
ET: Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world. Even if you find yourself in a conflict situation, there is an outflow of peace into the polarities. So then, something does change. There are some teachers or teachings that say, nothing changes. That is not the case. Something very important does change. That which is beyond form shines through the form, the eternal shines through the form into this world of form.
KE: Is it right to say that it is your lack of “reaction against,” your acceptance of the opposites of this world, that brings about changes in the way the opposites manifest?
ET: Yes. The opposites continue to happen, but they are not fueled by you anymore. What you said is a very important point: the “lack of reaction” means that the polarities are not fueled. This means, you often experience a collapse of the polarities, such as in conflict situations. No person, no situation is made into an “enemy.”
KE: So, the opposites, instead of becoming strengthened, become weakened. And perhaps this is how they begin to dissolve.
ET: That’s right. Living in that way is the beginning of the end of the world
Eckhart Tolle was a research scholar at Cambridge University, when at age 29, a spiritual transformation changed the course of his life, marking the start of an intense inward journey that led him first to become a counselor and spiritual teacher and, later, the author of a remarkable book, “The Power of Now” . In a world that desperately needs freedom from suffering and violence, Eckhart Tolle has brought forth a powerful, healing message: Accept the now moment fully. Herein lies the path to peace.
Science of Mind: A deep yearning is felt for that which is true, enduring, and trustworthy. Is it discoverable?
Eckhart Tolle: It’s perhaps more attainable now than at any other time in the history of humanity.Transformational consciousness until recently has been a luxury on the planet. A few individuals here and there underwent transformation but never on a large scale. It wasn’t necessary for the planet. Neither the survival of humanity nor of the planet was threatened before now, although there already existed the madness or insanity inherent in the human mind—by which I mean the thinking mind, not the deeper consciousness. This madness has been going on for a long time, but it has never threatened the survival of humanity.
It’s only when science and technology arrived that this threat began. The tools of science and technology amplified the effects of the madness of the egoic mind. So the survival of the planet began to be threatened, and with it the survival of humanity. The planet will not survive another hundred years of the same state of consciousness that produced the external effects of recent history. Imagine the twenty-first century being a continuation of the destruction and violence we’ve seen. It’s no longer a question of the luxury of a few individuals here and there becoming liberated. It has become a necessity.Humanity as a species must change dramatically and radically or our survival is at stake..
SM: Are you hopeful about an awakening of consciousness?
ET: Things are both getting better and getting worse. The madness is accelerating but an acceleration of the new consciousness is also coming in. However, this latter development is less apparent when you listen to the media. The media still mostly reflects what is happening in the sphere of the old consciousness.
SM: In your book you suggest that despair and the intensification of suffering can sometimes catalyze enlightenment.
ET: Many people know this from their own lives, especially if they have gone through intense suffering or great loss, or faced death in one way or another— either their own physical death, a psychological death,or the death of somebody very close to them. Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as “me.” Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching. We’re suddenly open to it, because it reaches the deeper levels of our being. Something from within—not from our conditioned mind but from the deeper level of unconditioned consciousness—responds immediately.Often all that is needed to evoke this response is to listen to one statement of Truth and immediately there’s a response. Because we all carry the Truth within us as our essence, we recognize it immediately.
SM: Do you see the recent events, as terrible as they’ve been, as having the potential of bringing greater enlightenment?
ET: Yes, I do. Especially for those of us living in the Western culture, death to a large extent is still a taboo subject. It’s considered something dreadful that shouldn’t be happening. It’s usually denied. The fact of death is not faced. What we don’t realize in Western culture is that death has a redemptive dimension. There is another side to death. Whether death happens through an act of violence to a large number of people or to an individual, whether death comes prematurely through illness or accident, or whether death comes through old age, death is always an opening. So a great opportunity comes whenever we face death.
SM: Why is death an opportunity?
ET: Death means that a form of life dissolves or that the imminent possibility of dissolution exists, whether through our own death or through illness or old age. When someone dies to old ideas, there’s a psychological death. Thought-forms with which one had identified as “me”—an egoic identity—suddenly collapse. In the face of death, especially violent death, things don’t make sense anymore. So death is the dissolution of either physical form or psychological form. And when a form dissolves, always something shines through that had been obscured by the form. This is the formless One Life, the formless One Consciousness. Death is the moment of form dissolving. When that dissolving is not resisted, an opening appears into the dimension of the sacred, into the One formless, unmanifested Life. This is why death is such an incredible opportunity. There is no transformation of human consciousness without the dissolving that death brings.
SM: How did your own experience of death happen?
ET: I was deeply identified with a very unhappy, egoic entity I believed was “me.” For years I lived in depression and continuous anxiety. One night I couldn’t stand it anymore. The thought came into my mind, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” Then I saw that my thought contained a subject and an object: I and myself. I stood back from the thought and asked, “Who is the self that I cannot live with?There must be two here. Who am I, and who is the self that is impossible to live with?” In that moment,that mind-based sense of self collapsed. What remained was I—not the form “I,” not the story-based “I,”the mental story of me—but a deeper sense of being, of presence. I died that night psychologically.
The mind-made entity died. I knew myself as pure consciousness, prior to form before it becomes something,before it becomes a thought, before it becomes a life-form: the One Life, the One Consciousness that is prior to egoic identity. Then came enormous peace. This is the redemptive nature of death. Through death you find yourself, because you no longer identify with form. You realize you are not the form with which you had identified—neither the physical nor the psychological form of “me.” That form goes. It dissolves and who you are beyond form emerges through the opening where that form was. One could almost say that every form of life obscures God.
SM: How is it possible to have an awareness of pure essence while still in physical form?
ET: You do so by relating to outer forms no longer through the labeling mind but through an inner sense of stillness. Your sense perceptions happen within that field of stillness, which is pure consciousness.Suddenly the whole world is perceived as very peaceful, because when you perceive other life forms from that deeper level—when they’re not being immediately labeled by the mind—then you see shining through each life form the formless essence.
It’s a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there. You can relate on a much deeper level to presence. You look on each form with the recognition that its essence is one with your essence. The form is seen but also you look through that and what you find at the core of each form,whether it’s a flower or a human being, is the One Life essence, the One Consciousness, the Self. That is the deeper meaning of love. It’s the recognition of all forms that you meet as yourself, and that liberates you from being trapped in illusory identity with some form.
SM: If this perception becomes possible only after the death of the form, how is that death accomplished?
ET: There are two ways. One way is through suffering. Suffering arises through resistance to the“suchness” of what is. That is the core of human suffering—to resist internally the “isness” of this moment. Loss comes into your life—a loss that involves death in one form or another. Someone close to you dies, or illness occurs and you don’t have long to live, or you’re part of some collective disaster. You lose your home, your sense of belonging and identity. Loss in some form comes into your life, and you resist what is because your situation seems unacceptable. That increases the suffering, which then becomes so acute that you can’t stand it. Then something happens within you. Suddenly inner resistance to what is, is relinquished. We’ve had accounts of people in the worst possible situations—concentration camps, prison camps, waiting for execution, or fatal illness with only a few more days to live. In the face of such enormous suffering, suddenly all resistance to the suchness of this moment was relinquished, and with it, the egoic identity, which lives in and through resistance. Suddenly reactivity is relinquished. You don’t react; you accept. You surrender. Through suffering life drives you to a point of surrender, and when surrender happens, it brings the psychological death of the “me,” which cannot live in surrender. The “me”depends for its survival on non-surrender. So life pushes you into surrender through suffering, through facing death in one form or another, and with surrender comes a deep inner peace. That happened tome, and I’ve read and heard many accounts from other people for whom a similar shift occurred.Suffering, especially acute suffering, is always a great opportunity. It contains the potential for liberation.
SM: What is the other way?
ET: Many humans now are choosing nonresistance to what is rather than being pushed into it by life.These people are often receptive to spiritual teaching—not that they need a lot. They only need to hear the statement “Say yes to whatever arises in the field of now,” and they recognize its truth right away.They see the wisdom of welcoming whatever arises in this world instead of internally resisting or denying it. Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it’s getting them to the next one.
They are missing the fullness of life, which can only be now, because that’s all there is. But the way of nonresistance is coming in more now because humanity has been through enormous suffering already, most of it produced through the madness of the egoic mind evident in the twentieth-century history—and recent events are just another chapter in that insane history. So there are two ways to surrender. One is to be entirely driven to surrender through extreme suffering, and the other is to choose surrender rather than having to be pushed into surrender through dreadful suffering.
SM: Do you believe then that suffering can be eliminated?
ET: The message of all spiritual teaching is you don’t need to suffer anymore. You’ve suffered enough to take you to this point where you hear the words, “You don’t need to suffer anymore,” and you understand them. You recognize their truth and you then see that you do have a choice—that you can surrender to the suchness of now, which means every moment to relinquish resistance and if it still arises, to recognize it. The recognition is already the beginning of freedom. When you recognize the “no” to what is and the emotional or physical contraction that goes with that “no” and you observe the mental judgments that are part of the “no,” then you’re free to say “yes” to what is.
People believe that when they say “yes” to this moment, things won’t change anymore. They’re afraid that if they accept what is, whatever form this moment takes, they’re going to be stuck forever in this moment that they don’t like: this job or relationship or whatever situation they’re in that they don’t like. But this is not true. It’s resistance that keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind,and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.
SM: Does surrender include forgiveness of actions that have hurt others?
ET: Yes. You may have done things to someone in the past that today you wouldn’t do, because there’s greater consciousness today in you than there was then. As you grow in consciousness you grow out of unconscious conditioning and identification with the conditioned mind, which is human unconsciousness.You can then see how much suffering has been inflicted by humans on other humans because they were run by the egoic identity. To make an identity for yourself out of having caused suffering is another attempt by the ego to hang on to a sense of self.
The ego doesn’t mind whether its sense of self is pleasant or unpleasant as long as it has a sense of self. So guilt is a favorite thing for the ego to hang onto. What guilt says is “I did bad—that was me, my mistake.” The truth is, it was a manifestation of human unconsciousness. To make a self out of that manifestation of human unconsciousness is the ego, and is also unconsciousness. Once you’ve made a self for others you’ve trapped yourself again. This idea is contained in the words of Jesus, beautifully, on the Cross when he said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” They are only manifestations of human unconsciousness. They haven’t woken up yet. But they will suffer. Because they are manifestations of human unconsciousness, those entities will suffer.
SM: Is healing the past needed in order to awaken?
ET: The only thing that can free you from the past is “presence”. If you carry, as every human does,conditioning from the past, either personal or collective, as more presence arises, you’re able to observe what your mind is doing. You’re able to observe and witness your reactions in various situations. These reactions are the past in you. As you continue to stay in the present moment and witness your reactions,the challenges become easier. They resolve very quickly. They don’t turn into problems. For it’s when you do not face something fully and completely in the now that a challenge turns into a problem.
The ego needs enemies, and the favorite enemy of the egoic entity is the present moment.
Sidebar: How to Stay in the Present Moment
1. Inhabit the body. Sense the aliveness that is in the body. This takes your attention away from thought.The practice of physical movements such as Tai Chi helps. Sensing the body becomes an anchor for staying present in the now.
2. Make it your practice to welcome this moment, no matter what form it takes. Say yes to whatever is”now”. There is only one moment, but different forms of it. The secret is not to resist these forms.Surrendering to the forms that arise takes you to the formless in yourself. You then sense a spaciousness around whatever happens in your life. People, events, situations, objects come and go. Being in the now moment liberates you from form, from the world. With that liberation comes enormous peace.
At the age of twenty-nine, Eckhart Tolle was a research scholar, supervisor, and doctoral candidate at Cambridge University in England. He was also, by his own admission, deeply miserable. As he lay in bed one night, gripped by an intense dread and loathing of his own existence, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. In his book The Power of Now (New World Library), he describes waking the next morning:
I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.
Gone was the miserable self, replaced by a deep sense of peace. Tolle didn’t quite know what had happened to him, didn’t have any concepts or words for it. It was only later, after he had read spiritual texts and visited with spiritual teachers, that he understood: he had realized his true nature as “pure consciousness” rather than as an ego-bound, separate self, “ultimately a fiction of the mind.”
Recognizing he could not go back to being a research scholar and doctoral candidate, Tolle found himself with “no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.” (He laughs and says that this has scared off some readers and that you do not have to sit on a bench for two years.) Later, people began to approach him with questions about the power of his presence. Their dialogues became the inspiration for his books The Power of Now and Practicing the Power of Now.
With its question-and-answer format, The Power of Now can look, upon first glance, like a spiritual version of The One-Minute Manager. This impression quickly dissolves as one begins reading. Tolle writes in clear and simple language about surrendering to the present moment as a path to liberation from our conditioned mind. The peace that results is, in his words, “an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good and bad . . . beyond happiness and unhappiness.” He has something to say to people of any spiritual background, or none at all. (More information about Tolle’s books can be found at www.namastepublishing.com.)
Tolle was born in Germany, and his childhood was marked by spells of depression and suicidal thoughts. At the age of thirteen, he went to live with his father in Spain. Except for language classes, Tolle stopped going to school and began educating himself through books. Around this time, a family friend left at their house the works of German philosopher and painter Bo Yin Ra. “I felt later that these books were left there for a reason,” Tolle says. “They created an ‘opening’ into that other dimension.”
When he was nineteen, Tolle moved to London and began seeking an answer to life’s questions through philosophy, psychology, and literature. He took preparatory classes and was accepted at London University. Upon graduating with the highest mark, he was offered a scholarship to do research at Cambridge. Despite his academic success, the unhappiness that had plagued him since childhood was growing worse. He would soon experience the awakening that would lead him down an entirely new path.
Tolle lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For the past ten years, he has been a spiritual counselor and teacher, and currently gives workshops for large groups in Europe and North America. When I learned that Tolle was giving a rare East Coast retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, I knew I wanted to attend. Less than a week had passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11. During the seven-hour drive from my home in Maine, I felt overwhelmed by, and yet addicted to, the nonstop media coverage.
As I sat in the crowded main hall at the beginning of the retreat, a stillness surrounded me. I experienced Tolle’s presence as powerful, though not in an overt way. His is more the power of silence in a room full of noise. Although I can’t explain how, this silent presence is palpably felt. What isn’t apparent in his books is his joyful humor, which would appear just when it was most needed. His playful facial expressions and body gestures, as he described what he calls “the little me,” were as true to the human condition as the comedy of Buster Keaton.
Tolle described the role of a spiritual teacher as “an open window through which a breeze is blowing.” It is easy to confuse “the breeze,” he said, “with the window through which the breeze is blowing”: the physical form of a particular person.
Later, as Tolle greeted me in his room for this interview, I was struck by his quiet and unassuming nature as well as his impish and contagious sense of humor.
Donoso: We often try to escape from our daily lives: work that is unfulfilling; relationships that aren’t going the way we would like; family situations that become difficult. What is the origin of this desire to escape?
Tolle: The tendency to escape is a form of collective mental conditioning that is at work almost all the time in people’s lives, not just when situations turn out to be unpleasant or unsatisfying or difficult. In ordinary life, there is a continuous moving away from the moment to an imagined future that is unconsciously regarded as more important. Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever I “make it.” Our striving toward the future, our inner compulsion to deny the present moment, manifests itself as a continuous sense of unease and latent dissatisfaction with what is. This seems to be the “normal” state of our civilization. Freud recognized this when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. A literal translation of the German title is The Unease in Culture. He saw that our normal state of consciousness could be described as one of continuous unease, more pronounced at some times than at others.
Donoso: Why are we not more aware of this state?
Tolle: Because it is everybody’s normal state. Children are conditioned to look to the future from the moment they enter school, always needing the next moment and the next. Even if the future moment is feared, there is still a projection toward it, which generates anxiety. Then the recognition can arise — and this is an amazing realization for people who have never looked at it clearly — that the present moment is all there ever is in one’s life.
Donoso: But aren’t our past experiences and our potential future experiences central to our lives?
Tolle: One never experiences the future, nor the past. One experiences only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can unfold only Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.
Donoso: Is having hope for the future a help to us or a hindrance?
Tolle: I wouldn’t recommend it. [Laughter.] It is more mental projection. It just gives you some new future that you think is going to save you.
Donoso: What keeps us living in either the past or the future?
Tolle: We live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making — a world of thought. And that becomes our dwelling place. It is a world characterized by the inability ever to stop thinking. The mental noise is a continuous stream. Psychologists have found that 95 percent or more of it is totally repetitive. Perhaps 10 percent of those thought processes, at most, are actually needed to deal with life. Thought can sometimes be very useful [laughter], but in our world it has become obsessive, compulsive, almost like an addiction. People’s sense of identity, of self, gets bound up with their mental concepts and mental images of “I” and “me.”
Donoso: When does this begin?
Tolle: It begins when your parents tell you what your name is. That’s the first label you absorb; the mind says, “Oh, that’s me,” and you repeat your name. Subsequently, that name becomes like a basket in which further life experiences are collected: things that happen to you; things that people tell you about who you are. Some parents tell their children, “You’re not good enough; you’re stupid; you can’t do anything right.” Other parents say different things. But there is always conditioning that is absorbed. These things are then collected and become the contents of your mind. As you grow up, a story grows out of them, a story consisting of judgments and concepts and belief systems. In other words, the self is a story line that develops in the head, very much like a fictitious creation. Yet it forms the basis of most people’s sense of who they are, and that sense, of course, is reinforced by the surrounding world.
This conceptual sense of self is also often threatened by other people, so it is always very uneasy and defensive and constantly needs to replenish and enhance itself. There is always the need for more of “me” to add to who I am. I need to add relationship; I need to add knowledge; I need to add material possessions; I need to add status. If people’s opinions of me are good, if they think highly of me, then I will have status in society, and that can become the basis of my identity. If they think badly of me, if I have no status, that, too, can serve as the basis for my identity — an identity that says, “I haven’t made it. I’m not good enough,” and is characterized by a continuous feeling of insufficiency, lack, fear. Either way, the story of “me” is not complete. Even those who in the eyes of the world have “made it” feel they haven’t arrived, that their story is incomplete, that so far it hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to go.
So my sense of self is deficient because it’s incomplete. “There’s so much more that I need to be fully myself” is the feeling. And then there is the unsatisfactory nature of my story. Sometimes this is clearly seen, as when people are depressed. Other times it is pushed underneath the surface and becomes unconscious. The conscious mind might create images of “me” as the greatest, but underneath lie those images that say, “Oh, no, you’re not.” It may well be that the image I project is the opposite of what I truly feel. This is what people live with; this is what people are burdened with as a sense of self.
A further characteristic of this fictional self is that it cannot sustain itself in the prolonged absence of conflict or strife. It needs other people and situations with which it can be in opposition, because to be in opposition to something strengthens our sense of self. If I have enemies, my identity is strengthened. And this applies, of course, to both a personalized sense of “me” and a collective sense of “us”: our tribe, our religion, our nation. In both cases, it is through enemies and conflict that the self defines itself, that it can declare itself “right.”
This need for enemies is part of the insanity of normal human consciousness, which has afflicted us for many thousands of years. It lies at the root of the continuous violence, warfare, and conflict that you see when you open a newspaper or history book. I always recommend people read twentieth-century history, because of all the periods of human history, surely the twentieth century is the maddest of all, in terms of suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. Any visitor from outer space who looked at that century would have to conclude that there is a strong streak of insanity running through the collective human psyche.
The madness of the world is not just out there; the root of the madness lies in every person’s mind. Of course, it takes on more extreme forms in certain people and less extreme forms in others. An extreme manifestation of insanity is the terrorist who kills thousands of people, including himself. How can he do that? How can a person inflict suffering and, seemingly, not feel anything? How is that possible? It is possible because the terrorist has conceptualized a large group of people — the other religion, the other tribe, the other nation — as the enemy. And once he has made labels and judgments, he no longer sees them as human beings. He sees only the mental concept that he has created, the mental labels that he has attached. The moment you do that, whether collectively to a tribe or individually to another person, you have desensitized yourself, and you no longer sense the aliveness and the reality of that other human being.
Donoso: So you’ve killed them before you have killed them.
Tolle: Yes, that’s right. But, before one condemns the terrorists, one needs to see that terrorism is only a more extreme manifestation of the same dysfunction that exists in everyone. And that’s a sobering realization. It also means that you can’t make the terrorists into an “enemy” anymore.
Donoso: There is a summer camp near where I live in Maine called Seeds of Peace, founded by John Wallach. It brings together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers to live, eat, and play sports: to discover that the “enemy” has a human face.
Tolle: Yes, and gradually the mental construct loses its density, and they see some of the reality shine through. But it is important to realize we are all trapped in mental constructs, and so we separate ourselves from reality; the whole world loses its aliveness — or, rather, we lose our ability to sense that aliveness, the sacredness of nature. When we approach nature through the conceptualizing mind, we see a forest as a commodity, a concept. We no longer see it for what it truly is, but for what we want to use it as. It is reduced. This is how it becomes possible for humans to destroy the planet without realizing what they are doing. It’s all contained in the last words of Jesus: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
This collective mental illness has been with us for a long time. In the time of Jesus, already, the illness was there. In the time of the Buddha, it was there. As time progresses, it has become more and more acute, more and more pronounced. The twentieth century — the “century of progress” — was the height of the madness so far.
Donoso: What role does technology play in all of this?
Tolle: Although science has created some miraculous inventions, most have also had very dramatic downsides to them. At first, we think a new invention is all good, and then we see the destructive side to it, the other polarity. During the First World War, technology and science multiplied the effects of human madness a thousand times. People began to ask, “My God, what have we done?” It was staring us in the face: this is the human condition; this is what we have created. And we had to turn our faces away.
Donoso: It is easier to see this outwardly, in society, than in our individual lives.
Tolle: First you see it collectively, the reflection of it out there. Then you see its root in yourself: the tendency to live continuously in a world of concepts, which is bound up with one’s identification with thought processes, which are always about abstraction and image making. Although in some people a change is taking place, a shift in consciousness, most people still completely identify with their thinking minds. That’s why the French philosopher Descartes, when he tried to state the deepest truth possible, came up with “I think, therefore I am.” Of course, that is not the truth. He was only expressing the error that was already there in his time: equating being with thinking.
There is so much more to a human being than thought activity. There is so much more intelligence beyond the world of thought, in the realm where intuition, creativity, and sudden realizations come from. I’m not dismissing thought totally. Thought is needed to give these things form. But when thought becomes equated with self, thought then becomes destructive, because the basis of our identity becomes an abstraction, a conceptualization, and once we have conceptualized ourselves, we then do it to the rest of the world.
Donoso: You speak of a shift that is taking place. What sort of shift?
Tolle: I see a shift in consciousness happening for the first time in more than just a few individuals here and there. It is a shift that the ancient teachers, such as the Buddha and Jesus, pointed to — a possibility of living in a different state of consciousness.
If you look at all the ancient teachings — Hinduism, Buddhism, the teachings of Jesus — you’ll see they have two things in common. (I’m referring here to the original teachings of these traditions. The organized religions are mostly mental constructs built much later, when the followers could no longer grasp the truth of the original teachings.) First, they all saw that there was something not right with the human condition, though they expressed this in different terms. Buddha said the human condition is one of suffering; Jesus said the human condition is one of sin; Hinduism said the human condition is one of illusion. And second, they all realized that there is a way beyond that, and that way is the spiritual path that these original teachings show.
Freedom from suffering is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching. Buddha summarized his teaching by saying, “I show you suffering and the end of suffering.” That means he shows us how suffering arises and how it can end. Jesus talked about the state of sin. (The Christian doctrine of original sin has been misinterpreted and misused by institutionalized religion, but there is a core of truth to it.) He said there is another way possible, the kingdom of heaven, which is not elsewhere, in eternity, but here, now, in us. Hinduism speaks of illusion and points to the way beyond it: “liberation.” Sometimes people call it enlightenment, but liberation is a helpful word, because it points to what you’ve been liberated from: a false sense of self, thoughts, mind activity.
So, in all three traditions, there is a way beyond. In Christianity there is the possibility of salvation, which has been misinterpreted as meaning some future point when I’m going to heaven, but actually means another state of consciousness. In Hinduism there is liberation. In Buddhism there is enlightenment. Those ancient teachings pointed the way, but not many people got the message. As a whole, humankind was not ready for it. But it could somehow sense that there was truth in those teachings, so they were not forgotten. Then the human mind, with its tendency to conceptualize, obscured the original truth of these teachings and built on top of them superstructures of religious beliefs, which became part of people’s identities: total delusion.
Donoso: And we are born into this conditioning?
Tolle: Yes, that is the collective conditioning of the human mind. But to see the conditioning in oneself is to begin to get free of it. At first, you notice that you continuously identify with your thought stream. You are completely in it. All these thoughts going through your head, one after another, are very familiar, like old records that you have been playing for years. [Laughter.] Some of these thoughts stand out very clearly; they’re old friends — or, rather, old enemies, because people carry a lot of conflict in this form. Then you wonder: what part of you sees this? That seeing part is not another thought, but it is aware of thought, and also of the emotions that accompany thought.
So there comes the ability to observe the workings of the mind and the emotions that go with them. And that is a new level of consciousness arising, a new level of awareness: to see one’s conditioning and observe it in action. For example, in the midst of an argument, this witnessing presence can sense the implicit violence behind your defense of your position. Why is there violence behind the defense of your position? Because there is an identification with a thought, with a mental construct that gives you your feeling of who you are. You attack other people’s positions because you are defending a fictitious sense of self. You are so identified with your position that you feel the need to defend it as if it were your life. It’s not your life, of course.
Donoso: But that is what it feels like.
Tolle: Yes, that is what it feels like. And with the awareness of this violence comes the choice to drop your position in the midst of the debate and see what happens. And that is an enormous step. When suddenly you drop your position, there seems to be a hole where before there was a strong structure. When the structure is relinquished, there comes a sense of freedom — and the amazing realization that you are still alive. [Laughter.]
Now, on the personal level, defending one’s position looks harmless enough, but the need to be right and to make the other wrong is the source of continuous conflict, in relationships and in the world.
Donoso: Nations defending their positions.
Tolle: Yes. So the question arises: if I am not who I think I am; and I am not who everybody I know has been telling me I am; and I am not the story in my head; and I am not the beliefs, the accumulated experiences, the memory traces — then who am I? Every answer to that question is dangerous, because every word that one might use will create another concept. The reality of who you are can never be expressed in words. Words are only signposts that point to.
Donoso: You spoke of a new state of consciousness arising; why is it arising now?
Tolle: Because human madness is threatening to destroy the planet. If the shift in consciousness doesn’t happen very soon, then there’s not much chance that the planet will continue to survive. Or perhaps the planet might make it, but humans won’t. The planet may regenerate itself after a few hundred years, but humans will have disappeared. Imagine another hundred years of this consciousness, unchanged. Everything will just get magnified: more science, more technology, more weapons, more consumer goods, more of everything — a dreadful prospect.
I’d say the change is happening now — or, at least, a real possibility of change is arising — because it has to happen now. There’s an urgency that wasn’t there before, because the survival of humanity wasn’t threatened. There was human madness, but it wasn’t so mad that it would destroy itself. Now the madness has been magnified, amplified by technology and science, to the point where it can destroy itself.
Donoso: The stakes have been raised.
Tolle: Yes, and something is arising, because there is a great intelligence at work that goes far beyond the human mind. It is the vast intelligence found in every organ of the body, in the DNA of every cell. It is the intelligence that runs and coordinates all the functions of the human body. Obviously, the conscious mind hasn’t the capability to do that. Put all the world’s computers together, and they couldn’t run the functions of the body for more than a second. So there is a greater intelligence in human beings than can be contained in the human mind. The mind is only a tiny aspect of this greater intelligence, which is the same intelligence that created the galaxies and the world of nature. And that is what is arising now.
Donoso: How does it arise in us?
Tolle: It arises at first as the ability to watch the workings of one’s mind. Then comes the choice not to identify with those mental structures. More and more, you realize that you are not your thoughts, because they come and go. They’re all conditioned; they’re all just the contents of your mind. Instead of deriving a sense of self from those contents, you realize that you can simply observe the contents. A deeper sense of self arises then. That is the aware presence, and it feels very spacious and peaceful, no matter what happens in your mind. You no longer identify with your mind, which is just conditioned thoughts, and instead identify with the observing presence, which can see the conditioned thoughts and emotions in continuous flux. When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth.
Donoso: It seems easier to be in the state that you describe when I am in nature.
Tolle: Yes, because nature doesn’t stimulate the mind in the same way. Although many people can be in nature and still be full of mental concepts and noise, occasionally even people who are immersed in mental noise have moments in nature when the noise subsides, and suddenly they are alert and present. Then they get to watch and see and sense the aliveness all around them: the sacredness, the beauty, the harmony that holds everything together. It is wonderful to walk in nature with a mind that has become quiet — or, rather, with no-mind, but simply in a state of alert presence. Nature can be a great help there.
Donoso: And if nature isn’t readily available?
Tolle: You can watch a plant, a flower, a cloud, a sky. Even the sound of water dripping. Anything.
Donoso: What about when we need to use conceptual thought — for example, when planning for the future?
Tolle: Then mental concepts are fine. You can use them. It is not a problem at all, because you are no longer striving for completion of your self through adding “more.” Once the compulsion not to live in the Now goes away, you realize that there is nothing wrong with acquiring more knowledge, having more experiences, or learning new skills, all of which require time. Even acquiring some material things — though no longer compulsively, only certain things that you would like to have or that you need — is all right when it is free of self-seeking.
So, on the level of ordinary living, there is nothing wrong with pursuing a future goal. The difference is that you are not seeking an enhanced sense of self through achieving those goals anymore. You already have a full sense of self, which is the awareness that is prior to thought, that can watch thought. And you watch the entire world from there. You witness things coming into your life and things leaving; forms arising and forms dissolving. And all the while, there is an inner sense of spaciousness that can allow these things to happen. There’s no longer a clinging to any particular forms that arise, whether they be thought forms, emotional forms, or physical forms such as objects, people, or situations. There’s also no longer a terror of forms that you don’t want, that don’t “fit” your sense of self. That is freedom: freedom from thousands and thousands of years of collective human conditioning.
Donoso: What does one need to do to become free?
Tolle: The good news is that you don’t need another thousand years to become free. All you need is to become present to this moment; to open yourself up to the fullness that already is, now. “Abundant life,” Jesus called it. He said: “I want you to have life, and I want you to have more abundant life.” Some translations call it “the fullness of life.” The fullness of life, as Jesus defined it, is not about the accumulation of material things. He was talking of a deeper fullness, prior to the world of form; a fullness that is rooted in a natural state. Underneath all mental concepts, all conditioned consciousness, is the pure, unconditioned consciousness. That is the essence of your being. That is the path of liberation, of freedom. And to follow it is not difficult. In fact, it requires no time. You don’t need to wait for the future. All that is required is to be present and attentive to this moment.
Attention is an essential word here. Keep in mind that the words I use are signposts pointing to a state of consciousness that is nonconceptual; in effect, I am using concepts to describe nonconceptual reality. Sometimes I use the words spaciousness or spacious presence. The word attention is very helpful. The state of not being identified with thought is one of heightened alertness. Jesus tells several parables about waiting for someone to arrive: when you don’t know when that person is going to arrive, you are alert, awake. It’s like listening to catch the faintest noise. Attention is also the essence of Zen, a state of alertness in which there is no tension. It is a relaxed alertness, as if you were listening, though there is nothing to listen to. In this state, thought actually subsides; it stops.
Some people have attained this state of heightened awareness in dangerous situations, where they can’t afford the luxury of thinking, because thought would be too slow. So the mind stops, and something else takes over: a state of relaxed alertness; a very peaceful, present state. People who have survived emergency situations say the shift happened just before the accident; something within them changed, and there was suddenly incredible serenity and peace and rightness. There was no fear anymore, and they knew that all was well. Beyond thought, they knew it. There are many, many such accounts. In some cases, those people took the right action at that moment, unpremeditated, not arrived at through thought.
Donoso: Are there other times when we have access to that state of relaxed, heightened awareness?
Tolle: Many people have limited access to it in their lives. Great artists create from there; great scientists, too. Scientists, of course, use their minds in their work, but the great scientists have all said that their best insights came at a time of mental stillness: they had been doing a lot of thinking and couldn’t arrive at a solution, and then the mind stopped, and out of that stillness, out of that aware presence, came the answer.
Great athletes also enter that state. They are not thinking about what they’re doing; the mind has nothing to do with it. Right action happens spontaneously, and they are totally alert. It is beautiful to watch. Anything that comes out of that state of alertness has beauty to it, whether it is art or science or sport. And people must sense that, somehow, because otherwise why would we watch people hitting a ball for two hours? [Laughter.]
The ancient teachings point out that it is possible to live that way, such that your whole life is an expression of that state of consciousness; the madness doesn’t reassert itself the moment you stop your artistic or athletic activity. Some artists were even more mad than your average person; it’s just that, occasionally, they were free from it. So, in this mad species, we occasionally see sublime creations. And we ask, “How could it be that a human being created something this sublime? My God!”
Donoso: Isn’t the mind involved in creation?
Tolle: Creativity doesn’t come from the human mind. The human mind may give it form, but the deep inspiration for it — the essence of it — always comes out of that state of alert presence: not the mind, not thought. Subsequently perhaps, thought comes in, more so in certain activities: writing, for example. But even the writer listens and waits for it to come.
Many works that are called art these days are actually creations of the human mind trying to be clever, trying to think of something new. And so they lack the essence of true art, which is the flavor, the fragrance of that heightened state of consciousness out of which the original inspiration came. That is the essence of great art. No one knows how it gets into the work. Even the artist doesn’t know. And yet, somehow, people recognize it when it does. Somehow, they sense it. So they are not totally mad; they sense that there is something there.
Humans now need to go beyond just having limited access to that state of consciousness. We need to undergo a “psychological transformation,” as Krishnamurti calls it. The shift will occur when humans begin habitually to live in that state of consciousness. If this happens, humankind will survive. If it doesn’t happen, it’s unlikely that humankind will make it. So let’s see what happens. But a very important factor in whether or not humankind will make it is you.
Eckhart describes how life can certainly be more pleasant with a good measure of self-esteem, but ultimately freedom comes by transcending form entirely.
