A Retreat for Your Mind: Stop Overthinking, with Eckhart Tolle

So the true meaning of retreat is the retreat from your usual self, from your usual mental, mentally constructed, mentally emotionally constructed self. And if everything else really happens on the surface of life now, what happens on the surface of life can be very helpful. And this is why we're here. It can be very helpful. It helps you to begin to let go of your identification with your usual self and then realize. And of course, many of you have already started or are well into that process of disidentification which we could also call the awakening process. Most of you already engaged in the awakening process has become initiated in you. And then you are here in order to deepen it. And some of you may not yet even know. There may be a few who may not even know at this moment what I'm referring to when I say awakening. But you will, unless you run away tomorrow already. Just give yourself a chance. So we are. There is the surface self. That is the usual self that everybody has. And for many people who have not yet awakened, that's all they have or all they think they have. It's very. It's like saying you have an enormous amount of wealth, but you don't know it, so it's as if you didn't have it. So when I say they don't have it, it really means they don't know that there is a deeper dimension to who they are. And that is the real meaning of that is really true deprivation of really not knowing who you are on the deeper level, your being. So there is the usual self, and there is the deeper self. And we are here retreating. The purpose is to retreat from the usual self and discover who you are underneath the usual self, who or what you are. And that discovery does not happen conceptually. After this retreat on the last day, you may not be able to say much more about your real self, your true, deeper self, than you are now. And yet you might have experienced it very deeply and be in touch with it very deeply. But what can you say about it? What can I say about my deeper self? It's hard to say anything because it does not live in the world of conceptualization. And you first encounter it in a moment of stillness, alert stillness, like now, where you don't need to know your name. You don't need to remember what your name is right now in order to be here fully. You don't need to remember your personal history right now in order to be here fully and be fully yourself. You do not need to remember your personal history in order to get that sense of being fully Present and being fully yourself. And that's quite amazing. So you can sense something. There is a sense of aliveness or presence that has nothing to do with your personal history or your name or your background, or whether in the eyes of the world you are a huge success or a huge failure. Nothing to do with that. Because there we move deeper. And so it's intangible. You can never say, I have found it now, I have found my deeper self. No, you can't. It doesn't work like that. It cannot become an object in your consciousness. Because when you say I have found something, there must be something that arises in your field of consciousness as an object in consciousness. You see something, you hear something, you think of something. A sense perception arises as something in your field of consciousness. I'm looking at the table, I have found the table. Or an idea comes into your head, I have found the answer as an idea. But the depth of who you are we could also call the transcendent dimension can never be experienced in that way as an object to your perception or consciousness, because it is the eternal subject, it is the I. So you cannot know yourself in a subject object relationship. You know yourself as consciousness, not conscious of something, but conscious. And that's the sense of the deepest sense of beingness or I that you can sense within yourself right now. Why not now? Why wait until the last day of the retreat and say, oh, finally, I got it. Get it already. It does not take time to be who you are, quote from A Course in Miracles. Or if you want the complete quote, it has taken time to misguide you so completely. But it takes no time at all to be who you are. And this is why I go to the already in the introductory session to the very core of what this is about. Instead of saying, just wait. On day two I will get you closer. And on day three, you get just wait, you'll get there. It's always here now. You are always here. Now let's go back to this strange thing of in order to sense your own presence, which is not your own, we just call it your own temporarily. Nothing is your own. In order to sense your own presence, you don't need to remember your past. In fact, if you think about your past, it takes you away from sensing the fullness of being of your own presence. Because you drift off into and you can see you're not here. You are in dreamland, a kind of hypnosis, hypnotized by your mind. Or in the middle of the night it goes my problems, me and My problems. And many people define their identity primarily as a set of problems that need to be solved. And one day they hope they will arrive at that point when their problematic self has become resolved. But it never does. You are not a set of problems that you need to resolve. So let's go back to that beautiful, very simple realization that you don't need to remember anything about what your mind tells you, who you are. It doesn't mean that you now have lost all your memories. No, they are still there. If you need them, they come back. Whatever analogy you want to use. I used to say the filing system, when you need it, you can pull it off, but they don't use it anymore. So it's a computer analogy you use now. It's there somewhere in your computer. It's all still there when you need it. Of course it's still there. But does it have to be there always when you don't need it? That continuous the problematic self talk. Does it need to be. Do you need to be burdened and walk around every day of your life burdened by the problem making? Well, it's pretending to be problem solving, but it's really problem making of your mind. And to carry around with you the heavy entity, the me, which goes. And you're trying to get to a point, at some future point, you think, I'm going to be liberated and free of all that. And then I will start living. And many people, even if they don't verbalize it as I do right now, the underlying mindset is when I can free myself from all these problems, then I can start living. And that of course, when you are 25, you can still believe that when you're 35, you say, yeah, it can still happen. And you become 45 and 50. Okay, maybe I'll really start living when I retire. And then you begin to live for the retirement. Okay, only another three years now. And finally the day comes. And then on the first day of your retirement, you sit at home and say, what now? Who am I without my function, my social function? But nobody's telling me who I am anymore. What am I going to do now? And then you try golf and you drive around in the golf baggage. And for a few weeks it feels good and you can drink. And then that dissatisfaction returns. The same mindset is still there despite your retirement. In fact, you become more aware of the dissatisfied mind now that you don't have to have that many external problems anymore. And yet there's still the heaviness of the mind and the discontent so that's not the way to go. So the wonderful news is there is a dimension in you that we could call the dimension of depth or the transcendent dimension, where you as the person become something else. Where the person can only really often compare the person that you are to the ripple on the surface of the ocean. That's the person. But the ripple is one with the totality of the ocean. If the ripple doesn't know that its existence is problematic, fearful. You fear every other ripple, or you want to incorporate them into your life. Maybe if we come with me together, we'll be a bigger ripple. Marry me, and you will make me happy. And I will make you happy. It has been tried many times. So to lead a satisfying existence as a ripple that only knows itself as the ripple and not as the ocean is very frustrating. You can't. Doesn't work. So the ripple needs to realize that it is much deeper than just the ripple. There's a depth to the ripple where it's no longer a ripple, where it's connected with everything and with every other ripple, where it's connected with the heart of the universe, not just on a human level. And that is true awakening. And after that, and when that is realized, and the ripple can sense that it's a stillness in you, a presence that has no particular content, then the ripple becomes relatively happy. It doesn't mean in the world, on the surface of ripples, things still can go wrong. Still things can disappear and break down. And ripples never last for very long. That continues. And yet you feel you can actually enjoy your ripple identity and enjoy the surface of life also. It's actually quite nice here. Look at all those little ripples. And ripple means whatever you perceive in this analogy. Ripple means whatever life form is there in your perception, including yourself. And whatever, whether it's humans or whatever you perceive in this existence, it is the manifestation of life, of the one life that has manifested as a multiplicity of life forms. And each life form is inhabited by the one life. And manifestation of the one life or the one consciousness. So when you realize that, and the beginning of that realization is to sense the I that has nothing to do with your past or your future or your name or anything your mind is saying, your simple presence. That means the ripple is becoming aware of something much bigger. And suddenly we have a relatively happy ripple and can enjoy every moment of its ripple existence in a sense of wonder. Because it's no longer demanding that things that are not permanent should be permanent. And it's not demanding anymore. That the surface existence of things should satisfy me. You are here to satisfy me. You are here to make me happy. You are here to fulfill me. The surface of the ripple can't do that. The conditions in your life, they can fulfill you for a while, and then it's no longer fulfilling. This happens to relationships. It happens to jobs that you find, activities. Unless you go deeper, nothing is fulfilling for very long. Thought going a little bit beyond it. There's such a thing as a collective mind. Many humans live virtually with a mind that has taken possession of them, pretends to be them, and they're stuck with it. Many thoughts are not your thoughts, really. They arise in the collective mind. They are energy fields or energetic entities. It.