Awakening from the Illusion of Self: The Path to Presence | A Guided Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

Who you are as a person is of little or no importance. Who I am as a person is of no importance, at least while we're here. And then hopefully that will have some effect on the rest of your life when you go about your business. So that the me, the person, loses its overriding importance in your life. It's still there, but it's no longer what dominates your life. So it's really transcending the person. And being here together can give you an intensified experience of the shift from being primarily a person to being primarily a presence. I don't speak to you as a person. My mind is used as a tool through which presence speaks. That's why I have a little book called Stillness Speaks. Seems almost paradoxical. This entire teaching, if you even want to call it that is not, does not come from a person. It only happens because the person got out of the way, became transparent, subsided, and so something deeper was able to come through into this dimension. That's your destiny and purpose also. So to. To be the presence consciously, to experience yourself as that underlying presence is liberating. It frees you from the density of being only that person, knowing yourself only as that personal self. Being a self in the Buddhist sense, which is ultimately a delusion, deluded. What emerges is in Buddhist terms, you might say the no self, which is not something, it's not an object, it has no form. Or in Hindu terms, the transcendent self emerges, the formless self, not the me anymore. And it's timeless. There's no past and future to it. And so this is recognizing yourself as essentially timeless. Timeless awareness, timeless consciousness. So when you look at me, you're not looking at a person, but you are connecting with yourself. So the depth of who you are is reflected back to you. That's all it. When you go back into your daily life, there may be times when the person reasserts itself completely. So you lose yourself again in the person and then you wake up again and some presence comes back. There may also be times when you are primarily the presence. That's wonderful. As that happens more and more in your life, with that comes an openness in non judgment, the judgmental mind subsides. And a real sense of connectedness, or rather oneness with other beings, human beings, other life forms. And so that means the way in which you experience your so called life, the way in which you experience the world, people, situations, events, that changes the reactive person, the reactive me, is no longer running the show. And where before there was a reactive judgmental person, there is now a deep, benevolent presence.