Eckhart Tolle on Discovering Heaven Within

We are primarily here to deepen our realization of who we are beyond form. Both the Buddha and Jesus talked about an inner dimension that is formless that you need to realize in order to become free of complete dependency on the forms that your life takes. The Buddha talked about what's traditionally translated as emptiness as the essential condition, the essential you. Better translation would have been, now we've got emptiness in all the scriptures it's been translated, but spaciousness or formlessness would have been a better translation. Jesus talks about the sky that's within you. That's another word for heaven, the kingdom of the sky. Translated into modern terminology, the dimension of spacious spaciousness. The kingdom of heaven is the old translation. What he was really. This is hard to relate to nowadays, Kingdom of heaven. But if he had been speaking today, he would set the dimension of spaciousness. Because when you look up at the sky, you see spaciousness, especially when it's not cloudy. The clouds kind of represent the thoughts in your consciousness, and the sky is the vast expanse without which there wouldn't be any room for the clouds. There couldn't be any clouds. So the empty sky is spacious. Now, interesting thing about the sky is, although we have a word for doesn't actually exist in the world of forms, because if you ever traveled upwards and wanted to encounter the sky, you would never find it. Because there is no such thing as the sky, really. So you can't say, oh, here's the sky, I'm touching it now. Or. Or you can't even say, I'm in the sky, where it's just a way of perceiving this spaciousness. We call it sky, and the color blue appears because the juxtaposition of the sunlight and the blackness of space behind it in some strange way. But the main thing is there isn't a thing. That's the sky. So, so very cleverly, Jesus used that because he was trying to point to something that is very hard to point to, using concepts and words. So he chose the most suitable pointer in the language in words that he could find, and the most suitable one that he could find to point to this inner dimension that is in every human being, but ignored and unknown to most humans. So to point to it, he chose sky because he realized, just like that inner dimension of spaciousness, you can never actually pinpoint it and say, I've got it, I have got it. There would already be a duality of it, the spaciousness and I. But the spaciousness is the essence of I. So there's no duality there. You can never say, here it is. And this is another thing that he actually said. Those are some things that you read in the New Testament. I can feel very strongly he actually almost literally said that. Then there are other things that were distorted when they started writing it down. And then there are other things that he never said, but somebody said it might be a good idea if he had said that. So the kingdom of heaven. You can never say that in the free translation. He said, you can never, oh, it's over there. Or oh, it's over there, look, here it is. You can never say that because it is within you. In the same way consciousness, which is what we are talking about, consciousness is the formless consciousness. That's the essence of who you are. It cannot become an object of knowledge like everything else can. Where you have, you are the perceiving or the acting subject. I see the chair, I realize consciousness. You can't really say that because consciousness is the primordial subject of all experience. It cannot be an object in your experience. That's an interesting thing. So in the form identified consciousness, you become an object to yourself. In ego, you have a relationship with yourself. And when you realize the essence of who you are, you realize yourself as consciousness, which is not an object. It's the I, the most fundamental subject of all experience. So let's an example. Some people say I'm looking for myself. I'm looking for my real self. I'm looking for something more real than what I know about myself. There must be a deeper dimension and I'm looking for it. Other people might say they're looking for God or realization of God, looking for something. And when you become aware of the that in you that's looking without having found any answer, without having found anything, and you're still looking for that thing, God, your true self, where is it? I haven't found it. And then the mind stops. And then you realize all the consciousness behind the looking is what you were looking for. But the consciousness became thought. And then you believed that there's something external to look for. So this is very hard to put into words. But when the mind stops, what's left is just the spaciousness of consciousness. And that is the substratum, to use a geological term, of everything, of all experience. And that is the most liberating thing, the only truly liberating thing is to realize in essence you are formless consciousness. And then the seeking stops.