Eckhart Tolle on Dogs: A Life Beyond Ego

Millions of humans still, that's all they ever know. All they ever identify with is the personality conditioned by the past. Problematic problem. Making you perceive the world and judge it through the veil of your mental conditioning. You don't see anything clearly. Some people hate themselves. I don't like my body. I don't like who I am. I don't like this as an awful way to live. I hate myself. It's much better to love yourself. So in New age teachings, you learn to let go of this dysfunctional relationship with yourself. And then this is a good thing. It's much better to love yourself than to hate yourself. But you have to achieve that transition. Not easy if the hating yourself has been deeply ingrained. You may have to put little stickers on your bathroom mirror. I love myself. Oh yes, and everywhere you are lovable. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, and again, this is fine. It's a transitional stage. It's not the final stage. Sometimes a New age thinks it's the final stage. It's a lovely transitional stage, but really it's the stage of awakening is that you begin to let go of having a relationship with yourself so that you can just be yourself. And you have to be in the present moment in order to be yourself. And that is you can sometimes learn by looking at an animal. The animal is at a pre egoic stage. What we are moving towards or into is a post egoic stage. Now, the animal, like your dog, is pre egoic. The dog has consciousness, but not conceptual conscious. The dog does not operate through mental concepts. In other words, the dog does not have an opinion about you. Isn't that that's why you love the dog so much? And also the dog does not have a relationship with himself or herself. Humans have. But I have not met a single dog that has a problem with self esteem. For example, I have not met a single dog that has a problem with body image. Even the ugliest dog is okay because the split hasn't happened yet. The split into me and myself. So the dog, this is why the dog often is often joyful. The slightest thing. Sometimes you go, you, if you have a dog, you go away for 10 minutes and you come back home. The dog acts. If you had been away for 10 years. He's so happy. And the HAP is contagious a little bit. The happiness of the wagging tail of the dog. Why is the dog so happy? Because the dog does not have a self. The dog is him, her itself. The dog is. And then the tail goes. Life is good. If the dog could say something. He would say, life is good in the present moment. Just give me my food. And it's even better. So the humans, they love to be with their animals because it gives them a little bit of a little glimpse of self transcendence. Because when they look into the eyes of the dog, they are not being judged. And that feels good. And you can sense by looking at the eyes, you can sense the being of the dog. Now the dog, what you really love. Just an example, dog, cat. What you really love in the dog is not the outer surface of the dog, although it's lovely to the touch and all that. Yes. But, you know, there is something that you cannot see, that you relate to when you look into the eyes of a dog. That, that is the essence of the dog. What you love is actually the consciousness of the dog, which has no ego in it. It exists at a pre egoic state. You love the consciousness of the dog and when you look in the eyes, you feel a little bit. You connect a little bit to that in yourself for a few seconds when you're not. You don't need any defense mechanism or anything like that when you relate to a dog. Although there are some humans with huge egos, I have observed a few who relate to their pet through their ego. But that's another story, and that's a sad story. They have an ego relationship. I knew a woman who would, in the evenings, you would put food out where her cat would go out. The cat would be in the garden and she had the window open. That was a neighbor of mine years ago. And she would put the food out. And this woman had a very accomplished person, but a gigantic ego. She put the food of her cat out. And then if the cat didn't come, because cat have many things to do out in the garden. And it was dinner time for the cat and she put the plate there and she was sitting there waiting for the cat to come. And 15 minutes passed. And then she said, okay, then she would close the window. That if she doesn't want to see me, I don't want to see her. Oh my God. She has an ego relationship with her cat. So a relationship with yourself that eventually is transcended so that you can simply be in the present moment, not. And let's go deeper now so that in the present moment, which is a portal into the awakened state, in this present moment, let's see who or what are you in the present moment without reference to any thought, without reference to any thought about who you are. That's an interesting point. In other words, what does it feel like to be yourself without remembering your past or thinking about the future, just in this moment. You don't need to remember your email address or anything, it's not necessary now. Or what you ate yesterday. Without reference to past and future, what does it do? You disappear, or what is left of you. Without the memory, the narrative that usually you describe as my life. Without that memory of that you need to revive continuously. Without that, what does it feel like to be you? And I cannot answer that. I can only give it to you as a pointer and slow down a little bit as I talk so that you can perhaps inquire, investigate internally what it feels like. What is the most essential thing about your identity? Are you still there? When you don't think about your life like now, are you still there? And what is that? I'm not going to answer it, and I don't expect a conceptual answer. So the that's me. There was an ancient spiritual teacher in India whose favorite meditation was asking his disciples to ask themselves, who? You can also ask yourself, what am I? Who or what? What am I? What am I? But don't answer it verbally, but feel or sense what it means to be alive or to be you. What am I? There's a. There's a gap in the stream of thinking. Then what is there when there's a gap in the stream of thinking like now? And in that gap there's a stillness. Yes, there's also a sense of. There's something there, but it's hard to describe. There's a sense of presence, of beingness. And in that sense of presence, of beingness, you know that you are. You know you can say I am. You know that without adding any qualifiers to it, without adding anything to the I am. It's a pure sense of being, which is I am. It's very peaceful. You need an alertness to sustain it just for a little bit. Without the alertness, you will immediately fall back into the stream of thinking. But it's not. You don't use willpower to stop your thinking mind. That doesn't really work. So you don't hold your breath in order to stop thinking that it might work for a little while, but then you think even more. It's like a boiling kettle, hold the lid on a boiling kettle. Just alertness. And so Jesus said, as I said in the beginning, and what I say to you, I say to all, stay awake. In some translations, it's translated as stay alert. What I say to you I say to all, stay alert. That alertness is consciousness without thought. It seems at first just to be an absence. It seems at first like, okay, stillness, one could say, is the absence of noise in a stillness, in absence. It might seem at first as a kind of nothingness. And yet if you stay with it for a little bit, just a few more seconds, stay alert, then you can sense it's not just the absence of something, it's also the presence of something, but not so much the presence of something, but the sense of presence itself, not of something. And so that is dimension of consciousness. That is the fourth dimension of consciousness, awareness or presence. And you encounter that in between two thoughts. Or, for example, if you find it hard to stop thinking, don't use your willpower, use a little device, use a little bit of help. For example, become aware that you are breathing. You become aware of. You are aware of the inflowing and outflowing breath. And your attention moves with the breath into the body and out of the body. And again your attention is there, and again your attention follows the breath into the body, stop for a second, and out of the body. It's helpful if you can breathe as deep as the abdomen, although the air doesn't actually reach it, but your attention reaches it. And now you may realize that when you become aware of your breath, which is a very ancient meditation method, when you become aware of your breath, you cannot be thinking at the same time. That's why the Buddha recommended this meditation, which is called anapanasati, which is awareness of your breath stops your mind, the thinking mind, automatically. The moment you start thinking, you lose awareness of your breath. So the Buddha said his main teaching, I would say, is be aware of your breathing. He didn't say stop thinking because that seems too difficult. But awareness of your breath is possible. And automatically thinking subsides. What remains is a sense of alert presence. That is the. The awakened consciousness, and that is inseparable from what I call the vertical dimension of life. It is the presence in the now. There is no time. In this sense of beingness, stillness, alertness, there is no time. And yet that is essentially who or what you are. That gets usually mixed up with content, a bit like diluted. So this is the consciousness that is in its pure form. When you start thinking, it's still consciousness, but it takes on a form, a thought form, when you perceive things, it's consciousness. Perceiving the perception is a form in your mind. Consciousness has taken on a form, takes on many forms continuously, and there is a bundle of thought forms in your mind that make up the main part of your sense of identity. And that is when you identify with that and you don't know yourself more deeply in the vertical dimension, then that's the ego. But when you know yourself more deeply in the vertical dimension of the present moment, then all that is is that which makes up your personality. Of course it's still there, your story, the narrative of you unchanged, it's still there. The difference, however, is you no longer look to it for your ultimate sense of self. You don't derive your true and ultimate identity from the narrative of your life that you tell yourself in your mind. Of course it's still there. But don't look to it for yourself for liberation or fulfillment or some future self. You don't even look to that for liberation or fulfillment. Because all that is the horizontal dimension of life, that is time, where time operates. And for millions of humans still, that's all they ever know. All they ever identify with is the personality conditioned by the past. Problematic problem making continuously, often very dysfunctional coloring. Everything that you see and perceive through this veil of conditioning. You perceive the world and judge it through the veil of your mental conditioning, you don't see anything clearly. So this is the awakening into that turiya, the fourth state of consciousness, the awakened state that all the ancient teachings already pointed to as a possibility. And it's here now, and it's more important now. It's not just something for very few humans to realize, but something that becomes available to more and more humans, especially now that we are being confronted collectively with various manifestations of adversity. And it's not the end yet. Fortunately, it's not the end yet. There's more to come. And that is the. This gives you this dimension, the awakened dimension. This is where the resilience you find for living in troubled times. This is where you are rooted in this ultimately deep and unshakable rooted consciousness in of being you are. You realize who or what you are beyond the personality. They are not ultimately two. The analogy I often use is the ocean and the ripple on the surface of the ocean. You are a ripple on the surface of the ocean as a personality surrounded by other ripples on this horizontal dimension. Some ripples you like, many others you don't like. Some ripples are very unpleasant, a few others are great. You like them, and yet you're only a ripple, and it's uneasy and it's never quite enough. And others are bigger ripples and even waves occasionally. Who is that guy? The wave and life becomes unsatisfying. And at some point, you meet another ripple who says, have you not realized who or what you are beyond your ripple existence? And you say, no, No, I haven't. Okay, then can you sense, if you stop thinking for a moment, can you sense the depths of you? Can you sense that there's more to you than this surface appearance? And the ripple goes, no. Okay. And finally, the attention goes deep as the vertical dimension opens up and the ripple goes, oh. And then, of course, the ripple won't know what to say, doesn't know what it is, but it senses something. It senses that its connectedness to something vast, infinite. It's the ocean. And it not only senses its connectedness, it senses its oneness with that. And then that is self transcendence of the ripple. And in this analogy, of course, you are the ripple. And this is the essence of all spirituality, is to sense that in yourself, in the vertical dimension of yourself, to sense it as yourself. And the moment we talk about sounds as if it were something, that you perceive this sense. But it's only because we use language. And then every sentence has a subject and an object. So you could say, I am aware of myself. Yes, it's true, but ultimately that's not how it is because the moment you have said that, you've created a duality, I and myself. But when you sense the essence of who you are, there's no duality. The awareness of yourself is the awareness. So it's not aware, being aware of something, but being aware of awareness itself, so to speak. You sense your own consciousness as consciousness you know you are. That's an amazing thing. It sounds almost. It sounds so simple that it's impossible to realize, to know that you are not as a particular this or that. It's pure beingness. You know that you are, and you can sense that you are. That is such a liberation and such a wonderful Ah. And then you realize there is a depth to who you are that far transcends who you are as a personality. And that is, in some spiritual traditions, that is called liberation. And you can see why it liberates you from yourself. Jesus also used the term salvation. You can use salvation. You can use liberation. So this is the. Once you have a glimpse, it's your mission to invite that dimension into your life more and more. Not just doing meditation is good if you have a meditation practice, if you meditate rightly, and many people don't meditate rightly, the mistake that can easily creep into meditation is you meditate in order to achieve a particular goal, or you have a future self of an awakened master, and you want to achieve that. And therefore you have the idea that you are doing a meditation in order to get somewhere. That's always very hard to get rid of this mind pattern, because everywhere else it operates, you always do something in order to achieve something. And in order to achieve something through your doing, you need time for everything. You need time. Even make a cup of tea, you need time. And this doing idea can easily come into the idea of meditating. So you're doing it in order to get somewhere. So you bring future time into your meditation unconsciously, without knowing it. Bohas meditation, true meditation is not a doing, but it's the realization of being. And there's no time in being.