Eckhart Tolle on Faith

And another strange thing that happens when you can sense the essence of who you are, it's not just, although the Buddha called it, well, as it's commonly translated, emptiness is not. I don't think that's a good translation of certain terms he used, like sunyata, spaciousness. I would prefer some call it nothingness. But there's more to it than that. When you can sense the essence of yourself as consciousness, there's a. There's a power in there. There's a vast power in there which has nothing to do with egoic power. Power over somebody. But sensing that is really the only thing that can free you of fear. Because fear means, oh, you're the little me and you feel threatened and fearful of what's going to happen to me and all these other me's around me, the others. But to be free of fear, if you can sense that deep within you there is a silent power. And perhaps that is the deeper and original meaning of the term faith. Faith is to sense that power. It's not an intellectual thing. Belief, I would say, is an intellectual thing, because the term belief is, as a noun, means you believe in the veracity of certain things that are being told. It could be a story. You believe in this particular narrative. That's a belief. Faith is something. The way I interpret the word or use the word is something deeper that is not connected with concepts. Faith is a deep trust. That's perhaps a better translation, better pointer. A deep trust in life which you cannot arrive at through telling yourself certain things. I really should be trusting because the universe is going to look after you. I just need to believe you're still stuck in your head and you're saying, I just need to believe that the universe is going to look after me. Okay, well, maybe that is a bridge or maybe that is a signpost that can take you to the actual realization of what you're saying. But it's also possible that it remains a signpost and you never get to where the signpost points to. I'm trying to have this trust in the universe, but I still wake up in the middle of the night in a state of panic. I don't know why I keep telling myself that I need to trust the universe. Even it's on my bathroom mirror and a piece of paper written, stuck. God loves you. Well, is it a thought that you believe in that does not free you from fear? Or if it's a signpost and then it takes you to a deeper place where you realize your connectedness with the source ultimately Your connectedness with the Source of all life. That there's not separation, that you're not an autonomous entity thrown into outcome, into. Thrown out of the universe, or fallen from the sky. So to sense your connectedness with the Source is the realization that God loves you. But you don't need the words anymore. There's just a trust. And there's no duality anymore, because you're an extension of the One, an emanation of the One. So faith really is trust. But the trust is not something you can think yourself into. Ultimately, you need to let go of all these concepts, although when you later talk about it, you may take them up again, but for the experience of it. You let go of concepts and you can sense in the space between two thoughts, in the space of awareness. You can sense the stillness, the presence of. And you can sense it as a silent power. Silent. That's the dao. It's Chinese, a silent power. And that silent power is inseparable from who you are. It's you, and much infinitely vaster than you, both at the same time. It's almost as if a ray of sunlight that arrives here suddenly realizes its source. The ray of sunlight suddenly realizes its own source, where it comes from. And it also realizes that it can never be totally separate from its source, because the ray of sunlight somehow is still connected to the sun, which in this analogy, that's the source. So the ray of sunlight then could say, my fear has disappeared because I realize that I'm connected to something much vaster. And this vastness is sustaining me. It could say that. It could also say, and some rays have done that. I am the sun ecstatic. Translated in this analogy. There have been mystics in various traditions who said, I am God. It's not advisable to say that people don't like it. So that power is something that you can then have in the sense in the background. And it can. It's not just a passive thing always in the background. It can. It emanates intelligence, so to speak. It can use your mind, and it can inspire. This is the dimension of creativity, which is prior to form, but it's where form arises out of the formless. So all the great creations that humanity has been able to achieve over the centuries and millennia. Anything truly creative comes because the human being who created that had some connection with the silent power within. Perhaps only in the act of creation, perhaps not in their private life, but in the act of creation. There was suddenly that connectedness. And many, many great composers and artists and even some of the great scientists who had breakthroughs say that it came to them almost fully formed, as a revelation. It already arrived as if it had been already formed at a deeper level, and then suddenly they just received it.