This is a YouTube video titled "Eckhart Tolle on Realizing Yourself As Consciousness" containing a spiritual talk or lecture by Eckhart Tolle. The content explores themes of consciousness, self-awareness, and the distinction between conceptual and deeper knowing, referencing ancient philosophy and meditation practices. The talk was created in January 2025 and focuses on the nature of self and presence beyond the historical person.
Now, just a little reminder. In the usual state of consciousness, you're always conscious of something. And when you are present, you are conscious. You accept, in deep meditation, you are conscious of something, but you are also conscious of yourself as consciousness. The early 20th century spiritual teacher GF called that self remembrance does not mean. It may not be the best term to describe it, but that's what he came up with. And it could be misunderstood as if you had to remember yourself as the historical person. But that's not what it means. And there's no. Really. There's no memory involved. Although we could say you remember to be aware of yourself. But what is yourself if you are not the historical person? In essence, you are the consciousness, the space for it all. And as you sit here and listen and look, you are, of course, conscious of your sense perceptions. But the possibility is there of being conscious also at the same time of an underlying presence or stillness. And that is the essence of you, which has nothing to do with your history. It is being conscious of consciousness that's the subject, the eternal subject. The moment you make yourself into an object, then you begin to remember your historical person. And then you begin to have a relationship with yourself. We talked about it yesterday, but in presence, you are yourself. Big difference between having a relationship with yourself, usually problematic. So you not only have a problematic relationship with your partner and colleagues and family members and in laws, that's not enough. In the unawakened state, you also have a problematic relationship with yourself. My God. There's a movie about a man who gets stranded on a desert island. There's a plane crash. He survives it. Then he finds himself on a beach, and he's there for don't know how long. A year, two years, three years. Survives on fishes he can catch and coconuts. The plane that crashed was a FedEx plane. So it had all kinds of parcels that also got washed ashore. And he opens them, and in one parcel he finds a beach ball that somebody must have sent to somebody. And because he has no companionship, he paints the face, eyes, nose and mouth on the beach ball and begins talking to the beach ball. And after a while, he begins to have arguments with it and is deeply offended. And because all the. All the emotions that the ego experiences in relationships he's having with the beach ball. Tom Hanks, I think, is the actor in the movie. So the patterns need to operate still. If you can't find a person, then you have a beach ball. And of course, yourself too. It. And that really is the meaning of knowing yourself. The deeper and the deeper sense. The ancient dictum from ancient Greece going back two and a half thousand years, know thyself. But you remember we mentioned the other day, there are two kinds of knowing. Our civilization basically only knows of one kind of knowing. Everything. The whole educational system, everything is geared towards increasing and focusing on exclusively that kind of knowing, which is knowing through conceptual thought. And so the majority of humans on the planet realize the possibility of another kind of knowing, not to replace conceptual knowledge, but. And not even to be there in addition to conceptual knowledge, but to be there as something that underlies and is much vaster than conceptual knowledge, where you can go when you choose not to be involved in conceptual knowledge, you go to that vaster place that transcends conceptual knowledge and is deeper. It's a space, a deep space of knowing. And so the deeper meaning of the ancient dictum of going probably back to the first one of the first philosophers in ancient Greece, Pythagoras, know thyself can be understood on two levels. One level is to know things about yourself. That can be helpful too, because that means you know how you function, you know, you begin to learn about things about yourself that perhaps you didn't know because they were automatic. Sometimes in therapy, it can be helpful to get to know yourself on a conceptual level about the person that you are, hidden motivations, things that you do but you don't know why you do things you compulsively do. And you might understand certain things about you on a conceptual level, but the deeper meaning is not to know yourself through concepts, but to know yourself without any concepts directly. One could call it unitive knowing rather than knowledge knowing. That creates separation. Now, there's even a distinction in some languages of different kinds of knowing. Not in English or German, but it's there in Spanish and in, I don't know much French, but I think it's there also in French. They have two words for to know. So, for example, you can say, if you say I know in Spanish, you have a choice. Say konosco or say. So the verb is connoisseur is one type of knowing, and saber is another type of knowing. And it's the same in French, I believe, connetre and savoir, something like that. So, for example, I know you would be. You would use konosko, I know you. But if you said I know who you are, you would use the other one, because that's a concept, I know who you are. Knowing who you are is a concept. But if you say I know you, there's something deeper there that's interesting. Sometimes there's a wisdom, certain wisdom embedded in language. But that does not mean, unfortunately, that all native Spanish or French speakers are familiar with a deeper type of knowing.
