Eckhart Tolle on Reconciling Grief with the Power of Now

Good afternoon, Mr. Tolle. My name is Liz Bluestone, and I'm very grateful to be here today. I'm also very aware right now that I am so not in the present moment because I'm so nervous. So I think I need to take a breath and be still for a second and a group to do it with.

Feel the inner body. Okay.

Thank you. I was fortunate enough to read the Power of Now when it was first published, and it had a tremendous impact on me. And I have followed your spiritual teachings ever since. As I went through my daily life and my daily practice, the unimaginable happened. My husband and I lost our son 2 years ago this August. And suddenly I seemed to go from the power of now to the nightmare of the power of death. And as you talked about this morning, which I found so interesting, it's the first time I've heard you mention loss. One needs to recover and cry. And I absolutely believe that you have to go through the grieving process to heal your soul. But here's the rub. I can't help but think about my son every day. Human nature. But what that does is catapult me consistently into the past. Because all I have left of him are my memories, which are in the past. And conversely, even though I know there is no future, I fantasize about what it might have been like for all of us had he lived. So my question is, can you help me understand and reconcile being in the present, creating space for consciousness as it relates to profound grieving with the death of a loved one that has done nothing but propel me into the past and to a non existent fantasy future? Thank you.

If I may ask another question. When you think about your son, apart from the activity of thought, which may be memories of the past, or as you say, fantasizing about what might have been, future or fantasies, can you also feel your son somewhere within, apart from the memories? Can you somehow feel his essence in yourself?

Absolutely.

And that essence is not in the past. Of course, it's in the now. And so what is required then is a greater focus on that than on giving attention to the thoughts. Once, perhaps, the thoughts have a limited usefulness. When the memory comes, it also brings up the feeling of his essence, the memories of the past. The feeling of essence is not. Is now. It is alive now. If you can, then give that more attention then to the thoughts, directing more attention there, closing your eyes, perhaps directing more attention there than to the memories. The memories were fine, but now they've taken you there. Or if fantasizing about future possible things that could have happened. Again, bring attention as a conscious choice. Take attention into the sense, that feeling of the essence of who he is, because the essence is. And then this enables you to connect with the formless essence that was actually the thing that you loved and still love in him, the indestructible. And you can only find it through your own. So they come together. Really, when you feel him, you also feel yourself as part of that. And so as a conscious choice, then take more attention to that if you can. If it's an occasion when it's not dangerous to close your eyes, then close your eyes and go in there and feel that and realize it's alive and it's now. Then gradually your son, you retrieve, you rescue your son from where he has been the past two years in the past. And the alive essence you still feel within yourself. And that means gradually the memories will not disappear. There will be memories, but the heaviness that's associated with the memories and the deep sadness gradually through that becomes transmuted into something else. And there will be. Then the memories will still. There will still be a gentle sadness with the memories. But there's a rising realization of that which is beyond death in him. That's what you love. You love and loved and still love. Now the mind says, the object of my love is gone. And that's the dreadful thing, the mind says. So the love has no object. But what you loved in him was never the form. What you loved in him and still love is the formless essence of we. I don't want to go into any kind of belief that you need to have of survival. But all I know is that there is an essence in every human being. I know it in myself that is beyond death. I know that I don't want to go beyond and tell anybody that they should believe this or that. I don't never step beyond my experience. I know the deathless as the essence in myself and all humans. And you know that too. You just need to go there more deeply. And I also. Anybody who has been touched by death. I also recommend, in addition, it sounds a little strange to occasionally take a walk around cemetery. I recommend it to anybody because you get a very distorted view of life. If you never have the realization of how imminent death is for every human being. The so called death of the form. And then the personal, the excessively personal thing about death becomes. You see how universal it is. And I find it extremely peaceful to walk around a cemetery. And just the mind goes totally still in just amazement of all these lives that have dissolved, the forms that have gone. That's why Buddhist monks in some traditions, regularly go to the morgue and they meditate for a few hours at a time there, just with the dead bodies around them. And so they go deep within to touch what in Buddhism is called the deathless. So that is the freedom from what you've been trapped in lies there within. You just go there, go there, there. Don't go into the mind. Excessively conscious choice. And then the transmutation happens.