Eckhart TolleNYT Bestselling author of the Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle: The Two of You Here

25 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from his talk, Eckhart Tolle frames awakening as a temporary perspective of "two of you." He distinguishes the human – the personality conditioned by past experiences, identified primarily with the physical body – from the being, the deeper, unconditioned essence that most people have not yet recognized. Tolle cites Confucius (contemporaneous with the Buddha) to illustrate that humanity is still on a path toward becoming fully human, underscoring that the common identification with the body is the most obvious but limited sense of self. The passage sets up the dual‑aspect model as a stepping stone toward deeper awareness.

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Most humans are only human, but they have not recognized the being. Even Confucius, who lived at the same time as the Buddha, Chinese philosopher Confucius, said humans have not yet become fully human. They're on their way to becoming fully human. For a moment, let me approach this, the awakening, from this particular angle. One could say there is two of you. Here, this is a temporary way of looking at things. You're one, but let's— temporarily, it's helpful to put it like that. You are the human and you're the being. Let's talk briefly, hopefully, about the human. That's you as a person, personality conditioned by the past. As a human, first of all, you have a physical body that is a for most people already a very important part of their identity. It's most obvious thing to equate your identity with the physical body because that is the most obvious thing. You can touch it, you see it in the mirror. So that's the first identification. Identification means what you derive your sense of self from.