Escape the Prison of the Mind | Eckhart Tolle

The true meaning of retreat is not just leaving your usual surroundings, going into a peaceful place that is conducive to becoming serene, but the real challenge. It comments according to its conditioning. And this becomes the conditioned me entity that most people are identified with. This conditioned me entity that forms the basis for most people. And when I say most, I mean all those who have not even begun to awaken spiritually. It forms the spirit sense of identity for most people. Whatever your mind is saying, its opinions, its likes and dislikes, its viewpoints, its mental positions, its grievances, it's all the things. But in most people, you find are quite repetitive. When you start living with a person, you get to know their mind and you begin to notice it's quite a repetitive thing. They're deeply entrenched in there. And some people are very strongly identified with voice in the head, which often, more often than not, is critical and looking for the next thing to criticize or complain about. Very much encouraged in at universities critical thinking. Recently I read an article by a professor in the New York Times. He actually recognized critical thinking up to a point is quite useful. But when you go too far, it's very destructive. You can no longer appreciate anything. You can approach a work of literature. Why is it immediately criticized without be open yourself to it first. And when you are immersed in the critical mind, you're not. There's nothing creative there. You can only tear things down. So you're critical of other people, critical of what you read, critical of this, critical of your surroundings. And many ego entities, which is the identification with the voice in the head, are in that state of continuous dissatisfaction, which always just underneath the surface there is a latent dissatisfaction. And they're just waiting for the next excuse so that the latent dissatisfaction can emerge and think, oh, why don't they should have? You should have. They should. And if you can't do it to others, you do it to yourself. Why didn't I should have? And all sorts of amazing what people. The burden that you carry as this conditioned entity that you mistake for who you are not realizing. All it is is the workings of your mind conditioned by the culture that you grew up in, your family background, your surroundings, things that happened to you, things that you did were done to you. Your parents, school, all those things. That's mental conditioning that forms the person or the personality. And it has emotions that accompany the conditioned self. And they also often amplify the mental patterns or depression. So the retreat is the retreat from that. We're not here to change that Change sometimes happens when you no longer identify. Well, usually happens. A lot of change happens when you don't identify with it anymore. But that is not the main purpose. We are not here to change the conditioning of your mind. There's a place for that. There are workshops you can take that change the conditioning of your mind. And that's like improving the furnishings in the place where you live. You put in better furniture and you feel a bit better, but it's still a prison. There's still the bars on the window. So the true meaning of retreat is the retreat from your usual self, from your usual mental, mentally constructed, mentally emotionally constructed self. And if everything else really happens on the surface of life now, what happens on the surface of life can be very helpful. And this is why we're here. It can be very helpful. It helps you to begin to let go of your identification with your usual self and then realize. And of course, many of you have already started or are well into that process of disidentification, which we could also call the awakening process. Most of you are already engaged in. The awakening process has become initiated in you. And then you are here in order to deepen it. And some of you may not yet even know. There may be a few who may not even know at this moment what I'm referring to when I say awakening. But you will, unless you run away tomorrow already. Just give yourself a chance. So we are. There is the surface self. That is the usual self that everybody has. And for many people who have not yet awakened, that's all they have or all they think they have. It's like saying you have an enormous amount of wealth, but you don't know it, so it's as if you didn't have it. So when I say they don't have it, it really means they don't know that there is a deeper dimension to who they are. And that is the real meaning of that is really true deprivation of really not knowing who you are on the deeper level of your being. So there is the usual self and there is the deeper self. And we are here retreating. The purpose is to retreat from the usual self and discover who you are underneath the usual self, who or what you are. And that discovery does not happen conceptually. After this retreat on the last day, you may not be able to say much more about your real self, your true deeper self, than you are now. And yet you might have experienced it very deeply and be in touch with it very deeply. But what can you say about it? What can I say about my deeper self. It's hard to say anything because it does not live in the world of conceptualization. And you first encounter it in a moment of stillness, alert stillness, like now, where you don't need to know your name, you don't need to remember what your name is right now in order to be here fully. You don't need to remember your personal history right now in order to be hear fully and be fully yourself. You do not need to remember your personal history in order to get that sense of being fully present and being fully yourself. And that's quite amazing.