Eckhart Tolle describes his own spiritual awakening and explains the difference between ordinary wakefulness and true awakening. He explores consciousness, mindfulness, and self-realization through the lens of various spiritual traditions.
Now most of you are already awakening. And you can. Most of you realize the importance of this question. And let's go in deeply now. So that our time together, present moment only, of course, is actually not just conceptual, but experiential. Realizing something here and now. Who or if I am not my thoughts and emotions and the body. Who or what is this thing that does the identification unconsciously? This I describe briefly in the introduction to the Power of Now. That night, when my body was 29 years old. When the thought occurred to me. I cannot live with myself any longer. Because I was so unhappy. I realized the unhappiness was produced not by the circumstances of my life. Because circumstances were. Well, not the greatest, but okay. But why couldn't I live with myself any longer? Because of my mind. How my mind, what I call my life. How my mind interpreted all the things in my life. The story I was telling myself made me unhappy. I didn't know that. I didn't understand that fully. All I knew is I can't live with myself any longer. I didn't realize what I called myself. Was a story that I was continuously telling myself in my mind. I can't stand it anymore. But I was the story. Except when this thought came up. I can't live with myself. And for a moment there was a stepping back from the thought. But another thought came out of that. And that thought said, if I can't live with myself, who am I? And who is that self? Who am I, and who is that self? Now, I didn't get an answer to that question on a conceptual level. But I got an answer experientially. Because at that moment a separation occurred from my. Now, let's put a word to it now. A separation occurred between my, the thought and the consciousness that had incarnated into the thought. And suddenly I realized I is the consciousness. But I didn't realize it conceptually, only experientially. Now when I talk about it, it becomes conceptual. I realize I is the consciousness. The thought is something that the consciousness had taken form as a thought. In the same way that the surface of water or an ocean develops a wave or ripple on the surface. So the wave of the ripple on the surface of the ocean, temporarily the ocean becomes a wave or ripple. And then when the ripple subsides, it's just the ocean again. So I can talk about it now, but at that time, it just happened. And so the next morning, the separation was still there, strangely so. But I didn't. I didn't understand what had happened. I only realized a wonderful deep peace. Just walked. Nothing had changed in my external circumstances. But there was this piece. I didn't understand why. And I was still living in London at the time. Everything was peaceful. The underground, the subway, the riding on the bus, the bus of the city, everywhere so peaceful. I don't understand why is it suddenly so weird? It took me several years to understand why suddenly something was so peaceful. And one insight came when I was talking to a Zen monk because I was visiting. I wanted to understand spirituality after something deeply spiritual had already happened to me. But I didn't understand it. So I talked to a Zen monk and he said, well, Zen basically is about not thinking but staying awake. And then I realized, oh, it's such a simple statement, not thinking but staying awake. Then I realized, okay, what I had experienced as peace was actually that my thinking had been enormously reduced. Like I was doing 80% less thinking than I had done before. And a lot of the time there was just an awareness. I was perceiving things and there was a still awareness in the background of the sense perception. Wonderful. Nobody's saying anything about it. Not some critical statement or I could still think when needed, but I wasn't thinking anymore. In the self serving thinking that goes on and on that people don't want to let go of, that had come to a stop, the self seeking through thinking or that had come to stop. And that eventually became the so called teaching. And then I realized all the ancient teachers using different terms, different words or they all point to that possibility of awakening because that's what it is, awakening. Why do we use the term awakening? Not only we use it, in Buddhism, Buddha means the one who is awake. Buddha is not a person, it's not his name. It's when they ask the Buddha, who are you? He said, I'm awake. Buddha is the Sanskrit word. Buddha comes from the route to be awake. And you might have overlooked that in the teaching of Jesus. There are quite a few parables about staying awake in the churches. I don't believe they understand the significance of that. Mostly Jesus literally, for example, said, quote, what I say to you, I say to all, stay awake. So the term awakening is used in many traditions. Why? Why do they term, what is it? Normally people would say, I'm awake already. What are you talking about? But we use the term awakening because when you. Everybody can relate to that in their own experience. Because in normal life in the morning when you wake up, there's a fundamental difference happens between the sleep state and the awakened state. Everybody experiences that every morning, and you open your eyes and maybe you'd just been dreaming, and suddenly your eyes open and there's a huge big shift in consciousness from being in the dream state. You can see when you. Even animals dream. If you have a dog or cat, I'm sure you have observed them when they are asleep and they go into the dream state, their face twitches and they're dreaming. So the human dreams. And then a shift, enormous shift happens. The human awakens. And so everybody knows they can relate to the term awakening. And that's why this term is used in spirit traditions. It can be quite helpful. One could say there is a second awakening as a potential in every human being. And it is not the awakening from sleep into normal wakefulness, because normal wakefulness is the unconscious state. Because it's your data. Because after you open your eyes in the morning, you start thinking after a few seconds, you maybe have a few seconds when you're just aware there, but then you start thinking, oh, today? What's going to happen today? And immediately the machinery starts and off you are in another kind of dream. And that other kind of dream is called normal wakefulness. And so there is a potential in every human being for what we could call that a second awakening. And that is the awakening out of the dream of identification with thought plus emotions, the awakening out of the dream of complete identification with thought. And that is spiritual awakening.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
