How to Get True Guidance | Eckhart Tolle

All guidance, all true guidance, and all true knowing comes from the one. The source. Presence then guides you. And you don't need on some people's spiritual journey. For example, certain substances you mentioned, plant based, you took on your spiritual journey. If it's done respectfully, with reverence, then that can be a helpful thing temporarily, but ultimately you have to transcend that also so that you go directly. But it can help show people what is possible and bring about a little spaciousness in their minds and temporarily put them in touch with a deeper dimension. But ultimately that is something also to be transcended and is not right for everybody at all. If you are drawn to it, then it's right for you. If you get too attached to it, it's no longer right. If it's something that you use on your journey, it's fine. And then you transcend that. And presence then becomes your guide. You don't need any external guide anymore. You just go directly to presence. Because any guide that you go to that again, is connected to the previous question. Any guide that you go to, where do they get. If the knowledge or the wisdom that they trust transmit to you, where do they get it from? Is it because they are more knowledgeable? Or are they more deeply connected to the one consciousness than you are? So ultimately, all guidance, all true guidance and all true knowing comes from the one. The source is this emanation from the source of all life. Consciousness itself is an emanation from the one source of life that is transcendent, that does not exist in space or time. Like the sun. The sun emanates the light. The light is still connected to the sun. Whether the light is in some way is still part of the sun. Consciousness emanates from the one transcendent source of all life, which has no location in space or time. It is transcendent. If God means anything, then that is what God means. It's the transcendent source of all life that shines into this world, into this dimension as consciousness. So the consciousness in you is a ray of coming from source, so to speak. So the consciousness you can sense in yourself emanates from God. I don't use that word very often, so I have to. God emanates from. It emanates from the source of all life, like light emanates from the sun. This is why in some traditions people speak of God realization. And in some traditions they even say things like when they connect with a deep I, they make statements like the mystics of Sufism, for example. They make statements like when they have that connection that I am God, I am God. And Sufis dance and so on while they dance. Not necessarily because they have already realized, but they may dance in order to shut off their minds. And sometimes it works. They say I am God. Of course that's not favorably received by others. And usually you get stones thrown at you if you say you are God, particularly in Islam, but even in Christianity. Used to be the case if you said I'm God, I mean, you wouldn't survive for very long in the Middle Ages. And it's true, and it's not true that you are God. Yes, of course you are an inseparable part of the One. In that sense, of course you are God. But in the same way that could a ray of sunlight say I am the sun? Yes and no, of course it is an emanation of the sun. But compared to the ray of sunlight, the sun is inconceivably vast. And so God or the Source, you cannot even speak of. There's no statement that you can make of God because one makes. It transcends everything, all polarities, everything. So you can't really say anything about it. But, but you can sense its emanation in you as you. And in that sense you are part of God, the divine. You are the consciousness that emanates from the source. And consciousness, really, that's the realization. And you don't then after a while you don't need anything as an intermediary to go there directly. So that is again partly connected to the previous question. Whether it's a spirit guide or plant based substances or whatever it may be, there may be a time and a place for it on a person's spiritual journey, but ultimately you transcend that and find that, that deep connectedness within you with the source, and that becomes your guide. And that is the unconditioned intelligence. So when you. Again, thank you for your question. I'll just add to know yourself as consciousness is the most amazing liberation of, is not the liberation of the person, it's the liberation from the person. Because the person was a misperception of who you are, a formed identity, a misperception of who you are. The universe, this is our dimension here. The universe wants to become conscious and it expands. The consciousness of the universe grows, expands. So there's gradually, you could say the light of the source gradually comes into this dimension. More so there's a growth of consciousness throughout the entire universe. I'm sure it's on millions of planets, billions of planets. Consciousness is growing in different forms Incarnating So the consciousness. The most amazing thing about the universe is not the fact that there are billions of suns, stars, suns in our galaxy alone. But there are billions of galaxies. Each galaxy is an entire world consisting of billions of stars. It's completely inconceivable. And the vast spaces in between completely inconceivable to the human mind. You know the speed of light in kilometers, it's 300,000 per second. 300,000 kilometers per second. So the light, the reflected light from the moon. Takes about 1 second to reach us. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us. From here to the center of our galaxy, If I remember correctly, where there is a black hole from where we are to the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Light takes about 30,000 years. And that's only in our galaxy. I believe the next neighboring galaxy is about 2 million light years or something like that. It's unlikely that we will travel there in a physical body in the near future. But there's something even more mysterious than that and more miraculous than that. The greatest mystery is not the vastness of it all. Or the multiplicity of star systems. But the greatest miracle is something that the universe is conscious. The universe is conscious. How do I know that? I know that because I am conscious. You know that because you are conscious. You are the universe. You are an inseparable part of the universe. You are an expression of the consciousness of the universe. The consciousness that underlies the physical manifestations that arise as it become more and more complex, the life forms that arise. But there's one consciousness underneath it all that expresses itself. And that you are that you are the consciousness of the universe. And that's the amazing mystery. The greatest mystery of the universe is it's conscious because you are conscious. That's how you know it. And you can't argue with that, because you cannot argue. Everything could be an illusion. But what is absolutely certain and beyond any doubt is that you are conscious. Obviously, because you're here perceiving the you may be dreaming. Maybe you're dreaming up this room and this man sitting on a chair. That's possible, but it still means there's a consciousness. Otherwise the dream would not appear. It appears in the space of this consciousness. So the one thing that's beyond any doubt in you is that you are conscious. And even that is not absolutely correctly expressed. Because when I use language, duality creeps in. If I say you are conscious, it already creates a duality of you and conscious you are. As if conscious were an attribute to who you are. But to put it more accurately, you are consciousness. The essence of who you are is consciousness, and that is beyond doubt. Now, consciousness is invisible. Even the mental manifestation of consciousness as thought is invisible. In fact, you are almost completely invisible. You, as a human being, what you see is only the surface appearance of the physical body. Every thought exists. Even thinking, which is a manifestation of consciousness, exists in an invisible realm. You can open up. The surgeon can open up your brain. Hopefully, he won't. He could open up your brain and look for a thought, a memory. Your brain is. You have countless memories. Go back to your childhood. See the teacher you had 10 years of age, either the one you liked or the one you didn't like. Go there. See the teacher, and you're sitting in the classroom, there's the teacher, and then you're walking home, and you're arriving, you're opening the front door, you're 10 years old, and you're walking into your living room. Now, when I say this, now your memory can go there. And actually, yeah, you remember many, many details. You didn't even know it. But where? What is that memory? Where was it stored? Were there atoms and molecules that contained the image of your living room and your teacher you had when you were 10 years old? Could a surgeon ever find the memory of the living room in their head when you were 10 years old? But using a powerful microscope, there's that thought and there's that. We don't even know what a thought is. We don't know how it lives in you. And scientists say everything is matter. That entire consciousness is a byproduct of matter, is a byproduct of the chemistry of the brain. And yet when they look at the chemistry of the brain, they can't find a single thought, let alone the memory of your teacher plus a million other memories. How do they live in you as atoms and molecules or as chemical substances in a kind of soup? In the brain, it's all invisible. It does not exist in the material realm. And although there is a connection between consciousness and the physical brain, there's a connection, but it is a connection in the same way. There's a connection between a radio receiver and the music that it plays, or a television. And so it's a medium through which consciousness can express itself in this world, but it is not produced. Matter does not produce consciousness. It.