Eckhart Tolle uses the ocean and waves as an analogy to explain how individual identity connects to universal consciousness. He explores thought, consciousness, and the invisible essence of the self beyond what we normally perceive.
It's an amazing realization that who you essentially are is. You are invisible. The moment you move to thoughts, nobody knows. Scientists don't really know what a thought is. What is a thought? Where does it live in you? Where does it live in you? That's an interesting thing. Does it have a. Now mainstream science is still largely, totally materialistic, which means it says that matter is all that exists and everything is matter. And it says that consciousness is a byproduct, or they say epiphenomenon, other words, a byproduct of the human brain in some way. This is a long. One could talk about this for a long time. I don't want to go this way and entertain you in that direction. It is more important, experiential to have. I want this to be an experiential gathering rather than intellectual gathering. But ask yourself the question, what is a thought? Where does it live? All your memories? I suggest, for example, the memory of. Please go ahead. The memory of your deceased grandmother, for example, or the memory of you when you were a child. When you were a child, you lived in a particular place. Maybe you had your own room. And you can suddenly recollect many details of the room that you had when you were a child, even how the doorknob felt when you opened the door, the carpet, the furniture. And you can remember your grandmother or your first teacher when you first started school, the teacher you had then. And you can remember, okay, now you. You hadn't perhaps thought of that first grade teacher in several years, but now that I mention it, suddenly he or she pops up. Where and in what form did this first teacher of yours or your grandmother, or the memory of the room that you lived in when you were six years old. And of course there are hundreds of thousands of memories like that. But where did this live in you? In what form was it, if it's molecules and atoms in your brain that somehow certain atoms represent your grandmother and other things represent. Other molecules, represent other things. The weird thing is, if a surgeon opens up your brain, he will not find any of your memories. He will not find you. That's a strange thing. He cannot define things. But not you. You cannot find, because you can. You do not exist on a physical level, ultimately only as a physical body. But the. The depth of you as who you are, even who you are as a person, which is still limited, even that just the human. You don't exist as in the physical realm. Really, I don't know where you exist. Perhaps in the cloud. The cloud that you. And then you download the memory from the cloud. So every, every thought is invisible. But if can of course it uses the brain in order to express itself. Emotion too. The emotion itself is not visible, but it can manifest of course with physical symptoms in the body. But in itself it's an energy field, a non physical energy field. So the entire structure of the psychic structure of you is essentially invisible. This is why in the famous little book, the Little Prince, I think it was famous classic, it says what is essential is invisible to the eye. This I which means, it means all the other senses too. What is essential is not visible to the senses. So you are essentially invisible. You are not ultimate. And I, the way I see it is thought is already, does not even exist in this dimension. That's all you are multi dimensional. You exist as a thought made entity. But it's not. No longer. It's. It's associated with the physical realm, but it is not confined to the physical realm. Your thoughts are invisible. Your whole sense of who you are is invisible. Nobody could find it by, by looking for you in the physical realm. You're not there. And that's, it's an amazing realization that the. Who you essentially are is. You are invisible. All the, all the thoughts that go through your head, they are not visible to the senses. Interesting. So. And that's only the surface part of you even there. Let's go back to the analogy of the ocean. You have the ocean. On the surface of the ocean there are waves and ripples. Now in this analogy, let's say every little ripple or wave believes itself to be an independent entity disconnected from other ripples. It only knows itself as a ripple because it doesn't know its own depth. And every wave only knows itself as a wave. Wave could be perhaps VIPs. If you own a private debt, you're a wave. And if you don't, you're ripple. So but the wave and the ripple are all short lived. Their destiny is the same. The body. One day the body is here, you're somebody, the next day you're nobody. Whether you're wave or ripple, it doesn't matter. So now this, this ripple of course feels uneasy on the surface of the ocean because its sense of identity is very limited and it feels sometimes threatened by other ripples. Or it wants to use other ripples to associate with in order to become a bigger ripple. And sometimes temporarily that works, but not for very long. And then you're looking for yourself on the horizontal realm. Where can I be a more complete ripple? Can you help me be a more complete ripple or I need you. If we come together, we can be a big ripple. And it's never. Nothing really works in one moment. The ripple goes to a talk in the and it hears this weird analogy and then says, but who are you? Beyond the body of you as the person, the invisible you. Can you become aware of the invisible you, which is the first of all. It's the person that consists of thoughts and emotions, but that's already a little bit beyond, beyond the surface of the ocean. You go a little bit into the ocean and there you exist as a person. And there's all your emotions and your thoughts and your identity as a human. There you are already you become aware of that. And that's still very limited. And that is sustained by the incessant thinking machine. The conditioned mind is this it sustains the personal selfhood, self identity. That's amazing. And so the key is to realizing go deeper and sense your connectedness with the ocean. Ocean in this analogy means consciousness. Universal consciousness that pervades the entire universe. The intelligence that underlies all phenomenal existence. The intelligence behind it all. The organizing principle behind the arising of forms, all forms. A vast intelligence that exists, not exist as such, but it gives rise to existence. The vast intelligence is. It is being. It is not. It doesn't exist because everything that exists, exists in this dimension.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
