How to Practice Spiritual Manifestation | A Q&A With Eckhart Tolle

We have Celia joining us from Portugal. Celia, welcome. And please go ahead and share your question with Eckhart.

Hello. Thank you for having me. It's an honor, Eckhart, to have shined such a light on my path. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

So my question is, if I'm honest, what I really want to manifest is of a spiritual nature. And I find this is the same for many on this path. But these spiritual intentions are not so easy to simulate in terms of feeling like we have already received or to visualize. Can you address how manifestation can be applied to spiritual yearnings? Or is manifestation only to be applied to practical purposes while we work on our spiritual practice?

Thank you. Thank you. Good question. One important thing to be aware of is that you don't make the mistake of regarding spiritual realization or being enlightened or being egoless or being in permanent conscious connectedness with source, whatever you want to call it, not to regard that as a state to be achieved. It's very easy to fall into that error of wanting to become fully awakened, for example. And then you might say, this is part of the question, is there something I can do, perhaps, to manifest this awakened version of myself? So if you have this intention or this image in your mind, you want to arrive at a fully awakened state, whatever else you want to call it, that will become a great obstacle, because spiritual awakening, or the ego state, or whatever it is, cannot be achieved in the future. You would be creating an image that you then pursue, wanting to reach or achieve. And you won't achieve it as long as you have an image of yourself that you want to achieve. You're striving towards that. In other words, you make it into a goal like everything else, things that you want to achieve in this world. But the one thing that you will not achieve by making it into a goal is this state of awakening. Or being fully yourself is another way of putting it, being, realizing the essence of who you are. So you would be striving away from the only place where it is accessible to you. And that's in the vertical dimension of the present moment. So for everything else, manifestation practices can be helpful, but not for realizing who you are. Because there's no you don't achieve anything. You don't attain anything by spiritual awakening that it's not an achievement, it's not an attainment, it's a realization that means it's already here. So if you look to the future for it, you miss the fact that it's already here and you don't realize that that's the place where you haven't been looking, because you're looking to the future. And this is why I'm saying it becomes a great obstacle. If you look to the future for enlightenment, fulfillment, whatever it may be, that becomes the obstacle. And you won't get your phone, you won't find it, and you will be striving, even you might be engaged in arduous spiritual practices, very determined to awaken, but you have in your mind a future goal that you want to achieve without. You might not call it that, but underlying it, underlying your practice, is this assumption arriving at a. At a future goal. And that is because. Is the greatest obstacle to that realization. Because what is future. Future is basically inseparable from thought, because the future exists only in your mind as a thought form, if any. I'll be very happy to listen to anybody who wants to prove me wrong, because then he would. Somebody would come to me and say, here's the future. I have discovered it so far. Nobody has come to me and said, here's the future. You are wrong. The future is more than just a thought form. And I don't think anybody will come. So now that means if you're looking to the future, you have a thought form that you are pursuing of yourself as the fully awakened one, or whatever term you use. So you are pursuing a thought form in the future, which. The inseparable future and thought. And then you reach the end of this incarnation and you become frustrated because you haven't found it. Why not? Because the thought form or the future, the future self, prevented you from discovering what's already here, discovering who or what you already are. So it's a complete reversal of normal practice, is yes, you need time for everything in this world in order to do this. Any action unfolds in time for anything you pursue. You want to acquire something, achieve something, become good at something. All these things require time. Yes, but the one thing that does not only not require time, but the one thing to which time is the obstacle is that self realization. For everything else, you need time, and that's fine, but to find yourself, you don't need time. That is an amazing realization. The Buddha also had to learn that he didn't know that when he started off. When the Buddha started off, he realized the unsatisfactory nature of normal human existence. He saw there's so much suffering and then you die. So he saw the unsatisfactory and said, there must be a transcendent dimension, there must be something beyond. So for Many years he practiced seeking to find enlightenment, transcendence, and he practiced the most arduous disciplines with great teachers. He almost killed himself with the physics spiritual practice. And after several years of spiritual practice, he still hadn't, wasn't any further to his goal of enlightenment. And then he said, well, I've had enough of that. That, by the way, is not a literal, literal quote from the scriptures. This is my free translation. He said, I've had enough. And he stopped his spiritual practice. And he sat under a tree. And then that was the big moment. He sat under a tree, and suddenly the realization happened, enlightenment. What does that mean? All doing came to a stop. He realized through the doing he cannot achieve being. Being needs to be discovered, but not achieved. So no matter what he did, he didn't achieve it, because you cannot achieve it. You cannot achieve enlightenment. You can discover it. It's already here. And when he sat under the tree, all doing came to a stop. All future came to a halt. There was no more future. All seeking stopped. Seeking for an enlightened version of myself, basically, that stopped. And then it happened. The realization came to him, and that was the moment of enlightenment. So there's a deep lesson in that. Now, of course, some people say that the Buddha's search through spiritual practice was unnecessary. You could say that if he had realized before he started his arduous spiritual practice, if he had realized that that was unnecessary, not only unnecessary, that it was ultimately misleading, then he could have sat under the tree immediately. Okay, that's an interesting perspective on it. But one could also say that he needed to go through that in order to realize the futility of it and then give up. The surrender only happened as a result of the being frustrated with spiritual practice. So who knows whether one could say it wasn't necessary at all or he had to go through it. I have a way of putting this, and that is the question is my answer to the question, do you need time for spiritual realization? Do you need time to wake up spiritually? And my answer is, you need time until you realize that you don't need time. So you come to a point of the vertical dimension suddenly opens up, so one cannot really start. Some spiritual teachers do that. They tell people there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you need to do about waking up. You either wake up or not, or discover who you are. Very often it's not very helpful. It doesn't leave people. And so I think the doing it's helpful to do, to want to achieve this or that. Every Human being needs to arrive at a point where the doing is realized as ultimately not leading to the ultimate goal or realization. But you may have to become frustrated several times, quite a few times, before you realize that no amount of doing will ultimately lead to the realization of who you are. In fact, the doing is. Is the obstacle. But sometimes you need to go through that stage of doing to fully realize that. So the to project a to pursue a state that you want to achieve is not to be encouraged, but to realize that there's nothing to achieve. And who you are in your essence is already complete, full, perfect. In your essence, there's nothing that you could add to who you are. You're already one with God, to use that term, one with source, the source of all life. You're already one with one with that. On the level of manifestation, there are many things that where you could improve your life as this manifested being that you are temporarily you can learn new things, explore new things, achieve, get, obtain. And then of course, it leaves you again. Nothing stays with you in the world of manifestation. It comes and then it goes. So there's nothing wrong with doing and achieving and obtaining. But for realization, it's not helpful. It's a hindrance. So we come to the point of where doing and being are reconciled in yourself. To reconcile in yourself the dimension of being with the dimension of doing.

So if you discover within yourself that a lot of the time you are in a state of lack of insufficiency, of not enough, and you feel that the answer to the remedy is to be active in this world and achieve and do as much as possible, then you'll probably find that ultimately that is not the answer to your state of lack. In order to transcend, to go beyond your state of lack of neediness, of not enough spiritual practice and spiritual realization is necessary, necessary focus on the realization of being. It's only there that you can go beyond that state of lack, which is ego. Go within and discover who or what you are beyond the person.