This is a YouTube video titled "Is Life After Death an Egoic Concept? | Eckhart Tolle Teachings" containing a spiritual teaching session recorded in March 2022. The content features Eckhart Tolle responding to a question about the nature of life after death, ego, consciousness, and reincarnation. The discussion explores deep philosophical and metaphysical ideas about consciousness, its invisibility, and its relationship to the physical brain, using examples such as pets and human memory to illustrate points.
Thank you all for this opportunity. My question is nearly all spiritual and religious traditions refer to some sort of life after death. The idea of living on after dying seems to me like an idea that egoic structures would come up with in order to support or enhance the ego. Some sort of life after death might still be true, but it seems to me that the idea could instead possibly be one big narrative lie created and propagated across human civilization by the ego. Our embodied consciousness can be realized while we are alive, but upon death might actually become completely non existent. Can you please speak to this Right.
A very profound question. The ultimate answers reincarnation. Of course, there are many traditions that speak of reincarnation. And it's always good to just, whenever you are asked a question, speak from your own experience or realization. And this is what I am also going to do. Mostly. The first thing to discover experientially is, as I've said before, it sounds a little strange, is that you are essentially invisible. You, not only what I can see of you is the body. And sometimes I may be able to see certain things in your mental emotional field. I can. Well, I can hear words that you speak or your facial expressions. I'm talking to everybody, not just to Tina, but I can see facial expressions that kind of give me a hint of what, what you're feeling or thinking. But anybody who was looking for you in the realm of physicality would not find you. And if that's too much, let's just go for a moment to. Let's talk about this perhaps makes sense to anybody who has a dog or cat at home. When the dog or cat dies, which can be very sad thing for people and we come to humans later, it might be a little bit easier start with the dog or cat. You may realize in that moment when suddenly the dog is dead or the cat is dead, but everything is still there. The fur, the body. There may even be some warmth left in the body. And there it is. But that which you essentially loved and related to in the dog or the cat isn't there anymore. So you can still. The touch is still the same. But something essentially is gone. And that was always invisible. What you love in the dog is, is ultimately although the dog, you might like, love the way the dog looks and what it does, but when you relate to the dog, you essentially love, although you know what, he might have actually expressed it like that consciously. You love the consciousness of the dog. That's what you love in the dog. And when you look into the eyes of the dog, what Looking back at you is there's a consciousness of the dog looking back at you. And when that's gone, the dog is. And same with the human. What you love in a human is the consciousness of the other human. Now you yourself, all that is invisible. Because consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe that science still has no idea what to do with it, cannot explain consciousness, and in most cases avoids talking about consciousness. The greatest mystery is the fact that the universe is conscious and that you are conscious. A surgeon looking for you by cutting open your skull and analyzing your brain will not find even a trace of you. You will not even find any of your countless hundreds of thousands or million memories that you have somewhere. What, in what form does a memory survive in you? Is a memory is the memory of your first teacher at school. I just mentioned the word. And suddenly an image of the first teacher you had at school comes to you. The memory of your grandmother who passed away. The memory of the bed that you slept in when you were 8 or 10 years old. I just need to mention it. It was somewhere. But where did that live in you? Was that in a molecule on Atom? 1 Atom was your bed? Or what is it? Nobody knows. And nobody can find even the memories that, that you make up. The person that you are even on that level, let alone the deeper level of the unconditioned consciousness, nobody can find you there. You are not. You don't exist in the realm of the visible, and not just the deepest essence. Even as a person, even the person that you are, which is a mental, emotional construct or entity, even, even mind and emotion, you cannot find a thought as a material form. So this is why the downloading some science fiction predictions, downloading your mind into a computer, I don't think that's going to happen. It's an interesting idea, but it's not going to happen. You don't even know what a thought is. Nobody knows. And it doesn't exist in the realm of the visible. So you are essentially invisible now that you can. You can sense that, that you are essentially invisible the moment there's a sensation in the stream of thinking and all that remains is even though even all the thought is already invisible. But if you go a little deeper, there's the consciousness, and you cannot see it, taste it, touch it. Now the important question that arises. Is this consciousness a product of the physical brain? Is it produced by the physical brain? Is it possible that the physicality of the brain, which is on one level, chemistry, on a deeper level, atoms and molecules. So on the chemical level, the soup, the chemical soup that makes up the brain. Can the physicality produce something non physical, that is consciousness? Or is the entire consciousness an illusion, as some scientists say? It's an illusion that the chemical soup is having. Who knows that? Who is the one that knows that the chemical soup is having an illusion? It's getting very complex now. Is the. Is consciousness an epiphenomenon? That's a fancy word for byproduct. Is consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain, the physical brain or. Undoubtedly there's a connection between the physical brain, physicality and consciousness. Because you can knock somebody out or somebody could give me a substance that makes me unconscious, or I could fall suddenly on my head and stop talking. Is that proof that consciousness is produced by the brain? Would it be Proof is that if I smash the TV that whatever you have been watching, or let's say the radio, I don't know if people still have radios. If I smash the radio, which had been playing the Beethoven's ninth Symphony and suddenly Beethoven's ninth Symphony disappears and then I say, ah, this is proof that the radio produces the music.
