Nothing in This World Can Touch the Real You | Eckhart Tolle

While you are aware of all this, can you sense the consciousness that you are the presence, the silent presence, one could say the silent presence in the background of your perceptions. And then you can sit here and instead of being a person perceiving this through the veil of the person's conditioning, you sit here perceiving this room. Not through your personal sense of self, but through the simple, uncluttered, pure awareness. And that awareness is the still background to your sense perception, so to speak. So you're aware of the foreground. And in the foreground things appear and disappear, appear and disappear, impermanence, fleetingness of everything. A house is built, then the house collapses or burns down. Bodies are born, grow, then they get old and then they die. And situations, they come, they go very quickly. All these things happen in the foreground. Everything happens in the foreground. And even your thinking is, one could say is still the foreground of what happens in your mind is the foreground. Ultimately everything happens in your mind, but the background is the stillness behind it, which is the awareness. So, and this is what the Indian term sahaja samadhi would be in both worlds. So samadhi itself, you could totally withdraw and forget all about the so called external world. Sahaja madhi, you can be in both worlds. So you sit here aware of everything and present. There's the presence in the background that is also stillness. And that is your essence, identity, not the narrative of your person. It is the narrative that calls itself my life. That's a short lived phenomenon. So you are essentially the presence. That's a wonderful realization. And then especially when things in the foreground become difficult because you lose something in the foreground, there's gain and there's loss. You gain something and you lose something. There's success and there's failure and you have the opposites. There's even happiness and unhappiness, Happiness and unhappiness. But they can. Even when as happiness arises and there's still the stillness in the background, this happiness is still there. But even the happiness doesn't take you over because you have something more vital and deeper. So the happiness doesn't make you go, wow, yeah, I got it. Wow. And two days later, oh, I'm devastated. I thought I could trust this person to such a wonderful person. I've been deceived. That was horrible, Tom. It's awkward or whatever it is. You went to some place that was promised some kind of fulfillment and then you get there, oh, nonce. Oh no. So this, the fluctuation, happiness unhappiness there's something deeper than happiness and unhappiness and that see the stillness behind it all. And from there you can observe so and then something that makes you unhappy, it doesn't devastate you. Let's say if you have witnessing something that is usually would usually be called tragic or let's see, your house is burned down. Unfortunately, it can happen. Then you are there. You're not, of course you're not happy, but. And of course you could say you're unhappy, but not in the. It does not touch the deepest levels of your being anymore. It remains a surface room. It. Now the presence consciousness, awareness. How do we use these words? One could say that when we say awareness that means consciousness is. Has become conscious of itself because you are consciousness. Then you become conscious of yourself as consciousness. Consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe. Even greater, much greater than even the mystery of outer space. Infinite number of galaxies, the mystery of atomic and subatomic particles. Also a very mysterious realm. But the most mysterious is consciousness. Nobody can tell you what it is because if you're looking for it, trying to examine, it's like, let's say you have a flashlight and you're shining the light. You're using the flashlight to look for the flashlight you're losing in the flight, you're looking for it. So consciousness scientists have a problem with consciousness because you cannot put it under a microscope, you cannot dissect, is not an object that you can see. Everything else is an object. But consciousness is the eternal subject. Where does it come from? The prevalent belief is in mainstream science that Edgar of Meserstein doesn't know what it is. But it kind of implies that consciousness is a byproduct of matter. Matter being in the case of humans, the human brain. And so the belief is that consciousness somehow the chemical soup of the brain, which is a jelly like substance in your head. This jelly like substance which normally it's incredibly complex and somehow they say this produces something that is non material. So there's matter of the matter of the consciousness and then it produces something that is not matter. How is that possible? How can the chemical brain produce See all this beautiful works of art, music, technology and this experience of this moment, nobody knows. But some of the great scientists, they recognized that consciousness ultimately is not a product of the brain, but transcends all that, that it is that the foundation of the universe is not matter physical, but consciousness. Its. And here we come to my phone now. Is this phone conscious? I don't know. It may be on Its way to consciousness? Would it produce consciousness or would it be a receiver of consciousness? Your brain, does it produce consciousness? Or is it like a radio that receives consciousness from and then transforms it into mind stuff and into thoughts and into words? Does your brain receive consciousness or produce consciousness? For example, there was a one of the most famous physicists, Max Planck, German physicist, the founder of quantum mechanics. If you want to know what that is, go to Google. But he was one of the great scientists, more or less a contemporary of Einstein. There was a group of great physicists at that time that made enormous discoveries in the realm of the subatomic realm. So Max Planck said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. This of course goes against the traditional scientific view of material reality as the basis for it all. And he also said all matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system, which is the atomic together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. The consciousness is the intelligence behind all the phenomena that we see in the so called physical world. There's an organizing principle and vast intelligence behind it all. And this vast intelligence, of course, is invisible in the same way that most of you is invisible. It's perhaps comes at a surprise, maybe you hadn't thought about it when I say that most of you is invisible. But when I see you, I see your body, and I can perhaps draw some conclusions as to your mind by observing your behavior or your words. Then I can learn a little bit about your mind. But mostly, and even that still comes through the body. But if somebody was looking for you in the physical realm, let's say a surgeon looking for you by cutting open your skull and examining your brain, which is supposed, supposedly that's where it all lives. The scientist or the surgeon cutting open your brain would not find a single thing there. He could call you your countless memories, all the things that go on your mind. He wouldn't know what language you speak. He wouldn't know where the memory of your parents or grandparents is. He can't say, oh, there's the grandmother. They say, I found a molecule that represents the grandmother. And then there's a molecule of the language this person was speaking. No, he couldn't see if the brain is damaged. He could try it. You could say, yes, there are damages in the brain and this is perhaps why the person suffered from dementia, because the brain had become defective. This is similar examining a radio. And when the music is no longer coming through very well. You examine the radio and you see that rust particles have accumulated, and so it's not functioning very well anymore. But what you consider to be you, you are an invisible phenomenon every. Because every thought already exists in the realm of invisibility. Yes, the brain is necessary in the same way that the radio is necessary to play the music. But you are essentially an invisible entity, which means most of you does not even exist in this dimension.