Realizing Who You Are: A Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

This meditation period is always an opportunity to connect with who you are at a level deeper than the person, the surface self. And not only connect with, but realize that that deeper self is the essential self. And the person which is the surface self is the non essential, temporary, conditioned, time bound self. They are not entirely separate. The conditioned self, the person, of course, could not be without the deeper self, which you can sense at this very moment by becoming aware of the presence, or the life presence, whatever you want to call it, within you. One way of doing it, as we sit here together, is to be aware of these spaces in between my words. And realize that when you are aware of a space, whether it's short or a little longer, at that moment you are not thinking, you're simply present, like now. And you can then sense your more essential being underneath the surface self, which is the physical body and the mind and the emotions. No thought nor thinking is the essential self. You can only become aware of it when thinking subsides. Without you going to sleep, thinking subsides and an alertness remains. An alert presence, one could almost say a kind of nothingness. And yet it is evident that it is only nothing in the sense that it is not a thing. Thing. It has no form. But there is clearly a presence there which you can sense with your entire energy field. So you become aware of yourself as a space of consciousness, a sense of an underlying sense of aliveness, of beingness, which has nothing to do with your past or future, or who you are as a person. And then you also may become aware that there is a presence that pervades the so called external world. That the entire universe is pervaded by a sense of alive presence. Although in you, so to speak, it becomes focalized, and in you it can become aware of itself. Another way of putting it, of course, is to say that you become aware of yourself. And gradually then your daily life becomes interspersed with moments of presence. That's how your life begins to change. Which means the conditioned mind, with its habitual thinking, thought patterns, reactive patterns, mental likes, dislikes, is no longer all there is to who you are. So you become deeper. The more your life becomes interspersed with the presence. You deepen. It's not really the person that deepens, opening up of the dimension of depth in you. So the person remains the person.