Realizing Your Depth, with Eckhart Tolle

You are a ray of sunlight. And as this ray of sunlight, you've always been looking out here, so you are the little ray of sunlight, thinking you're an independent entity with other rays of sunlight everywhere around you. And they're all looking for things. And then the ray of sunlight that considers itself to be an independent entity, autonomous, having certain relationships with other rays of sunlight, and even with itself, the me becomes still for a moment and then realize there is a depth to who I am that goes all the way back to the sun. But you can only realize that when you stop thinking, then you become aware the ray of sunlight. You become aware of your own depth. There's no end to you. There isn't this finite little thing. As the thinking mind stops, there is suddenly a depth. And in that you realize that you are not a disconnected fragment that has been thrown into this universe by some malignant deity that enjoys your suffering. No, but that you are an essential part of the universe. You haven't been thrown into the universe, you have come out of the universe. And so in this analogy, you have come out of the sun. And as the mind stops, and then you can actually sense how far you go back, but there's no distance. You are actually never separate from the sun. The ray of sunlight realizes suddenly that it is still actually part of the sun. Nobody can say where the sun actually finishes, because it doesn't have a boundary. So the light that reaches us from the sun, one could say, is still part of the sun. We are all within this vast energy field of the sun. This is an analogy. Sun is the closest you can get in the sense perceived universe to the source of all life. Because in the sense perceived universe, here the sun is the source of all life. The very heat in your body comes actually from the sun. All the energy we use is stored up energy from the sun. And we, one day we'll find a way of using sun energy in a much more intelligent way than fossil fuels and so on. But that's another matter. So the ray of sunlight realizes that it's still connected to this vastness, to the source. And that's the self realization of the ray of sunlight, that it was never separate and could not even exist as a separate entity. Totally impossible. And then the ray of sunlight actually becomes a much more peaceful and relaxed being while it's still there. I'm talking about you, of course, because you've realized, without any needing to convince yourself of anything or take up some new belief, no, through actual direct realization, you realize your connectedness with Something very deep. So you're not just a little person. You're also the kingdom of heaven, or as the Buddha called it, spaciousness. Sunyata. So there's two of you, and this is not an ultimate truth. Ultimately there's only one. But let's just temporarily. It sometimes helps to have a certain perspective on things. There's two of you. That which expresses itself in form, the physical body, and all the stuff that's in your mind and in your emotional field, all that makes up the person that has a limited lifespan. Even if there's a continuation of that after the body dissolves, it has a limited lifespan because all forms, no form is permanent. So all forms are continuously changing. It would be dreadful if you survived as this personality that you are now. I mean, who would want to be the same personality for centuries and millennia? There is an evolution of consciousness. So the body is short lived. That which is beyond the body may continue for a while as it continues on its journey of self real. But you are that which is the form identity. And more essentially, you are that essence identity. The two. And all the great spiritual teachings, all they do is point to the possibility for you to realize that there's more to you than meets the eye. To use an expression. What meets the eye is first. When you see another human being or you look in the mirror, or you look down yourself. What meets the eye is first the physical body, then what meets the eye, metaphorically speaking, when you meet another human being is their personality. Things, how they act, what they say, how they behave, that's already unseen, but it manifests in the scene. So it meets the eye. That's all the form of the person and your own form. And all spiritual teachings really come down to somebody trying to show you that there is another dimension to who you are. And whether they call it the kingdom of heaven that's within you or the emptiness that's the essence of who you are. Or in other teachings, the true self. In certain Indian in India, they talk about the true self or the Self it's sometimes called. And then people who haven't had any, not even a glimpse of a realization. They may be religious scholars. They say that Hinduism, the Hindu talk of a true self or the great Self, and the Buddhist teachings of no self is totally opposite. They don't realize that they're talking about the same thing from a different perspective. When Buddha talks about the unreality of the self, he's talking about the unreality of your form identity, the relative, the dreamlike nature of your form identity. And in order to get you to realize your essence identity, he talked about inner spaciousness and what is meditation all about? That, he taught, is to help you stop the mind not as an active thing but as a relinquishing. And then there's the spaciousness. And then you know who you are without having any added without having added any concept in your mind to who you are. When we think of knowing who you are, we think you must know more about you, but that's not that knowing. If you want to know more about you, then you'd have to perhaps go to psychoanalysis and then you can delve deeply into your form identity and many things will come up. But eventually you'd have to go deeper beyond that in order to be free of complete identification with form. So let me just remind you that the essential practice is to relinquish thinking not by falling below thinking, but by rising above thinking.