Rising Above Thought | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

We're talking about identity, which is the most fundamental thing. Where do you get your sense of self from? This is the most fundamental thing in your life. Because if you derive your sense of self from a fiction in your mind, which ultimately is what the ego is, your whole life will reflect back to you that this is a fiction. And it will color all your experiences. It will create a neediness, it will create all kinds of emotions that are completely unnecessary, that are manufactured by your mind. And the identity in the mind that we call the ego, almost like a little entity that doesn't want to go away, it wants to. I want to suffer a bit more. I need my enemies. I need to complain. What can I complain about now? Why does he talk so much? He's been going on talking for so long. I can't stand it anymore. So the words are pointing to something in you. Then of course, you cannot undo your personal history. Of course you remember your personal history. And you, there's your life situation. Everybody has a life situation. You have relationships, you have a work situation, probably, or you have lost your job. Then you don't have a work situation. But it's similar. You have a living situation, you have a health situation, you have a relationship situation, a huge source of suffering and occasional happiness. Those things make up your life. You have those situations. But is that all there is to who you are? So you need to be free. You awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. The essence, your essential being, is the aliveness of presence, consciousness. And you can only get that in the gap between two thoughts. This is why stillness is an important pointer to it. Stillness does not mean you fall asleep. It could mean you fall asleep because humans, the habitual level where humans exist is thinking. Then the only time when you are free of thinking is when you fall asleep, if you haven't awakened yet. When you move towards sleep, thinking gradually slows down. When you get very sleepy, there's very little thought going on in your head. And you go, and you might even like that, because suddenly you can't remember what your problems are anymore. And you feel the pull of sleep, which is so delicious. What we call tiredness, it's so normal, we accept it. But if you really look at what tiredness is, something absolutely delicious is pulling you come this way, you must come this way. It's so delicious. And at some point, even if you try not to go there, the attraction, attraction of that place becomes so overwhelming that you have to go there. And in the last moment, when you still have some consciousness. You feel, ah, even if you were out in the cold. And no, if I fall asleep, I'm going to die. In the last moment, you would still feel the deliciousness of going, ah, the rest wouldn't matter anymore. You're moving towards the source. You're moving to regenerate. You're moving, but you don't know it anymore. You're moving below thought towards sleep. Another way of moving below thought is having a few drinks. And that can free you. For some people, it frees you. It frees them of their unhappiness. And they become jolly suddenly. Suddenly they can enjoy life because they're not thinking much anymore. They're just. It's a way of being present too, in some way. And then you think, I need another one, because if I feel jolly now, I'll be feeling even more jolly with the next one. But that's not the case, because the more you drink, the more you move towards unconsciousness. So you're falling again, you're falling below thought until finally you fall off the chair. So we are not going there below thought. Yes, that can free you also. But as we awaken spiritually, as consciousness awakens in us, universal consciousness awakens in us. We become conscious of being conscious. And the moment you are conscious of being conscious, you have risen above thought and you are still. You have transcended thought, which means you are able to think, but you are no longer trapped by it or in it. You're no longer at the mercy of your thoughts. You can use them, they can still operate, but you can also by choice. And this possibility is coming to many of you already and to many more of you, I would say, after this evening, to realize it is possible for you, and even desirable in many, many instances, to transcend thought and simply be aware. That is, by the way, the state of. That is the entire teaching of Zen is contained in this. Zen teaches you that you can rise above thought, become free of thought, and just be aware. This is why the Zen master often looks so fierce, because. Because he's in that fierce awareness. And he goes in the old drawings of Zen masters, or they might. One Zen master, when asked, please explain Zen. The only thing he would ever do was raise his finger and look at you. That was his teaching. And he became famous, famous teacher. Some people got it, others didn't. If they didn't get it, they said, please explain Zen to me. And he would go. And some people went, wow. And others didn't get it. They said, did you hear my question in Zen. For those of you who are interested in Zen or might even have spent a decade in a Zen monastery, there is nothing to understand in Zen. You cannot understand Zen because there is nothing to understand. Zen is about transcending thinking. Not falling below thinking, but rising above thinking. This is why that is Zen. Shh. Oh. Now, many of you, especially after this evening, will discover in yourself the ability to step beyond thought. When you don't want thought, not perhaps always, sometimes the challenge is maybe too much, and you fall back into thought. For a while, it's fine, but from time to time, and you can actually invite it into your life. In many, many situations that are relatively neutral, step out of thought and lose the illusion that in order to hold your life together, you need to think all the time about you and your life. And if you stop thinking about you and your life, it's all going to fall apart. It's not going to. It's going to fall apart. If you overthink, which most people do, overthinking is a disease. Overthinking means you are completely identified with thinking. You are, in fact, addicted to thinking, a lot of which is not only completely unnecessary, but actually harmful to your health, to your well being and to other people. It's harmful to you also because you're making yourself unhappy through it. And if you are making yourself unhappy, the chances are that you're making other people unhappy too. So overthinking, identification with thinking, that is all part of the unconsciousness, the old, or the old consciousness, as I call it. Now, a certain percentage of humans has reached a point of readiness where they are able to transcend thinking, become aware of themselves as awareness, as presence, as consciousness, and that becomes their sense of identity or sense of self, their presence. It doesn't need. There's no longer any superiority or inferiority in it. There is in it a recognition. When you now look, not just the dog, it's easier with the dog or the baby, but when you look at another human being, and you can, you're not trapped in the conceptualizing, the judgmental mind. You are looking at another human being. And you can sense the background to your perception of this other human being, the sense perception. You may be looking and maybe listening. The background to your sense perception is the space of awareness. You are looking as a conscious presence and not as a person at this human being. Because for a moment your mind is still while you're looking and listening, or just looking at another, into the eyes of another human being, either somebody close to you or somebody you only meet casually in a shop or whatever, but for a moment you're looking. And there is a recognition at that moment when you know yourself as consciousness. The wonderful thing is you recognize that essence in every other human being, or any other living thing, and that recognition, you recognize that there is something of the same essence that is in you, or also in the other. And you are able to, so to speak, look through the personality which is there, which manifests through their words, whatever they are saying, the conditioned personality, which is their mind, their egoic mind. That of course will be there. But you are able, if you are still and present, you can look at them. And then for a moment you sense their essential beingness or consciousness. Because you know your own consciousness. And that's the one, the recognition of oneness. And it is only there, out of that state of consciousness, that that which frees you from eternal conflict with other humans, which ego condemns you to it, is only that that can free you from the eternal conflict. And out of that emanates that which makes you truly human, or more than human, almost empathy, a loving kindness towards another, arises. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.