The Beginning of Awakening & Essential Identity with Eckhart Tolle

And then comes a point when it's time for another stage to arise where the dream of form is no longer. Consciousness is beginning to awaken from complete identification with form. And that is happening to many humans. And this is why human beings are drawn to these spiritual teachings. With the awakening from the dream of form. Who am I? What does it mean I? What is identity? What does it mean when I say I? What does it feel like? What is I? What am I? Not most people yet if you ask them, who are you? They will define the word I in terms of form. They will say, well, obviously this body, that's I. That comes maybe first. And then there comes the mind with its accumulations, its accumulated, its thought, habitual thought movements, its memories. They come the emotions that go with the thought movements, the psychological form of I. So they say, well, I am this body. Then there's a name, which of course is just a sound. You say, john. I am John. And many people say they think that's already a big part of who they are when they can say their name. Oh, okay. And then they add a little something else. I'm an architect. Oh, okay, we're getting even closer to who you are. And I'm a father, which. Okay. And your age. Okay, something. Okay, we're almost there now. Just need a few more details. And then we know who you are. And so you can put it on a piece of paper, a summary of it, or if you want a detailed account of who you are, you can write down your life history in a book and it becomes your autobiography. Oh, that's interesting. Now we know who you are. And if that's not enough, and if you think there may be hidden parts of me, then you can go, go to psychoanalysis for 10 years. And then all these hidden memories and hidden desires and feelings that you had when you were four and a half years old towards your mother and your forefather and your grandmother and what they all readily, they all come up. And then you can add that. And then, okay, now I've got it. I've got my autobiography. And I go, that's I. I'm me. I'm complete now. And then you look 50 years later, which is not much. On a universal scale, 50 years is very little. I know that now. I thought when I was 20, 50 years was a lot. I'm a lot older than 50, by the way, by the body. The 50 years pass, and what's left of the body and the psychological me, that entity in the head with its history, what's left Nothing. Well, maybe there's one or two copies left of your autobiography. And maybe one person finds a copy in a secondhand bookshop. This is somebody's autobiography. And your grandchildren or their descendants. My mother passed away three years ago, and I realized a few recently that I am virtually the only person now who remembers her. Because all her friends died before she did. And her family and all the other people who knew her only knew tiny fragments. They said, oh, she was a little bit of an eccentric, and she was outspoken and so on. They had little fragments. But the person who really remembers her more than a fragment is me. And when I go, nothing, nobody remembers. And then all is left is photos. And a generation later, nobody will know who this person on the photo is. But this is strange how an identity evaporates that seemed so solid and real and so form. We are talking about form. Identity. That is when you're asked, who are you? Or you ask yourself, who am I? Okay, now, is that all there is to who you are? Is that what can be defined through form? What can be that which is form? Thought forms, emotional forms, physical forms, a conglomeration of that put together for a while, becomes what you think is I. Is that really your identity? Or is there something else? Well, perhaps we can just. At this moment. See, as you sit here right at this moment, you don't remember your past. You don't have to. Let's pretend you don't have one. You have no past. There is no past. Let's say there is no past, which, by the way, is the truth. Ultimately, there is no past. There's only the now. So, okay. And no future. Let's pretend there's no future. Well, there is no future anyway, but there's only this. So you can't remind yourself. You don't even. Unless there's a thought in your head that says, I am such and such, even that you don't know right now, let's say you don't know anything about who you are. Nothing that you can formulate, conceptualize, call something. What is left is there, what is lost. Nothing is lost. In fact, when you encounter this, which cannot be named, which is a formless presence aliveness, that's the. You've touched your that which is beyond form, consciousness itself, and that is identity. That is where your sense of I comes from. And so you are more truly yourself when you don't remember your past than when you do remember your past. And you are more truly yourself when there is not a single thought in your head than when you Are full of thinking, thinking about me and my problems. And whenever you feel the sense of I this the light of consciousness, which you can know directly in the stillness that is always there, available to you as the essence, your essence identity. Your essence identity, timeless. That's always there. And that is one with universal consciousness. It's just coming through this form. It's never lost. When this form dissolves, the consciousness goes out like a little tentacle being. So let's stay with this for a moment. Here you have no past, or there is no past. What is lost? Nothing essential is lost. You get a stronger sense of who you are in your essence. When you are not telling yourself in your mind who you are. This is why I said in stillness speaks. I believe you are never more truly yourself than when you are still. And still means, of course, the mind becomes still. It's an inner doesn't. Whether there's noise outside or not doesn't matter. You're never more truly yourself than when you are still. Then you can sense the essence of who you are. And that does not depend on the age of the body. Whether you're 20 or 90. It's the same stillness that frees you then from the suffering that comes if you have identified with form, which then sooner or later will leave you. You suffer. If you identify with a strong or beautiful body. And that body eventually grows old, you begin to suffer because you seem to dissolve. You haven't realized who you. And so we have. You have form, identity and essence. Identity and suffering arises through knowing yourself only as form, identity. My history, my story, my body, my past, my this, my that, my that, my, my, my. Whatever you identify with in the world of form, if you know yourself only as that, that's the state of unconsciousness, the dreamlike state. Consciousness is dreaming the dream of form. And then it acts, attempting to become free of its inner state of incompleteness, dissatisfaction and fear. Which is inevitable when all you know is, is your form identity. There's always underneath the surface, or even very much on the surface. There is dissatisfaction, fear, unease, discomfort, fear. I am not enough. This is not enough. This is not the right place. Where I am now. This is not the right people I'm with. This is not the right thing that I'm doing right now. There comes the need to go out and search for more forms that I can identify with so that I can feel more complete. But the only way you can actually reach the state of being at home in being rooted in yourself. Without the dissatisfaction that always comes again and again and Again and without the fear. The only way is encountering that which is beyond form. And it's so. It's so much. It's right here. It's closer. It's God's realization. It's another word for it. But let's not go there. The God within, the timeless within. And so the universe then has. All the people who are into creating traditionally have been very unconscious because those who were most identified with form had the strongest desire to manifest and create more things out there and conquer an empire, or accumulate more and more possessions or have more power. So they got driven. So all the powerful people, the people who created human history, if you read the history books, they were deeply identified with form. And they were all unhappy, of course, very unhappy. Hoping by achieving this, that or the other, and conquering this, that or the other, the other tribe or whatever, to become free of their state of unhappiness and of incompleteness and never getting there. And that's been so traditionally, the. The doers. There were always some people who were not into doing. But in many traditional societies, there wasn't much of a place for them. Later, monasteries came into being so they could become monks. Long story, but so we still associate going out and doing with unconsciousness. I believe there's a line by T.S. eliot in a poem where he says the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Talking about contemporary humanity, early 20th century. The best, like all convictions, means that they don't know what to do because they are torn between. There's some inkling inside them of their essence. So the desire to do is not as overpowering as in those who are totally identified with their former identity. So that's an interesting that where we are at as humanity as a whole is a realization that there is an essence that has nothing to do with the form. And only if we are rooted, if some of our attention is in that formless essence, can we do things in this world without creating more havoc and suffering for others and ourselves. If we only go into doing without the rootedness in the eternal dimension, which is stillness, which is here now, always now, inseparable from now. Whatever you do, when you lose yourself in the doing, identify it again with form and creating some new problem. So the foundation for all doing is conscious being. So that's the important realization. About what? About manifesting. That's good. But before we talk about manifesting, before we build some new building or structure, get the foundation first. Do you have the foundation? Don't start building a house without any foundation. Let's manifest this great business empire. This is going to change the world. Yes, but have you laid the foundation? What foundation? Being. Being the formless, the eternal. No, we haven't thought about that. No, of course you haven't. You can't think about it. The foundation is being rooted, realizing what that means, what being is. Not intellectually. Not by trying to understand. Because, as you may have noticed, there's nothing much to understand about being. You can't. Being. Can you explain a bit more, please? Being. Stillness. I don't understand stillness. Can you explain stillness? No, because there's nothing in it to explain. You can't look at it under a microscope or dissect it. Aspects of stillness, Ph.D. iT.