The Journey of Transformation | Eckhart Tolle

Satnam Eckhart. I am. I go to bed with you at night. It's very nice to see you here in person. So I'm here asking a question for several people. We were all praying that I would get chosen so I could ask this question. We're just curious. Do you still experience moments of losing it, losing consciousness? For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, the person who called you or said, slow driver, the story you gave, bad driver, do you ever still experience yourself losing it? And what is that like for you? And, you know, calling yourself back?

No, in those cases I don't. I'm just fine. It just doesn't affect me at all. But sometimes I don't. There are emotions. They can come. When I see violence inflicted on humans or animals, I can experience weeping. There are sometimes when I see human suffering, there is an emotion. It doesn't last very long. It passes through, but there's no reaction to those things, traffic or humans. I think people who have worked with me can probably tell me if I'm wrong, because when you work with somebody, then you get to know them, especially when things need to get done. So there's a fairly constant sense of presence, but it's not always the same intensity of presence. The intensity of presence varies. It can be. It sometimes recedes into the background. And then more of my attention is taken up with the foreground. I have to deal with this and this and this. Then the attention goes there and there's a. The presence is kind of background presence. Like, it's like a humming in the. Like an om in the background. And here things happen. But then times, because I love doing nothing, and I do that quite often and. And then sometimes presence comes completely, so the person is virtually obliterated. And there's just consciousness. In teaching situations, for lack of a better word, like this, the person is not really here. It's not the person who is teaching. It's consciousness. It's using the vehicle of the person, is using the mind of the person in order to manifest this. So in a teaching situation, there is just consciousness. Eckhart is only the frame or the window frame, but the light comes from somewhere else, the light that comes through the window. And yes, there are so degrees of intensity of presence, but it's always there, either obliterating Eckhart or in the background. And then the person deals with things as best he can.

And did that come after you had your experience of awakening? Was it like that from the very beginning, or did that come with your practice?

Well, the Peace was there, has been there since then, but there has been an integration of that into life that took longer, so that it went into every aspect of my life. I was still deluded in some ways, even after the shift happened, because the personality was still working. And I still thought at that point my destiny was to be in the academic world. And I continued to pursue a Ph.D. not knowing that it was no longer what I was meant to do. The personality still had a momentum and went on with that for a few years. There were also times after that when a few times I could feel the pull of suffering in the form of the mind tugging me. Like occasionally went like, come this way. Come and suffer. And what that did was there was an intensification of presence suddenly when that happened. So then I'm not going that way. And so suddenly the light went up. And then a few more times it happened. Come be unhappy. You have so many reasons to be unhappy. Don't you remember? No. If you. Any mind can, if you want to remember reasons for being unhappy, I'm sure everybody here could do that. I could. Even now I could. Reasons for being unhappy, anybody can do that. If you allow that kind of thought to take over your mind and then pretend, then confuse it with reality. A story, a sad story in the head. So a few times the mind tried, but didn't get very far. And then another shift came to a deeper level when I started to work with people, because that required a further deepening. Working with people required a further deepening, especially people who were in suffering. And I noticed that when I started seeing individuals who came, often very unhappy people or suffering people, or people who are suffering from serious illness or had great loss. And I noticed whenever I sat in front of these people and listened to their story, I would go into a very deep state of presence then, deeper than I'd experienced before, very deep and intense presence. And some of those people, if they were sensitive enough, it happened several times they stopped and said, what? You're doing something. I wasn't doing anything. You're doing something. One lady said she was a former nun in the Catholic monasteries and became, after 15 years, became very unhappy because she hadn't found God. And so then she came to me looking for God, but of course she was looking for herself, the deepest source of her being. And I was sitting listening to her. And then she said, oh, you're doing healing. You're healing me. I said, oh, because I didn't know that I was doing that. And for a while, because I didn't at the time, I wasn't. Didn't fully understand the consciousness. And the process just was there, but I didn't understand it. I thought I was a healer suddenly. And then she sent me some people who wanted just physical healing. But I noticed when people who just wanted physical healing, I didn't go that deep at all. It's only people who are ready for a deeper transformation. Then I would go very deep. And then when groups happened again, a deepening happened again of a different kind. Because a group is a different energy field again. So there was a deepening there. Somewhat different kind. It's hard to describe, but my great learning was with individual people. Spiritual counseling also. The words that came out of that deep state of connectedness surprised me many times. I know that some of you have already had similar experiences. When people came to you with problems and you were able to just be still and listen. And then you found yourself saying some words that were just right. But there are always two parts of that. One is the words and one is the energy field that's behind the words. And sometimes words are not even necessary in a situation like that. So that was a process. And then later the teachings became a book. And there itself, the writing of the book was another way of connecting with Presence and allowing Presence to use this mind to express itself through. It's a long adventure of ways in which Presence manifests it through this vehicle as it is for you. Nobody can predict in what ways Presence will flow through you and manifest through you. But it is doing it already, and it will. Who knows what situations you go into and become a healing influence in those situations. You are meant to do that, to be there, because the universe needs that. The evolutionary impulse behind the universe is behind you. It wants you to go through that transformation and then be the agent for transformation in this world. So that is our common destiny. Thank you. 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.