This is the question that stops the mind completely | Eckhart Tolle

That's love. That's the true meaning of love. That's the outflow of benevolence, which is another word you could use, goodwill, benevolence, an outflow of benevolence towards the other. I Am, the realization that you are is the most important realization as an experiential knowing. I'll ask you a couple more questions in order to deepen that, just a slightly different approach. If you completely let go of your past, the entire history of you, let's say the history of you just recedes, without your history, without any reference to memory. What's— what does it feel like to be you right now without reference to memory? You have no past. What does it feel like to be you without a past? What's left? What is left of you without the past? The answer is not conceptual. The answer lies in the stillness, and you can't talk about it much. There's a knowing there, a knowing that you are. So that's a deep 'I.' Then at some point, of course, thinking resumes, and You go back into the world. The question is whether you're able to sustain that awareness in the background of your life, even while you're going about your life's business. Are you able— first you practice while perceiving things with your senses, be aware of the presence that's doing the perceiving, that's you. Then, in a conversation with somebody, every time you listen to somebody, can you be aware of yourself as the listening presence? In other words, you do not— in many cases, you don't need to prepare the next thing you want to say. Just listen and then allow the next thing to be said spontaneously, intuitively. It will be the right thing, unprepared. So when you listen to another human being, you're giving the gift of presence. You're acknowledging their being. So that's an important skill, so that you don't lose yourself when you interact. You don't lose yourself in a stream of thinking, and it drags you along, especially when you adopt a mental position, political or cultural, whatever it may be. Then you identify with that, and And you can't stop, 'Oh, it's home.' Practice when listening to somebody. And as far as personal relationships are concerned, there's a vital difference that takes place if you are able to stay connected, even if only in the background, somehow have the connection with the stillness within, which is the deep 'I,' the stillness that's behind thinking always, the alert stillness. So there's an alertness, and then you talk to somebody, and so there's a relationship. The person that's talking is the conditioned entity, conditioned by the person— it's the person who is talking, the conditioned entity. Usually one conditioned entity reacts to the other conditioned entity, and before long there's conflict. Except in very superficial encounters, you can avoid conflict. But if you're no more than your conditioned entity, without access to the vertical dimension, and the other one is also no more than their conditioned entity, it's not going to go well. And usually it doesn't. Even it applies on the individual level, it even applies on the collective level, the collective ego, when nations talk to each other. So you're talking— if you're able to sense that the beingness of you, which is one way of putting it, while you're talking to another or listening to another, then something arises out of that deep 'I' which we could call— sometimes it may manifest as empathy, it may manifest as a kind of what is conventionally called compassion, what the Dalai Lama calls quite simply kindness. The Dalai Lama said, my religion is kindness. That's quite a surprising statement. He didn't say my religion is Buddhism. My religion is kindness. What is that kindness? It's loving kindness, metta. Sometimes called loving-kindness, arises from that deeper level of consciousness. And then love is the simplest way of putting it. You can then feel an outflow of loving-kindness towards the other person. And what you can sense then is beyond that person, there is their being, their consciousness, which is one with your consciousness. You can sense the unconditioned in the other as being one with your— this is the end of the delusion of absolute separateness. And that's love. That's the true meaning of love. That's the outflow of benevolence, which is another word you could use— goodwill, benevolence, an outflow of benevolence towards the other, because the other is no longer totally other. And since you're no longer operating from ego, That is the opposite of the ego's continuous attempts to emphasize the otherness of others.