Transcending the Ego for Lasting Fulfillment | Eckhart Tolle's Wisdom

Through thinking, you cannot be aware of those spaces between words, because thinking is object consciousness. The space between words takes you to space consciousness. So the entire secret of our gathering here, of all spirituality, is just one thing. All the things that happen, your financial situation, your health situation, your relationship situation, your work situation, your living situation, yes, these things matter, relatively speaking. But there's one thing that is more important that matters absolutely, and that is your state of consciousness. And whether or not you have awakened to what we could call. It sounds a little abstract, but it's not. We could call the transcendent dimension of consciousness in you. The transcendent dimension of consciousness. Now, I'm not going to immediately define what that means because actually it cannot be defined. It can be pointed to. This is what these words are for. But these words are not a substitute for it. The words point, famous phrase in Buddhism. It's the finger pointing to the moon. But the finger is not the moon. So there's nothing that I say tonight that you need to believe on a conceptual level. I'm not asking you to believe anything whatsoever. There is what I sometimes call the two levels of consciousness. The conceptual. I sometimes call that object consciousness. These are all the things that happen in your perceptual field and in your mental field. Thinking, emotions, sense perceptions, things arise, things pass away, things come and go. Sense perceptions, ideas, thoughts, opinions, feelings, emotions, all belong to object consciousness. One object after another happens. You perceive things. Ah, oh, there. Oh. And then thought objects arise continuously. A stream of thoughts. Oh, no. For most people, the stream of thoughts has such a gravitational pull that they get completely dragged along by this continuously proliferating stream of mental activity. I sometimes call it the voice in the head. It never stops speaking. It continuously comments on where you are, what you are doing, or takes you somewhere completely different in the so called past or the so called future. One thing after another, one damn thing after another. Just to paraphrase Churchill, Churchill was talking about history. History is one damn thing after another. And that's true. But for many people, their conditioned mind, the experience of their conditioned mind is just one damn thing after another because it never leaves you alone. It goes. So most humans who are not awakened or even awakening are completely trapped in their object conscious. They are confined by it. And not only that, they are completely identified with all the arising thoughts and emotions that continuously go through their mind. And there is no separation between the thoughts and the emotions that accompany the thoughts. And you, you don't, you're not even there when you're totally identified with the voice in the head. You are, spiritually speaking, asleep, or another word for it is unconscious. So an unconscious person. In ordinary usage, unconscious means, of course, you've completely lost. You don't know what's going on. And this is unconscious. In conventional usage, unconscious means. In spiritual usage, unconscious means completely and continuously identified with the stream of thinking and the emotions that go with the stream of thinking. What does it mean to be identified? It means you derive your sense of who you are from every. From the stream thinking. Every thought is imbued with a sense of self. So you're identified, it gets. Has you in its grasp. And therefore, if you people conventionally say, I think, I think, what do you think? As if thinking for most people were a voluntary activity, whereas for most, not you, but those who are not awakening yet, which is a majority of the population still on the planet, for most, that is, they are completely identified with a stream of thinking. They are, spiritually speaking, unconscious. And that is a terrible thing, because then everything that you perceive, reality itself as you perceive it goes through the filter of your mental emotional conditioning from the past. So you never see anything as it is, perceive anything clearly and.