Eckhart Tolle explains "awakening" as a spiritual transition away from identifying the self with conditioned thinking and life-story narratives. He argues people mistake their mental-emotional narratives ("my life") for who they are, creating a heavy, unstable sense of self reinforced by identifications (body, gender, culture) and temporary external circumstances (relationships, sensory pleasures).
There is the. The burden that humans carry, which is their life story, but they confuse it with who they are. So they're completely trapped in a story which they call my life. You might ask, what's he talking about? I'm awake. Whenever I'm not asleep, I am awake. And I'm awake right now. What's he talking about, awake? So the, the term awake to awaken is a spiritual term used in many traditions. And it points to this transition from the state of being completely identified with the stream of conditioned thinking, so identified that you derive your sense of self, your identity, from the continuing narratives that flow through your mind that tell you who you are. So your, your sense of self is derived from that stream of unconscious, conditioned thinking stories you tell yourself. And everybody has a story. There's one main story, and there are several subsidiary stories that relate to the main story. The main story is what you call my life, my life. Oh, it's problematic. Let me think about it. And the more you think about your life, the more problematic it gets. Obviously, my life. Many people carry a huge burden daily, and this burden that they carry is my life, which is the self. It's the self that's created by the mental narratives, the emotions that accompany the narrative. That's me in my life. And of course it's not. It's never satisfying for very long. It's always something. Often it's horrible. Some people carry an almost permanent burden in their mental emotional field, which they don't recognize it as self created. They believe it is a genuine, genuine, justifiable response to their external situation and what has happened to them in the past. That they do not recognize that the response is a conditioned mind activity that is not the reality of their lives at all. It's a story in the mind. So that I call that your life situation which exists, comes from the past. The past has taken you here. The past created what you call the person is the me, the person. Everybody has a personality. There's a person there. The person has been conditioned by the past. And the person is continuously upheld and amplified by the stream of continuous thinking and emotion and reactivity to whatever is going on. So everybody carries this enormous burden of themselves. Of course, yes, Sometimes there's happy moments. Something good has just happened to me. I'm finally free because I won the lottery or got a promotion or I've fallen in love. This is it. Okay? And of course, as the Buddha said, I don't know if he said it, but he probably did. If you're happy now, just Wait a moment. And then your happiness, the very thing that makes you happy turns into unhappiness or something else erupts into your life and destroys that situation that made you happy. And this is the. Many people can verify in their own lives how relationships have the power to make you happy and then not. It's not uncommon for the same relationship that makes you happy one day. In fact, not just happy. Elated you. This is the one. And a little later, don't know, we don't know how long. A few months, three years, seven years. The very same person makes you very, very unhappy. What was that all about? Was the. Oh, yes, the Buddha. He was talking about something like that. How quickly. Any external thing that makes you happy for a moment doesn't last very long. Oh, and then you're looking for some kind of satisfaction. Maybe you can find it in the sensory pleasures. That's very temporary too. Sensory pleasures, eating. You can absorb all that. And of course you don't feel good the next day. And if you do it for too long, you fall ill anyway. So there is the. The burden that humans carry, which is their life story, but they confuse it with who they are. So they're completely trapped in a story which they call my life. And it's heavy for most humans. It's heavy. Do you think others do not experience the heaviness of themselves because they post happy pictures on Facebook. And then you feel I'm the only one who is miserable because they're all happy. And they show you what they're eating. Pictures of the plates. Look what I'm eating right now. Look at me. Identification. Where's body image? Identification with body, which is of the many identifications that make up the personality, the person, the self, I would say probably starts with the body. The body, obviously you consider to be this, my body, me. And you identify with the body. But of course, ultimately it's not the body. It's a mental image of body. Everything is a mental image. You don't even know where there's anything out there at all. It could just be a creation of your mind. But let's not go that way. Right now there is a. And you identify obviously with your body. Body becomes part of the self. Self image. And the body is young or old. Could be young or old. It could. And it's male or female. That's already another important identification. You're man or woman. Well, nowadays there are many other possibilities, but we don't need to go into that. Let's say you're a man. Or woman. I'm old fashioned. So you're a man or woman, and that becomes part of your identity to some degrees, almost unavoidable, that you feel being a man or being a woman becomes part of your sense of self. And again, it's a, it's an ultimately a mental, an image. In some cultures, being a man or a woman is even more important than in our cultures. Here, the very traditional cultures, then for some people, being a man becomes like almost 80% of their identity is that they are a man. And the same applies to the woman. And in some ancient cultures, patriarchal cultures, for example, being a man immediately gives you a feeling of super superiority over 50% of the other humans who are not a man. That's interesting. So if you have nothing to show for it in your life, but at least you're superior to 50% of the. This.
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