What is Reincarnation? with Eckhart Tolle

The voice in the head is the involuntary, conditioned, incessant thought processes that go through your mind all the time. This is normal human existence. And this constitutes the person. Complete identification with those thought processes plus the emotions. Complete identification with that is the unawakened or spiritually speaking, the unconscious state of living in this world. You are just a conditioned entity. You're like an actor that has learned his or her script and the actor is on stage acting out the script, but no longer realizes that he's acting out the script because he or she is completely identified with the script. So the script, for example, dictates whenever somebody says that, I get angry. So somebody says that. Oh, quite often you identify with your every opinion you have. You don't recognize your opinions. Opinions are mental positions, thoughts. But you don't recognize an opinion as an opinion because your opinion has become your identity. This is the essence of unconscious living. Opinion becomes identity. That's all it is. And anybody who questions your opinion becomes obviously your personal enemy. Because you have identified with this fiction. Somebody attacks or questions this fiction that you have identified with. And immediately in your unconscious state, this person becomes your enemy. Until you start shouting or defending your viewpoint or in very extremely unconscious people, physical violence happens over difference of opinion. Oh my God. This is unfortunately for millions, that is still their normal state. And this produces a not very happy life. If you only exist as this conditioned entity. Your life is full of problems and conflicts, many of them internally generated by the unobserved mind. So many of your problems are generated by the unobserved mind. You encounter situations, the unconscious reaction happens, the reaction amplifies the situation, makes it even worse, and you get into a spiral of Samsara is the Indian word of the wheel of you constantly reincarnate. That's an interesting word. Of course, there are many levels of reincarnation. Normally reincarnation means when you leave this body, as then the animating presence that inhabited this body eventually incarnates into another body. But incarnation happens every moment, every time you identify with a thought form, form. Just as a body is a physical form, the thought is a non physical form. But it is a form. It's an form if you identify with a thought, in fact. So you don't know that this is a thought that has appeared in your mind. You become the thought. This is the essence of identification. So you identify with the thought. So we could say that each time you identify with a thought form, you reincarnate into this form. You become it. So the end of reincarnation that the Buddhists for example, are looking for. They say at some point, when you have achieved, when you have more, when you are more advanced spiritually. They say somebody may tell you, many years ago, I spent some time in Buddhist monasteries and one monk said that he thought he needed another 10 or 12 lifetimes before he would become free and awakened and enlightened. That's interesting. I need time to realize the essence of who I really. He didn't say that. I'm saying now. He said I need time to realize the timeless essence of what. Who or what I am. It's an illusion. I need time to realize the timeless essence of who or what I am. There was something wrong here. You need time to realize the timeless. Well, we will go into that in a few minutes, a bit more deeply. There's always a paradox when we're talking about this. So you reincarnate into every arising thought and emotion. You don't have an emotion, the emotion has you. You don't have a thought, the thought has you. You don't think. Thinking happens to you in the same way that your heartbeat happens to you. I'm talking about the un. Unconscious way to live. Complete, completely unenlightened or unconscious. Complete identification with that. So you're in the grip of thoughts and in the grip of emotions. And they constitute your. What you believe to be your identity. That's me. And of course we call that the ego. And the ego is always a very fragile thing because ultimately it suspects perhaps deep down that ultimately it is a kind of fiction. So it's always lives in that state of constant fear and anxiety. It may be in the background or it may be very much in the foreground. There's a fear and the anxiety that you are not enough, that you might lose something that you had identified with. And there's a desire, the deep feeling of insufficiency. There's something very important missing in my life now. It might well be that, yes, on the level of the person that still that level has a certain reality. It's not an ultimate reality. It is a temporary relative reality, like a dream. While you're in a dream, the dream is real. It's only when you wake up that you. Or it was just a dream. But the dream you could call. Depends how you use words. You could call the dream as a dream is real. It's only when you awaken, then you call it not real. So there is a certain reality to this life, and only when you transcend that it may appear to you as something akin to. To a dream. Very much like or perhaps even a nightmare that you wake up out of this nightmare if your life is very unpleasant. So let's. There is then the. When I talk about identifying, the question arises when I say you identify with thought, you identify with an emotion. You identify of course also with external things that you have, like possession. You identify with your body. That's the first thing perhaps you identify with. You identify with other things, other people's opinion of you. You identify with achievements or skills that you may have. You ident with failures that you have experienced. You identify with things that you have done to others or others have done to you. With all kinds of things. You identify body, possessions, etc. But ultimately they're all thought forms because everything experience is experienced as a thought form. So ultimately it all boils down to identification with the mind, with thought. The question arises who or what is it that does the identifying? So if I say you, you identify with that, who or what is that thing that does the identification in an unconscious process? Ah, so that's the question that arises. If I am not my thoughts and my emotions or the body or anything else external that I. That gave me my sense of self, that contributed to my sense of self identification. If, if I'm not that, if I just identified with that, who, when I say that I identify with something, who or what is that? I. If I'm not the body, I'm not my possessions, I'm not my thoughts or my emotions, who or what am I? That's a very interesting question. That could be the beginning of an awakening.