Eckhart Tolle guides listeners to sense their fundamental presence by asking "what am I?" and resting in the silence after the question rather than answering with conceptual labels (gender, profession, appearance). He emphasizes that thinking is a form assumed by consciousness and that beneath thought lies a formless, alive presence (the "I am"). Using metaphors (ocean/waves, dreaming/lucid dreaming) and references (Ramana Maharshi; Tao Te Ching), he frames awakening as "lucid living": awareness recognizing itself and ending the suffering born of identification with the personality.
Now, feeling the being of you, sensing the being of you is to sense without thinking. You're not thinking right now, but you are. You realize that you are, but you don't add anything to it. When you say I am, you know that you are. You say I. That. That would. If you had to use words, you would say I am. Now, when I say I am, can you feel the reality of I am? In the silence that comes after the. After the words? Because when you're not thinking, what is left of you when you're not thinking? Because then the personality is not there anymore. It's subsided. Something else is there. But that is nothing to do with your past or your future. It's not the person. When you sit here, you not only perceive what's around you and hear the words, you're also aware that you are the being of you. I am. That is why some spiritual teachers have their favorite device for helping humans to realize this. They, like Ramana Maharshi from India, recommended that people meditate on who am I? But I would even recommend to change it a bit into say what am I? Because if you say who am I? Implied in the who is, that you are a person. So it could be a little bit misleading. But if you say what am I? It's more neutral. So you ask yourself, what am I? And the answer. Do not look for the answer through thinking. You cannot find the true answer through thinking, because then you will come up with some kind of conceptual identity. Could start with your gender. It's a very interesting one these days, more interesting even than it used to be in the past. Start with your gender. You can start with your race. You can start with your nationality. You can start with your profession. You can start with your. Start with your physical appearance, your age, all kinds of things. Okay, none of that, because all that's conceptual. Ultimately, these are mental concepts. What am I? The answer comes in the stillness after the words, after the question is asked. What is left of you? After you've asked the question, what am I? And you're still. All you know is there is a presence. There is something that you cannot possibly define. A beingness, a presence, a sense of beingness, an alive presence. But there is no actual content to it. It's just pure space without. And if you are able to stay with it a little bit, you can sense there's an aliveness there. It is very liberating and joyful to realize this essence of yourself. Now, another way of putting it is you become aware that you are aware. You become Conscious of being conscious. Because what's left of you without thinking is consciousness itself. Thinking is a form that consciousness incarnates into, continues. This is the primordial incarnations. Then eventually consciousness also incarnates into physical forms, becomes this into a beautiful plant, a flower. Consciousness continuously incarnates, assumes a form, and then the form is relinquished. So thinking is not separate from being, it is or from consciousness. Thinking is a form that consciousness assumes. In the same way that the ocean appears on the surface as a movement of waves and ripples, the wave is not separate from the ocean. So this wonderful realization that there is a depth to you, that's why I call it the deep. I. There is a depth of being to you. But when you are trapped in the thinking, can never find it. Step out of thinking into pure awareness, and then you become aware of the simple fact that you are aware. In other words, you can sense that you are aware the moment you talk about it. As I'm doing now, a little bit of illusion creeps in. Because when I say be aware of awareness, there's a duality there. I am aware of the awareness. But in reality, it is the end of duality. When we talk about it. Every sense has a subject and an object. The moment you talk about it, you create some kind of duality. That's why at the beginning of the Tao Te Ching, the wonderful ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true dao. The dao is the vast intelligence that underlies itself. All of this that can be realized within you as that deep silent presence that's always been there, just covered up by the wave movement on the surface. That's the personality. So there is no duality. It's only when we talk about it, duality comes in. So it's not that you become aware of awareness. If we had to express it in words, you could say awareness becomes aware of itself. Consciousness is awakening to itself. Whereas before consciousness was asleep, it was dreaming this wonderful or sometimes very unpleasant dream of existence. It. It was. Consciousness was lost in its incarnations, losing itself. You. I know how I was lost in this incarnation is consciousness for. For years. And so you don't. What we are talking about here is a little bit like perhaps all of you have experienced dreaming at night, and suddenly realizing that you are dreaming, it's a very liberating thing because in the dream, perhaps it was an unpleasant dream, but suddenly in the dream, they call it lucid dreaming. Suddenly in the dream, you know that you're dreaming. And even the whatever monster or threatening situation you were in at that moment is no longer that threatening at all. Because you know that you're dreaming. There's a constant. In the same way, what we are talking about here is lucid living. Which means in the midst of. Because this is another kind of dream. One could use that term because everything, all the things that unfold every day. The continuous flux of becoming, the continuous. The impermanence of all things. Like things arise and they pass away. Arise, pass away. It's a very bit like a dream, very much like a dreamlike existence.
