Eckhart TolleNYT Bestselling author of the Power of Now

Why Most People Are Spiritually Unconscious

14 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this excerpt from his talk, Eckhart Tolle clarifies what he means by spiritual unconsciousness. He distinguishes the everyday use of “unconscious” (a medical or psychological state) from a deeper, spiritual sense. According to Tolle, most people appear fully awake in the conventional sense but remain spiritually unconscious because they are completely identified with, and driven by, their mental‑emotional conditioning—reactivity, opinions, viewpoints, and egoic patterns. They act like actors following a script learned over a lifetime, never recognizing the deeper dimension of their being that lies beyond the personal self. The passage sets the stage for understanding how awakening involves stepping out of this conditioned grip and recognizing a deeper, non‑personal dimension of consciousness.

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Many, many humans on this planet are still really unconscious, which means they have not awakened to the deeper dimension of who they are beyond the person. Unconscious has a different meaning when we use it talking about the spiritual dimension. We all know what the conventional meaning of unconscious obviously means. That's— so when I say to a human, when we, with reference to a human being, and we say he or she is very unconscious, it doesn't mean that they are— no, they look very much awake, but they are totally in the grip of their conditioning, and they're acting out in the same way that an actor acts out the script that he or she has learned. The unconscious person is totally in the grip of their mental emotional conditioning, reactivity, opinions, viewpoints, all these things, totally dominated by that, totally in the grip of that. And therefore we use the term unconscious.