Eckhart Tolle explores how people build their identity around their physical bodies, leading to shame in youth and despair in old age. He uses his mother's suffering as her beauty faded and his father's jokes about mirrors to show why this attachment causes pain. Recognizing a deeper self beyond the body, Tolle argues, is what most people never learn.
If you are lucky enough to have— let's say you're a young person, you have a body that's good-looking and strong— how could you not identify with the body? As I often say, these are the This is a very significant term, human being. Most humans are only human, but they have not recognized the being. That is the unawakened state. Even Confucius, who lived at the same time as the Buddha, Chinese philosopher Confucius, said, Humans have not yet become fully human. They're on their way to becoming fully human. So, for a moment, let me approach this, the awakening, from this particular angle. One could say there is 2 of you here. This is a temporary way of looking at things. You're one, but let's— temporarily, it's helpful to put it like that. You are the human and you're the being. Let's talk briefly, hopefully, about the human. That's you as a person, personality conditioned by the past. Mental-emotional conditioning by the past. The person that you are as a human, first of all, you have a physical body. That is, for most people, already a very important part of their identity as a human, is to have a physical body. It's the most obvious thing. To equate your identity with the physical body because that is the most obvious thing. You can touch it, you see it in the mirror. So that's the first identification. Identification means what you derive your sense of self from. For many humans, their physical body is a very important, and in some cases the most important part of their identity. The physical body may cause you pride if it's stronger or better looking than other bodies, because the ego loves and seeks superiority over others. It fears inferiority and loss. So if you are lucky enough to have— let's say you're a young person, You have a body that's good-looking and strong. How could you not identify with the body? Everybody looks at you and says, you're great-looking, and many people are envious of your strength or your looks. And you begin to realize as you reach the age of 17, 18, oh, I'm actually better-looking than most. That can apply to men, but it applies even more to women. Unfortunately, my mother unfortunately had that. She was quite good-looking. Unfortunately, I didn't inherit that, but she was very good-looking as a young person, and her sense of identity was very much derived from appearance, and that made her happy for— relatively speaking, not really, but she was— That's not true. Liked her, equated her sense of self and also her sense of self-worth from her appearance, bodily appearance. And then unfortunately, time suddenly came in and time did something to her body. It tends to do that. So you reach a certain age and then your body shrinks or doesn't look that beautiful anymore, and you look in the mirror and you see there's something wrong. As my dad, who had a good sense of humor, said when he reached that stage, he said, mirrors are not the same quality they used to be. And so unfortunately, my mother began to suffer more and more. She became very— as she became old, she became very unhappy. And I had a few moments of breakthrough with her, sitting with her, bringing her into presence as much as possible, but she's not— the readiness wasn't there. There were moments of presence, I remember them, brief moments. She would talk a lot about, oh, life is so horrible now, oh, I can't stand this anymore. And there were brief moments, I remember one moment I was visiting her, I was just present listening to her, and suddenly she stopped talking. That was a moment of presence. And she said, Isn't it strange? We are born and then we die. I said, wow, this is really profound. Because that is the beginning of that sense of wonder at the mystery of life, is the beginning of all philosophy. It was the beginning of ancient Greek philosophy. So Socrates says, what underlies philosophy is a A sense of wonder at the mystery of life. So she had this momentary— it seems like a very simple thing, but it is a strange mystery. You're born and a little later you die. Well, at least the body dies, the physical body dies. So identification with the body Can be a good thing until it becomes a bad thing when you get older. And you— if in the meantime you've always been identified with the body and there's little or nothing else, you suffer. But many people suffer already when they are young because they are unhappy with their bodies. It's not as good-looking as other bodies, or as it should, or some weird ideal you might have. In your head about how— what the body should look like. So you have, instead of pride, you derive an identity that's shameful, shame of your body. That's— so you begin to suffer there already, not just when you get older. Body identification always leads to suffering sooner or later. So
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