Eckhart Tolle argues you mistake your conditioned personality for your true self. The mind's constant thinking traps you in patterns shaped by past and culture. Beneath this is a timeless awareness always present but buried under thought, distraction, and daily pressure.
your attention is being absorbed by thought. That's a normal state for millions of humans, and the only relief they get is when they get too tired to think. So, one way to look at yourself is to see that there's two of you. Let's put it like this. It's not the ultimate truth, there isn't two, but it's a helpful perspective for the time being to see that there's, there's two of you, or we could say two dimensions to who you are. There's two, two of you. One is the historical person I'm saying historical because who you are as a historical person is dependent on the past— your past, your personal past, and the past of your collective, whatever background you grew up in, your nation. The collective includes your nation or your religion, belief systems, and so on, associated with your belief systems, your nation. The collective is also part— your gender is also part of the collective, and the past, your personal past, of course, childhood and so on. So, they make up the historical person. So, your identity as a historical person depends on the past. What you think and how you think is dependent on the past. —And so that is the surface 'I'—'I' meaning the pronoun, the first person of the verb 'to be'—and for most people the historical person is all they know. They know themselves as the historical person with all the good and bad things that make up their past history and the conditioning, the mental-emotional conditioning. So for most people, that's all there is. They relate to themselves as this historical person and to everybody else also as historical persons. And as you awaken, you realize that in addition to the historical person— and not just not in addition, but more fundamentally— there's a deeper dimension to who you are. And I sometimes call that the deep 'I,' very different from the historical 'I.' The deep 'I' is the timeless being that you are. Most people don't know that that even exists. It's a dimension that is closed to them or obscured, or they are completely just simply unaware of it because The historical person has so many things to think about and to do and to experience. They get so absorbed in their thoughts and their experiences and the demands that the world makes upon them that they— one could say simply— They overlook, they overlook the deep 'I,' which in a way is always, is always there underneath the historical person. So the things that continuously absorb your attention and make you overlook that deeper dimension, that is the deep 'I,' are obviously the things of this world, the demands made upon you, including the devices that we have invented to distract you even more. But fundamentally, it all comes down to your mind, your thinking, which absorbs your conscious attention. So for those who are completely unawake, unconscious spiritually speaking, the entire consciousness is sucked up by the addictive stream of thinking. And even the things of this world that make demands upon you, ultimately you experience them as mind formations. It all ultimately comes down to that your attention is being absorbed by thought. That's a normal state for millions of humans. And the only relief they get is when they get too tired to think, just before they drop off to sleep. Or when they take some kind of substance, it slows down their thinking. And so that's why there's a lot of addiction to substances. One of the main reasons, or the main reason, is that they offer you momentary release from the prison of your mind.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
