Your Essence Can’t Be Lost | Eckhart Tolle Foundation

So the greatest fear is that you may lose yourself when the body dies. However, the fact that you are invisible may be a little— maybe help a little bit in realizing that when the body dies, that invisible being is still there. Now, if a— we know that there are billions of neurons in the brain and they function— there's continuous movement and interaction between billions of brain cells, neurons in your brain, and that is related to your consciousness. However, if a brain surgeon ever opened up your skull— hopefully that will never happen— If your brain surgeon opened up your skull and was looking for you, he would not find a single memory that you have in your— out of a million of memories and whatever is there in your mind, he would not find you at all. Nerve cells, yes, neurons, but what— in what form? All the memories survive in you, all the things, the entire structure of your language, or if you speak several languages. I speak 3 because of circumstances. I've lived in different countries. Where do these 3 languages live in your mind? Would a surgeon ever be able to find, there's English, there's German, there's Spanish? No. Memories, I have many memories of my grandmother who died when I was 12 years old. Would a surgeon ever find my grandmother in my brain? No. And thousands and thousands of other memories, they do not actually exist in the physical realm. The physical realm is there, it's needed for them to enter this dimension in the same way. This is the big, big, big question is, Is matter, the physical world, primary? Does matter produce consciousness as a kind of byproduct? Is consciousness an epiphenomenon or byproduct of brain activity? Very important question. Or is there more to consciousness? Is matter capable of producing consciousness. And this matter, according to materialistic mainstream science, although some are beginning, some sciences are beginning to go beyond that, but according to materialistic mainstream science, matter, physical matter is all there is. And according to, since Darwin's theory of evolution, The molecules and atoms or whatever it is that make up matter over millions of years came together randomly and out of this random coming together of atoms and molecules, all this incredible miraculous life arose, they say. Miraculous, by accident. a random thing with nothing behind it. That's 19th-century theory, which we still, to a large extent, have adopted, mainstream culture. So we would all be meaningless products of random accumulations of atoms and molecules. And they say, well, that's how the world came into being. There's no intelligence behind it, they say. There's just— it's all random. It's all meaningless. And that, unfortunately, which started with Darwin's theory of evolution. Of course, there is evolution, but the question is, is there a mind behind evolution? Is there an intelligence behind evolution? Is there a guiding intelligence behind evolution? Darwin did say no, although he believed in God apparently, but he said, well, God created the world, and then he walked away and said, well, okay, you do, Rupert, I've done my work now and you go. So he, or maybe he lost interest. Now there's, but many people have now examined this belief because it's just, it's a belief system really. It's nobody, he did not prove that there's no intelligence behind it. And people have looked at it and said, even if you give it billions of years, the random— according to the random theory of random coming together of molecules, even in a billion years, the intricate complexity here would not arise out of nothingness. An analogy that's often given is the monkey and the typewriter. I don't know if you've heard about it. The monkey and the typewriter. What, for the young people here, typewriters were what? Instruments that once existed where people— keyboards, but mechanical ones. So let's say keyboard for everybody. The monkey and the typewriter. They give— put a monkey in front of the typewriter or the keyboard and tell him to start randomly typing. And if this theory is correct, that order can arise out of randomness, at some point the monkey would produce— after a few million years, the monkey would accidentally produce— A sentence. The play Hamlet by Shakespeare. Would he? I don't think so. Maybe an occasional sentence may come together after 100,000 years, a couple of sentences, oh, that's from Hamlet, and the rest is— so what is— if consciousness is not produced by the brain, What is the relationship between consciousness and the brain? Now, the more advanced, somewhat alternative scientists have suggested that, and others suggested that the brain is more like a, not a creator of consciousness, but a receiver of consciousness, like a radio that receives the signals, invisible signals. And then it begins to play the music. So the radio receives the signal and presents— now, if anything happens to the radio, if it gets rusty, the music that it produced is not very good anymore. If it gets— if the radio gets destroyed, the music will suddenly stop. If a brick falls on my head, hopefully I'm not going to manifest it at this moment by talking about it. If a brick falls on my head, I will most probably stop talking and fall off the chair. Is that proof that my brain produces consciousness? It's not, in the same way that if something falls on the radio and it stops playing the music, it doesn't mean that the radio produced the music. So consciousness and all the memories, and your essential, your personality already, actually exists in an invisible realm that connects with the physical brain and needs the physical brain to manifest into this dimension. But you, as the person of you, which is not even the deepest part of you, the person that you are, your identity, individual identity, is actually invisible. You cannot find it with a microscope or any other instrument. You cannot see it, touch it, feel it. It's not you as what we feel to be you. It's invisible. Nobody can find it in the realm of physicality. Yes, I can draw some conclusions as to how you feel or what you are by looking at your facial expression or hearing what you say. But I don't know, I cannot see you because you are invisible. Every human is essentially invisible. There's only the physical being, but that's a relatively small part of who or what you are. The physical is— because deeper than that, there's an entire personality of you, the individual. And that's the one that people are very afraid of losing. You don't want to lose yourself. But you're already invisible even now while you're still alive in here. That's an amazing fact. So every thought, even a thought, which is a function of consciousness, does not exist in the physical realm. It can be— once it enters the brain, then— It's gone. a thought can be expressed as a word or whatever, then it enters the physical realm. So I would suggest that my grandmother and your grandparents and countless and countless and countless other memories and accumulations and skills that you have and whatever else is there as your consciousness exists in a non-physical realm. But your brain can, when it needs the information, download, so to speak, to use a contemporary expression. It downloads certain information from— let's use the analogy of— computer analogy of the cloud. It downloads it from the invisible realm. That's an important realization that you are essentially invisible, and that's just the personal identity of you. Well, that's interesting. Now, does that— so that is not produced by the brain, and In many near-death experiences, people have reported that they were still conscious without a brain. So there is a kind of another version of you, we could say etheric, whatever, that is invisible, that— For example, people have been in hospital, undergone operations, something went wrong, Briefly, and many accounts of the invisible separated from the physical vehicle and was able to observe from above what was going on down below. And they were still aware. Awareness was left completely aware, completely conscious, without the brain. The physical brain. So these are amazing facts. So that is the fact of the invisibility of you as a person. So the greatest fear is that you may lose yourself when the body dies. However, the fact that you are invisible may be a little— maybe help a little bit in realizing that when the body dies, that invisible being is still there, and it will go on from there.