The Seer

Although few of us really know it, it is the nature of all human beings to live in a pseudo-reality of concepts.

We look at a tree and we know it by its name, not its essence. We think, “What a beautiful oak tree”, but we don’t feel its aliveness. Our awareness and experience of the tree stops with the words “oak tree”.

Our entire life is lived this way, constantly naming every thing and every one. We even name events and experiences. We take a trip to the ocean and we chop up our experience into little pieces that are conveniently named so that we can tell others about it later. “We swam in the ocean.” “We sunbathed.” “We watched the sunset.”

As you tell your friends of your trip, are you merely uttering the names describing each experience, or are you reliving the experience as if it were happening now and speaking of your trip from your present-moment enjoyment and excitement?

More often than not, we tell stories of such things from our mental memory. The stories may be interesting and entertaining, but when we speak of them from the conceptual memory and not from our own sense of aliveness, the stories are flat.

We even name our own inner experiences, such as the emotions we experience. How many of us name our emotions rather than feel them deeply and fully? “I’m angry.” “I’m sad.” “I’m frustrated.”

When you speak these words, how angry do you feel? Are you inside the experience of your anger or are you reporting it like a journalist?

It’s the ego that traps us in this incessant naming and labeling. The ego is a mental phenomenon and has no capacity to feel. It names our experience and our world because it cannot directly have the experience.

Unfortunatelly, all of these names and labels (along with the ego mind’s concepts, images, words, judgments and definitions) blocks true experience and connection with other people.

The ego mind keeps us engaged at the level of physical appearance and form, which means it prevents us from experiencing life, ourselves and others directly, in their fullness and magnificence and aliveness.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

Many children when they are first introduced to Christianity wonder why the body of Jesus, impaled upon a cross and bleeding from his wounds, is the symbol for Christianity.

Millions of people for thousands of years would not have related to it if there wasn’t something inside themselves that deeply resonated. In other words, perhaps they were not yet awake enough to see it directly inside of their own psyche, but the inner reality that Jesus on the Cross symbolizes is that of the collective pain body of humanity.

It seems right now that there is a lot of pain out there from sex scandals to oppressive Middle Eastern regimes. And all of it is brought to you live on cable news and the Internet. This is a further representation of how the pain body renews itself both on a global social and cultural scale as well as personally inside of each of us.

Reduced to its essence, the pain body is an independent energy-form that dwells within most humans. It has its own intelligence similar perhaps to a clever and cunning animal. And that intelligence is concentrated on maintaining its survival.

Like all living things, the pain body needs to replenish itself. The food it requires is energy that vibrates at the same frequency and has a character similar to its own. For the pain body, any emotionally painful thought, experience, deed, or fear can serve as food for it. That’s why it thrives on conflict, drama, and negativity.

You may be surprised the first time you discover that there is actually an entity inside yourself that feeds and thrives on conflict, negativity, and unhappiness. When one is identified with the pain body, there is a tendency not to turn towards goodness and charity, but actually make others as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative reactions.

As disturbing as this realization may seem, it does explain why humans on this planet treat each other so poorly and why one recent news commentator compared the media to high school where bullying, hatred, bias, and close-mindedness seem to rule the day.

Realizing that we are all at the effect of the global pain body will begin to give us the understanding and compassion to see it at work; stop feeding it, and finally dis-identify from what is a primitive and unneeded part of our brain and cultural past.

~ Eckhart Tolle. www.tolleteachings.com

Our planet, whether in the first world or the third world, is going through austerity measures that causes most of us to experience a sense of lack. In fact, our minds can become habituated to ignoring that which is good is our lives and only seeing the lack.

Who is this person that chronically complains about not being treated well enough?

This is the “needy little me” that is the small mind being identified with. This part of ourselves is always finding others that are withholding from them what they need when what is really happening, is a dis-identification with who they really are.

If you see yourself as a weak, needy person abused by the world and others then that self-image will sabotage your relationships, your career even your relationship with money. In fact, identification with lack tends to bias one’s point of view to seeing lack everywhere.

The first step in changing your identification with the victim position of “I’m being taken for granted and can’t get the respect, attention, and recognition I deserve” is to acknowledge the good that can already be recognized and cherished in your life.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. The reason you are withholding is because down below the surface of your awareness you believe you are insignificant, powerless, and have nothing to contribute.

An excellent practice to change this negative identification would be the next time you feel a lack of attention, appreciation, or nurturing from someone — just give those positive qualities to that person anyway. You will notice that as you start giving you will find that you also will start to receive.

The law that outflow determines inflow is a repeatable scientific experiment that you can try each day in your personal life.

~ by Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

For anyone who has risen above the level of mere survival in day to day life, the sense of purpose and meaning become important. The less gripped you are by the need to survive – or simply the perception that you need to survive – you are free, spiritually and psychologically speaking, to pursue purpose and even to be led by it.

Take a quick moment to evaluate your life on the basis of these descriptions:

• Do you feel consumed by the demands of your job or schoolwork (or both)?

• Does it seem at the end of each day that you have been running a race of time, frantically trying to do everything on some mental list of required accomplishments?
• Do you suffer from stress of any kind on a regular basis?
• Do you feel that you and your life are stagnant, the opposite of frantic running, wallowing instead in inaction, boredom, despair, negativity or depression?
• Or, if you have said no to all the above, do you feel that your life lacks a sense of meaning and purpose, that you don’t know how to find it?

If any of these descriptions apply to you, then consciously or unconsciously, something is blocking your connection to meaning and purpose. That something is most likely you.

It may be that you are still living in survival mode (which may be true if any of the first four descriptions applied to you). If this is the case, then it is very important that you take a good look at your priorities in life. Spend several days pondering this question all through the day: “What am I making most important in my day right now?”

You may be very surprised by what you find. Be honest with yourself and write down what you learn. Notice also how you feel about these most important things you fill your days with. How satisfying and fulfilling are they? How many unnecessary activities are unsatisfying to you? Take special note of those. They are the activities you can drop altogether. As you do, you will free up time and inner space from which you can begin to contact and develop your sense of purpose.

Your true purpose already exists, that’s the good news. You do not have to create it and it’s not a matter of choosing it. Purpose is something you discover within yourself in the space of stillness. This is the only way you can find it, in your own stillness, not in a book or a workshop or in the analysis of your dreams. You must go within and be with yourself in stillness and there you will discover the purpose that has been waiting for you all along.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com (see below)

Q: How does one be with the process of death in such a way that it can be celebrated?

ET: Death is a great opportunity because death is one way in which the formless dimension comes into this life. It’s precisely at the moment of the fading of the form, that the formless comes into this life. But if that is not accepted, and the fading of form is denied, then it’s a missed opportunity.

As people around you pass away, you become increasingly aware of your own mortality. The body will dissolve. Many people still, in our civilization, they deny death. They don’t want to think about it, don’t want to give it any attention. There is enormous potential there for spiritual flowering. Even in people who, up to the point of the beginning of the fading of the form, were completely identified with the form.

It’s your last chance in this incarnation, as your body begins to fade — or you are becoming aware of this limited lifespan. It’s your last chance to go beyond identification with form. This is true whether it’s to do with your body, or somebody else’s body. In the proximity of death, there is always that grace hiding underneath the seemingly negative event.

Death in our civilization is seen as entirely negative, as if it shouldn’t be happening. Because it’s denied, people are so shocked when somebody dies — as if it’s not possible. We don’t live with the familiarity of death, as some more ancient cultures still do. The familiarity of death isn’t there. Everything is hidden, the dead body is hidden.

In India you can see the dead bodies being carried through the streets, and being burned in public. To the Westerners, it’s terrible. As the consciousness is changing, I feel that more and more death will become an important part of the evolutionary process, the process of the arising consciousness on our planet.

At any age, the form can dissolve. Even if you’re very young, you may encounter death close to you. At any age, it is extremely helpful to become familiar with, or comfortable with, the impermanence of the physical form. I recommend to everybody, to occasionally visit the cemetery.

If it’s a nice cemetery, that makes it more pleasant. Some cemeteries are like beautiful parks, you can walk around and feel extremely peaceful. But even if it’s not nice, spiritually it is just as helpful to walk around the cemetery and contemplate the fact of death. I still do that, quite often, whenever I have a chance.

In Europe, in the villages and so on, you have a cemetery next to the church very often. I love walking around there. My favorite thing is reading the names on the gravestones. Sometimes if the gravestones are very old, you’ll see that the name is not there anymore — it got eroded by the weather.

It’s the contemplation of death and the acceptance of the impermanent nature of the human form that opens up, if you accept it. Don’t intellectualize it. Don’t come to some kind of conclusion about it. Just stay with the simple isness of the fact of the impermanence of the human form, and accept that for what it is without going any further.

If you go further, you get into comforting beliefs, that’s very nice too. But what I am driving at is something deeper than comforting beliefs — instead of going to some kind of conclusion, stay with the fact of the impermanence of the human form, and contemplate this fact.

With the contemplation of the impermanence of the human form, something very deep and peaceful opens up inside you. That’s why I enjoy going to cemeteries.

When you accept the impermanence, out of that comes an opening within, which is beyond form. That which is not touched by death, the formless, comes forward as you completely accept the impermanence of all forms. That’s why it is so deeply peaceful to contemplate death.

If someone close to you dies, then there is an added dimension. You may find there is deep sadness. The form also was precious, although what you loved in the form was the formless. And yet, you weep because of the fading form. There too, you come to an acceptance — especially if you are already familiar with death, you already know that everything dies — then you can accept it more easily when it happens to somebody close to you.

There is still deep sadness, but then you can have the two dimensions simultaneously — the outer you weeps, the inner and most essential is deeply at peace. It comes forward almost as if it were saying “there is no death.” It’s peace.

The supreme art of living is to embody simultaneously the relative and the absolute in yourself. That is why you’re here on this planet: to live this state of perfection where heaven and earth come together. To embody that is your practice.

~ Eckhart Tolle. www.tolleteachings.com

For the ego – right action is finding out how any situation can meet my ego’s personal agenda and needs. Or more specifically, how can I scheme up a situation that will in the future meet my criteria of needs?

The present moment is actually a state of open inner space. When you’re in the present moment you’re asking this question: How do I respond to the requirements of this present circumstance at this very point in time? How do you tell the difference between ego and the present moment when a situation arises?

If when a situation presents itself you have an emotional reaction, then that is most probably an ego response. But if a situation arises and the first thing that presents itself is shining, black, limitless space, you can know that you are responding from the present moment.

Instead of reactivity against new circumstances, the nature of Presence is for you to merge with the situation and the solution arises without judgment or reactivity.

If you dig deeper you will find that it isn’t even you as a personality that is evaluating what is going on. Instead it is Stillness itself with it’s relaxed, open, alacrity that is operating seamlessly in empty space. If action is needed, right action occurs. And that action is appropriate not only to your personal life, but also to the complete whole.

Another way of identifying egoless right action from the pettiness of the personality is whether you are experiencing any pride. In right action there is no one pumping his fist up in the air in a gesture of defiant triumph. Right action is not a victory but rather the next moment of Being.

And even if your actions do arise out of the empty space of Being, you will need to be vigilant afterward that you do not take credit for what you have accomplished. Because as soon as ownership of your action takes place, the ego returned and the boundless space of infinite possibility has once again been hidden and lost.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

Q: If we’re all one, why do we feel drawn toward certain individuals in an expression of ‘personal love’?

ET: True love is transcendental. Without recognition of the formless within yourself, there can be no true transcendental love. If you cannot recognize the formless in yourself, you cannot recognize yourself in the other. The recognition of the other as yourself in essence — not the form — is true love.

As long as the conditioned mind operates and you’re completely identified with it, there’s no true love. There may be substitutes, things that are called ‘love’ but are not true love. For example, ‘falling in love’ … perhaps most of us have experienced it. Maybe one or two at this moment are ‘in love’, and those who have experienced it have also experienced ‘falling out of love’. We need to remember to understand (the difference between) true love and other forms of so-called love.

We are in the relative as form, and in the absolute as formless consciousness. The two dimensions that the human being embodies are the ‘human’ and the ‘being’. The human is the form, the being is the formless, the timeless consciousness itself. It sometimes happens that the form has an affinity with other forms.

It could happen for a number of reasons. One being that this form has come out of another form — called your mother — and so there is an affinity of f this form with that other form. You have a love toward your mother that might be called ‘personal’.

Another aspect of affinity with another form is male/female. You can be drawn to another body in a sexual way, and it’s sometimes called ‘love’. Especially if the sexual act is denied long enough, it’s more likely to develop into obsessive love … so much so, that in cultures where you could not have sex until you were married, falling in love could be a huge thing and could lead to suicide.

Naturally, there is an affinity of the male/female, the incompleteness of this form. The primary incompleteness of this form is that you are either a man or a woman. The oneness has become the duality of male/female.The pull towards the other is an attempt to find wholeness, completeness, fulfillment through the opposite polarity, in an attempt to find the Oneness.

That lies at the basis of the attraction. It’s to do with form, because on the level of form you are not whole — you are one half of the whole. One half of humanity is male, one half is female, roughly. You have the attraction for the other, then there may be finding certain qualities in another human being that resonate with certain qualities in yourself. Or, if they don’t resonate, it may be the opposite that you feel drawn to.

If you are a very peaceful person, maybe you feel drawn toward a dramatic person, or vice-versa. And again, you’re hoping for some completion there. You can have an affinity with another form, which can be called ‘personal love’.

If personal love is all that there is, then what is missing is the transcendental dimension of the formless — which is where true love arises. Is that part of the personal love, or is the personal level all that there is? That determines whether that so-called ‘love’ is going to turn into something painful eventually, and frustrating, or if there is a deepening.

There may be an attraction that is initially sexual between two humans. If they start living together, this cannot endure for that long and be the fulfillment of the relationship. At some point, sexual/emotional (attraction) needs to deepen and the transcendental dimension needs to come in, to some extent, for it to deepen. Then true love shines through the personal.

The important thing is that true love emanates from the timeless, non-formal dimension of who you are. Is that shining through the personal love that is to do with affinity of forms? If it isn’t, there is complete identification with form, and complete identification with form is ego. Many times you may think ‘that’s it!’ and after living together for a little while you realize ‘that was a mistake’, or ‘I was completely deluded’.

Even in parent-children relationships, which is a very close bond on the level of form, if the transcendental dimension doesn’t shine through, eventually the love between children and parents turns into something else. This is why so many people have very problematic relationships with their parents.

Some relationships may start as purely form-based, and then the other dimension comes in after a while. Perhaps only after a lot of problems, and perhaps you get close to a breakup, when suddenly there is a deepening and then you are able to bring in space. The key is to ask, ‘Is there space in this relationship?’ Or are there only thoughts and emotions? It’s a dreadful prison to inhabit if you live with a person and all you have are thoughts and emotions. Occasionally you are okay, but there is disagreement, friction.

We need to acknowledge that there are personal affinities. But in themselves, they are never ultimately fulfilling. More often than not, they are a source of suffering. Love becomes a source of suffering when the transcendental is missing. How does the transcendent come in? By being spacious with the other. Which essentially means that you access the Stillness in yourself while you look at the other. Not mental noise, not emotional waves.

That doesn’t mean that there cannot be emotions or thoughts, but there is something else present in the relationship. That applies not only to close personal relationships, but also to more superficial relationships at work.With any human relationship, the question is, ‘Is there space?’ It’s a pointer.

Space is when thought becomes unimportant — even an emotion becomes unimportant. When people live together, sometimes the other is no longer acknowledged in daily life because there is so much to do. If you wake up in the morning, is there a moment when you acknowledge the presence of the other? It’s the most wonderful thing if you can be there for the other as space, rather than as a person. At this very moment, you can either be here as a person, or you can be here as the space.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckharttolle.com

Last week, after many years in outer space, the US Mercury Messenger space probe finally achieved orbit around Mercury, the smallest planet nearest to the Sun. For the first time scientists will get a good look at the Solar System’s smallest planet, a planet bathed in solar radiation millions of times stronger than the harmful radiation of any nuclear reactor.

If you choose to sit outdoors and look out into the night sky you can perform a thought experiment about form and space that will tell you more about reality than any space probe. The next time you look at the stars don’t worry about the shapes of the constellations and what their names are. If you see a planet, don’t try and figure out which one it is. Instead, let go of your desire to label or explain and become only aware of objects inside an infinite plane of endless empty space.

To contemplate this vastness you will have to become still enough to where the enormity of space can fill your awareness. When we think of space we think of nothing being there. And yet the word space implies that it is an object since we named it. The Buddhist word for space is Void and that term means an awareness of space that is really nothing but awareness itself – or what some would term the inner space or Void of consciousness.

Suddenly, at this point you may feel like you and your awareness is actually the universe becoming aware of itself. It turns out that anything that we objectify as form is form – even empty space. And it’s also true that that as you sense the vastness of outer space as your own inner space you will know this precious stillness that has no form to be more who you really are than any content of your daily life.

This practice can be a very important one to give our awareness perspective when earthquakes, tidal waves, nuclear meltdowns, and cruise missiles attacks in the Middle East dominate the airwaves and bombard us with news of the pain body of our culture and our planet. Remember, a sane and productive human life is a dance between form and space. You can call on the power of inner space at any time to summon compassion and perspective between what appears and what is.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com (see below)

A lot of people are upset and disturbed by the earthquake in Japan. How could this happen? In reality, what happens is actually the most unstable aspect of the known universe. The world of cause and effect is changing constantly, like the relentless movement of tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean that created the latest disaster.

The 24 hour news cycle shows you the latest YouTube video uploaded by survivors more interesting in filming the catastrophic event than running for their lives and surviving it. What are these people missing? They are missing the deeper perfection of life itself, the Stillness that has nothing to do with the coming and goings of form. And this brings us to the problem of depending on what happens to make us happy.

As obvious and matter-of-fact as changing circumstances may seem to be linked to having a happier life, just look to the most highly paid US television actor’s most recent antics to see how futile relying on any form, anything that can be bought or sold; anything that can be earned or achieved, or any magical event. If Charlie Sheen isn’t happy with all his millions, what do you think will happen to you when you finally win the lottery?

As far as true Joy of Being is concerned, beating a computer at Jeopardy, or winning the Powerball is completely irrelevant. Simply put, true, satisfying, everlasting joy cannot be manifested by an act of will. Especially if that will is based on a goal or need from the outside world of circumstance. That will lives in the same world in which tsunami’s kill thousands, copper mines trap miners, and an infinitely fertile inner pollution of negativity thrives on our planet.

True joy actually derives from a place beyond form that cannot even be called a place. It is consciousness itself and is in the end the supreme identity of who you are… complete, needing no adjustment, requiring no attention, simply being there.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

This week in Libya, another decades-old strongman, has his authority challenged by protestors. Part of Libya has declared itself free of Gaddafi and has organized itself in a democratic manner despite being forbidden to even assemble for over 40 years. How can these people know how to cooperate and self-govern with no prior experience?

The ability to be free is directly proportional to how identified you are with the pain body. When regimes are toppled there is a tendency for the victors to punish the vanquished. This simply perpetuates the pain body, as most clearly illustrated when Germany had to pay war reparations after World War I and the rise of Nazism in Germany was helped by the resentment Germans felt for being punished for losing. The United States learned that lesson and instead rebuilt Germany after WW II with the Marshall Plan.

Now in the eastern parts of Libya, towns have organized themselves peacefully with new ad hoc local governments despite continuing attacks from pro-Gaddafi forces. On the surface it looks like this part of Africa has broken free from a dictator, but on a deeper, spiritual level they also have the potential to break free of the pain-body itself – the root cause of all human suffering.

Once we understand that it is identification with the suffering one inflicts on oneself and others that causes us to identify with the pain body, then the next question is how long will it take to be free of that identification?

Remarkably, it can take no time at all since the resolution is in the Present Moment. Knowing that the Present Moment is always available to break the trance of self-hatred that is the pain body is the real secret tool to the ability to be free.

Old negative emotions may still dwell inside of you that can get reactivated. But once you experience the power of the present moment you can no longer be tricked into identifying with your personal or global pain body for very long. Every living human has this potential for transformation and freedom whether it’s Wall Street or on the Arab Street.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com