Russell chats to spiritual teacher and author of The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle about awareness, psychedelics and the Great Reset. In the end, Eckhart says "wisdom is the one thing that saves us!".To WATCH the full interview of Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson, Vandana Shiva, Jocko Willink and Wim Hof go to: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Enjoy weekly meditations and join us for a special Q&A weekdays after our new daily show streamed on Rumble from 10am PT, 1pm ET, 5pm GMT.Find out more about Eckhart Tolle and his 'Finding Inner Peace: 7 Days of Teaching and Meditations - https://teachings.eckharttolle.com/finding-inner-peace-free-meditations/Finding Inner Peace:7 Days of Teachings and MeditationsCome and see Wim Hof, Biet Simkin and Vandana Shiva at COMMUNITY 2023 - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Hello and welcome to Subcutaneous, where I have conversations unbridled by cliche and unimpeded even by time herself.
I've had fantastic conversations already with Jocko Willink, Gabor Maté, and coming up soon we have Brené Brown, Joe Dispenza, and today...
Oh, today it's Eckhart Tolle.
Next week it's Jordan Peterson.
What incredible terrain we're crossing together.
Remember, you can watch this show live on Rumble every single day.
And all of the episodes we've recorded, they're over there on Rumble.
You can see people's faces as they handle these questions.
But today, it's time to talk to Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher, author of Power of Now, and for me, the person that most easily embodies the principles that they espouse.
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But now it's time to talk to Eckhart Tolle.
Get ready, get ready to live in the moment right now!
What I'd love to frame our conversation around today, if I might, Eckhart, is the sense that we are living in a time of crisis, where we are lurching from one crisis to another, where we move from a financial crisis into a pandemic crisis, into a war crisis.
How do we align individual spiritual awakening with collective awakening?
And do you think that spiritual awakening, when attained, as it can only be in the present moment, means that we are somehow divorced or separate from
community activity in the same way that we would be separate from sort of personal goals of the
fulfillment of personal passions, say, do you have trouble squaring that circle?
Well, we are certainly moving into turbulent times and perhaps it's helpful to become more aware of one's own
state of consciousness.
That's the main thing, is to become aware that everything is experienced through your state of consciousness.
And your state of consciousness determines the way in which you experience so-called reality.
So you could divide, for example, your experience of reality into three parts.
One is you experience reality through your past, which is of course all the things that have happened to you and all the things that make up your personality.
They are accumulations, mental, emotional accumulations from the past.
And that's who you consider yourself to be.
That's part of your reality is your past or whatever happens even in the more recent past.
Another part of your reality is the future.
Many people are very much focused on the future.
What's going to happen to me?
What's going to happen an hour from now, tomorrow, next year?
What's going to happen to the world?
Are we going to survive?
Am I going to make it?
Et cetera, et cetera.
So we have the past as part of your reality, which makes up your identity in the sense of personal identity.
You have the future, which you look to for fulfillment or liberation from a state of Insufficiency or lack, you look to the future for liberation, which is normal, you look to the future to become a more complete human being, to achieve or acquire this or that, that's all fine, and then you have the present moment, the immediate experience of the present moment, and that's often overlooked, because future and past have
Obscure in the cases of, in most people's lives, future, past and future, past in the sense of carrying the weight of a personality that's based on the conditioning of your mind, and then the future in the sense of desperately needing to get somewhere, there's the hope of fulfillment, and at the same time there's the fear of non-fulfillment or loss, so the future is a two-edged sword, On the one hand, it promises fulfillment and it might give it to you.
Or it's experienced as a threat of loss or something bad happening or death or whatever.
So they tend to obscure the present moment.
And then there's, I would add, a fourth thing that's only come into people's lives in the past decade.
In the experience of reality, there's a virtual world of the reality.
So there are many people these days who spend several hours a day focusing on the virtual reality of social media, whatever it is that they're engaged in, when they look at their screen.
So we could say perhaps there's your screen reality, which for many people, unfortunately, especially young people, has actually become The main way in which they experience reality, and that's quite amazing.
It's something totally new.
Until recently, it's only been past, future, and present moment.
Now it's past, future, present moment, and then the virtual reality.
So that's something that we need to be aware of.
The spiritual dimension can only come into your life through awareness of the present moment reality, your immediate reality in the present moment here and now.
That's the entry point into the spirituality.
And that is often overlooked in people's lives.
They overlook the most important thing there ever is, which is actually their immediate experience of this moment, which after all is all there is ever.
So, past and future are actually experienced as mental formations.
One could say that past and future don't really exist except as thoughts in your mind.
Without the thoughts in your mind, There's no past and future.
One could go into that.
Philosophical questions may arise out of that, but we don't need to go there.
May I interrupt for a second?
I'd like to see you, Russell, but I can't see you right now.
I can only see myself.
Oh, there you are.
I don't like looking at myself.
Do you know the story of Narcissus?
I was in it.
[Laughter]
The, uh, the, the, the, the Greek, the, it's a mythological tale.
I call it, it's a story of how the first selfie happened.
So the story goes back into a mythological past.
It's not, I don't think it ever really happened, but it's deep wisdom embedded in that story.
There was Narcissus.
The man, a very beautiful young man, he was very, very happy.
He didn't know he was beautiful.
There were no mirrors, but he was just happy.
One day he saw a very still pool of water and he looked into this pool of water and he saw his reflection.
For the first time, he saw himself in the reflection of this water.
And as the mythological tale goes, it says he fell in love with himself.
When he saw himself, he saw that he was beautiful and he fell in love with himself.
And after that he was never happy again.
And this, there's enormous wisdom in that story because to me it tells the story, I sometimes Jokingly say it's the story of the first selfie, but really it tells of the beginning of the human ego.
The human ego is the formulation of an image in your mind that you have of yourself.
It consists of visual image and to a large extent A narrative that's connected, a story that you tell yourself, that you believe in, that you say, this is me, this is who I am.
So you begin, as the ego developed, humans began to live with dividing themselves up into two.
There's me and the image of the That I have of myself, and I live then through a mental image of myself.
And so that is the split that happens.
Perhaps this is what sometimes is described as the fall, the fall of humans into the egoic consciousness.
And this is what we are still living with.
And over the millennia, the ego has become stronger and stronger.
So our Entire identity is then based on that mental image that we have of ourselves, which in most cases has now become a narrative.
This narrative you call me, me and my life, you call it, people call it my life.
And they don't realize when they call, when they say my life, they're talking about a story that they're telling themselves in their minds.
People carry this burden of, because every life is so problematic, every life has is a problem.
Many people's identity is experienced as a big problem and they're looking for a solution to this problem of me.
Then you look to the future and occasionally it helps you a bit.
The future enables you to do things, et cetera, et cetera.
But eventually, as you grow older, as I'm growing older, and I begin to realize the future is also very lethal.
It's going to eventually kill you.
First, the future gives you everything.
All the possibilities are there.
It's a wonderful thing to have time.
It's really time.
The universe gives you time to do things, to acquire things, to get better at this or that, and then this beautiful thing, time, that you need for everything, and you have it, and then it turns around and it starts killing you.
It gives you everything and then it takes everything away.
That is time and that is the world that we live in.
I call it the horizontal dimension where things are.
There's past and there's future.
That's time.
We live through memory and anticipation.
Humans live mainly through memory and anticipation.
And what they don't realize is the primary importance of the present moment.
That ultimate sanity, you have to seek that in the present moment rather than looking for it at some future point or in the virtual world.
The virtual world is an amplification and an externalization of the egoic mind in many cases.
The human mind gets amplified there and then you have it there on the screen.
So I don't know what your initial question was, let's see if we can get back to that, but it's all connected.
You once told me that in one of the conversations where I was troubling you having gotten your phone number by illicit means, that you said you can never be happy in the conceptual mind.
You are trying to find happy in the conceptual mind and of course the future is ultimately conceptual, the past is conceptual, my identity as an individual, as a Male, the narcissus identity.
I was very taken with your explanation of that myth in the pure pool of unbounded potentiality, the super state of all unconscious possibility, connected perhaps that a limitlessness, a choice is made to identify with form, whether that form is physical or thought form.
I like that at this point of distinction and separation, this point of distinction, separation occurs.
It reminded me too, as you alluded to, of the fall of humankind, of course regarded as expulsion from the garden, the garden being a cultivated space where everything is immediately available without requirement or recourse for the external.
Some people, I suppose they're not of a spiritual persuasion, would seek to say that this mythic memory of the garden is born of our shared individual memory of a uteral life, where all of us live initially formless, then single-cellular, bi-cellular, where we live suspended and all of our needs are met by the Great Eternal Mother.
And while we're on this sort of somewhat mythic pathway, Eckhart, I wondered if I My ask, as I felt you were on the brink of saying it when you talked about horizontal dimensionality of the function of the mythic symbol of the crucifix when it comes to enlightenment beyond Christ's ascension, is there a personal and relevant message for us in this image system?
It's a very profound image And to appreciate it and understand it.
You don't need to be a Christian to appreciate this deep wisdom embedded in that image.
So, first of all, you have... If you came here as an extraterrestrial, well, they're probably here already, but... And if you saw for the first time... Don't think I haven't noticed your initials?
Yes, well, that's true.
I won't say any more about that.
So an extraterrestrial, they would be very surprised to see humans worshipping a man.
It's not just the cross, because there's an image of the man crucified on the cross, and people are worshipping that image.
So they would say, how does that make sense?
What is that?
So the central image of Christianity is the crucifixion, the man on the cross, which really is an image of suffering.
The central image of Christianity is an image of suffering.
In the same way that the central teaching of the Buddha is a teaching of the fact of human suffering, called dukkha, the primordial fact of human existence.
The Buddha taught the primordial fact of human existence is the fact of dukkha.
Buddha said wherever you go, whatever you do, sooner or later, sooner rather than later, you will encounter some form of suffering.
Dukkha is a Pali term.
Pali is a language related to Sanskrit.
Many Buddhist scriptures are in Pali, as you probably know.
So Dukkha can also be translated as unsatisfactoriness, unhappiness, misery, whatever.
You could call it unhappiness in whatever form.
So Dukkha is suffering.
The central image of Christianity is also an image of suffering, but it is also an image of The transcendence of suffering, because the crucifixion is the image of suffering, but it also points to the resurrection.
The cross then is ambivalent.
It has a twofold meaning.
One, it's a torture instrument.
It's the cause of human suffering, of this archetypal human, as I call Christ.
It's the image of, it's a torture instrument.
But the cross also is a symbol of the divine.
It's both.
It's a torture instrument.
And it's a symbol of the divine.
In other words, it points to something that perhaps no human would have understood conceptually at the time, that the path of human evolution is the evolution through suffering.
Eventually, we awaken and we transcend through the experience of suffering.
Suffering eventually awakens us.
And the Buddha, when he talked about Dukkha, he also added, he said literally, I teach suffering and the end of suffering, which means, he was saying, I show you how suffering arises, ultimately how the human mind creates it, I show you how suffering arises and I show you how it can be transcended.
So the crucifixion is suffering and the transcendence of suffering.
But there would be no awakening, spiritual awakening, if it weren't for the suffering that precedes it.
That is the path on all levels.
Evolution of every life form, the existence of every life form is precarious.
Every life form, as soon as it manifests into this existence, It encounters limitations.
It encounters danger.
Life is always precarious.
And so even a blade of grass has a struggle.
It has to come up through the soil.
I heard some gardeners, when they plant seeds or something, they sometimes, when the first The plant first sprouts, they put more soil on top of it.
They say that, I talked to a gardener who did this and said, why are you putting more soil on top of this thing that's already sprouting?
He said, then they have to struggle and then they become stronger.
When they finally emerge, they are a stronger plant through the struggle.
The struggle attracts more energy, more life energy.
And so this is why humans never evolve in their comfort zone.
No human has ever achieved deep insights or in evolutionary terms, no human has ever Experienced a deeper awakening in their comfort zone.
Sitting on the sofa, they're drinking their beer, watching NetBinge, watching Netflix.
It's so great.
Whatever their comfort zone is.
Lying on the beach.
It's great.
People think, one day I will achieve this.
I'm going to move to Hawaii or to Bali and then I'll have made it.
I'll lie on the beach.
Or they might think, when I have enough money I can go to a beautiful spa and out there.
I will be pampered, I will get the purest food, I will get massages every day, and then I can actually dedicate my life to spiritual awakening.
Those will be the ideal conditions for spiritual awakening.
I wish I had the money to do that, they say, but of course the opposite is true.
In their comfort zone, they would not awaken at all.
They would gradually go to sleep, so to speak.
And the ideal situation for your awakening is the very limitations you experience in your life at this moment in your life.
That is your ideal situation.
Some imagined comfort zone!
Amazing!
All right, I've got some questions.
Firstly, to your point there about the precondition of suffering as the natural environment for enlightenment, it came to me the idea of Marcus Aurelius in this reified position as an emperor and indeed a philosopher king, presumably able to achieve a degree of comfort due to his authority and power and yet living in that place of stoic wisdom.
I'd like to also add to this because I know that I have to ask all my questions at once because I know I might not be speaking for a while after this, like there's the Marcus Aurelius in a reified position argument, then I want to add to that the idea of Epicureanism, the idea that Pleasure and hedonism can lead to some unbounded state and is this not a sort of an ascetic model that is about the denial of pleasure and the denial of the body?
Where do you place of sex and sexuality on that spectra?
But firstly, and I'd like you to cover all of this if you would, and you've still got a bit of question about the war left over from about half hour ago that's just warming on the stove for you in a Tupperware box to answer in a moment.
And I'd also like to add that I want to talk to you about undifferentiated states because you used when talking about the sapling seedling metaphor that struggle attract you said, attracts more energy and I wonder where this
attraction is from and where this attraction is going to. I also would like to recount a
personal story if I may, Eckhart, that recently after doing a show late at night, which
required of me that I be absolutely present in the moment in order for me to deliver what I was
required to deliver. I had to function at a high state. After this, I was in this state afterwards.
Another time when I was troubling you on the phone, you said to me, the minute you're not on the... you said the minute you leave the stage, you said you are no longer that person and that experience is over and you have lost that concept.
Well, not so for me.
I live in the velocity and momentum of that moment and still the next day after not sleeping well because my body wants to stay awake, it wants action, it wants...
Essentially, if I may say, coitus and procreation.
And the next morning, when I wake up, I still feel I'm still in it.
I'm still in it, but it's sort of glorious.
And as I drove to work the next day, when I see the bins, the garbage left out, you know, the garbage cans, which are like wheelie bins in this country, when I see them, I see them in a sort of a joyful state, like saintly, like it's Disney versions of trash cans, like they make me laugh.
I see them as funny, as if they're talking to one another.
And when I see the pigeons on a wire, it amuses me, and I notice how close it is, this sense of the vibrant, constant vivacity and non-separateness of things, how close it is to glory, how close it is to comedy, how close it is to beauty, to see momentarily behind the veil, how approximate it is also to insanity, To people that go, my television is talking to me, it's telling me that I've got to do this, I'm getting information from the news.
And it reminded me of my experiences, although they were a long time ago now, of psychedelics, in my case just simple LSD, that whilst it was fearful and unstructured, and I was probably too young and not ready for those kind of experiences, that what I felt I now remember on LSD is non-separateness and that non-separateness was
scary to know, oh my god this is all a concept, I'm not really me,
that's not really a table
this is the application of concepts to temporal circumstances
what was that table before it was a table? What will it be in five years?
What is five years? So I suppose I'm asking to you about these routes to
First that Marcus Aurelius tag, reified position, how did he experience the struggle to come up with this sort of Stoic philosophy that he's a significant part of.
What do you say about Epicureanism and the role of pleasure and is it not like because you know what about in Tantra in the Vedas where they say just go crazy man and live it all out.
And what do you think also about These transcendent states that are achieved through psychedelics, whether or not they can be accessed, I'm guessing you say they do, whether or not you've ever taken any psychedelics, and if you understand what I'm saying about how close this is to a type of insanity, we talk about awakening, but isn't there a kind of danger in there, because obviously I'm very familiar with your personal awakening, but so that's just some questions, Eckhart Tolle.
Yes, well, there are many questions and ultimately Probably boils down to one question.
Every human is longing unconsciously, mostly unconsciously longing for self-transcendence.
They somehow feel that they are not comfortable with themselves.
They're not comfortable in their own skin.
There's always in the background and sometimes in the foreground, there's a sense of something missing, something not quite right.
Or I haven't arrived yet.
I haven't really started to live yet.
I'm waiting to start out living.
Some people reach the age of 60, and they're still waiting to start living.
And then finally they say, oh, when I retire, then I'll start living.
No, you won't.
So there's a longing for self-transcendence.
And then they may seek self-transcendence in certain experiences, and certain experiences can give them a taste or a glimpse of temporary self-transcendence.
For example, you could say alcohol.
You drink, you take a few, a whiskey, whatever you drink, and what does it do?
You have the first one and you begin to feel, let's say this, you're a normal anxious person, Stressed, anxious, you've had a rough day, and your mind says, come on, you deserve a treat, get the bottle, and the mind, even if you have a problem with alcohol, the mind will convince you, okay, just one more, what else do I have in my life?
Let's go, come on, do it!
And so, what is that?
Just water, Eckhart.
Nearly 20 years, one day at a time, just water.
But it definitely was triggered by your description of that whisky.
Oh, that's great.
So then what that does is, because all the anxiety was your mind continuously creating Anxious states, thinking anxious thoughts and creating anxious emotions.
So that's a burden of the self, living with myself, this problematic self.
After the first drink, mind activity slows down a little bit.
And you go, oh, it feels a little better.
You begin to feel it.
Then the second one makes you feel even better.
And then you suddenly, maybe you haven't smiled all day, and then suddenly you go, oh, Life isn't so bad, is it?
It's actually quite nice.
Why is it suddenly a little better?
Because the mind is slowing down even more.
And so this does not happen in every case.
There are some people, but that's another story I don't want to go into right now, some people actually become angry and aggressive when they drink.
That's another story.
But many, many people Experience and ease.
Life suddenly feels easier, more pleasant.
And then they start, some people start moving or dancing or singing, then suddenly it's, they're becoming, it's a moment where they're becoming free of this problematic self.
And then they think, oh, if I heard, I've had two or three, then another If I had another two or three, I would feel even better.
But unfortunately that does not happen, because if they drink even more, gradually they are moving towards complete unconsciousness.
And so there is self-transcendence.
That's only one example.
Self-transcendence is also other drugs, like the stuff that people smoke.
It's legal here now.
So you have this dried plant that for a long time was illegal.
I mean, it's a bit absurd.
People carrying in their pockets leaves of a dried plant and then they get arrested for carrying leaves of a dried plant.
Anyway, so you smoke.
I tried it.
I don't know if I told you, I tried it once because people asking me, what's it like?
Is it the same as meditation?
I said, I have to try it.
So we were in Amsterdam in a hotel and of course that's the ideal place to try it.
Well, it was at the time, nowadays it's available elsewhere too.
So I tried it.
And I could see it did something to my mind.
I could feel a dulling, a kind of dulling of my mind.
I would not want to repeat it because my normal state is so much more pleasant.
Then I can see why for people who are burdened by this anxious mind or the problem-making mind, the egoic mind, they experience a moment of release.
It gives them a glimpse of becoming a bit freer of the me, this always anxious or always regretting this or looking, fearing this, all the fear and anxiety.
Subsides for a while.
So it's another, it's a glimpse of self-transcendence.
But again, if you go further that route, you again move towards unconsciousness.
Yes, it can be.
I also experimented.
No, I didn't experiment.
I took it once.
Acid, LSD, because people asked me, isn't this the same as meditation?
I couldn't answer the questions.
I had to try it.
So I took some, and that was years ago.
People experience in different ways, but what I experienced was an enormous intensification of sensory experience, like everything was, every sense was amplified.
Like the sense of smell, the sense of touch, the visual sense, looking at an object.
I could see walls in the room pulsating with energy and I can see how what it does It completely, it removes the thinking mind.
And what's left is a pure experiencing of it.
The pure sensory experience.
It removes the thinking.
In that sense, it has certain similarities with the state of presence or the conscious, very conscious state of spiritual presence.
Because in spiritual presence also the mind is still, But consciousness remains.
The difference between all these things where people seek self-transcendence through drugs or alcohol or even sexual, the intense sexual pleasure will also stop your mind temporarily, not for too long.
Well, it depends.
Eckhart, I expect better from you!
I hope it's not like when you're answering questions, like, oh god, when's the orgasm?
Goes on for hours!
The difference is, when you indulge in those things that give you temporary relief from yourself, You're moving below thought.
The thinking dimension is where most people live.
The voice in the head talks, talks, talks, interprets, judges, criticizes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's the thinking dimension.
You can become free of that mind-created self, which is the ego, by moving below thinking.
So through certain drugs, help you move below thinking.
Also you can experience it when you are just about to go to sleep.
There's a moment when you're half awake still and half asleep.
And in that moment, you can sense the nature of sleep as a sweetness that pulls you, that it pulls you.
And there's nothing left of your problems because you've fallen below thinking.
And you suddenly feel so good as you're moving towards sleep.
It feels so good.
Ah!
And then you disappear into sleep.
You have moved below thinking.
But that's, spiritually speaking, there are certain similarities with that, with these things that give you a glimpse of self-transcendence.
And spiritually, spiritual awakening, you rise above thinking.
But there are certain similarities between the two states.
And the drug-induced temporary glimpses that people have can be helpful if you don't get addicted.
Some people have started their spiritual life by taking acid once or twice or three times and then they started doing meditation and then they didn't need that anymore.
There's no, there's no, the ultimate solution is not for us in falling below thinking.
We cannot, we don't, we cannot regress.
To that.
The animals also live in a pre-thinking stage, in a pre-egoic stage.
The dog has no self-image.
It hasn't arrived at that stage yet.
That's why the dog is happy.
I've never met a dog that has a problem with body image or problem with self-esteem.
Even the ugliest dog is fine here.
He has no secondary image through which it lives.
That's why the dogs are quite happy, they don't have a self.
But we can't go back there.
Our destiny is, the next stage in human evolution, is not to let go of thinking completely, no, thought is the most wonderful tool that there is, but not to seek an identity through the movement of thought, to find a deeper identity that is not That is not separate from thought, but is far deeper than thought.
You could say, for example, the image I sometimes use is the movement of thought is like ripples on the surface of the ocean.
The ripple is not different from the ocean.
And humans have an identity.
Let's use this analogy.
Let's say we are all rebels on the surface of the ocean as human beings.
We are rebels on the surface of the ocean and most of these rebels on the surface of the ocean only know themselves as rebels.
The form that they are as a rebel, the physical form and the mental form.
And so they live on the horizontal plane, the surface of the ocean, and are surrounded by other ripples.
And they feel threatened by other ripples, or they want to attract other ripples in order to become, to join it, become a bigger ripple.
And that is the existence of the purely horizontal plane where most humans still live.
And that I'd like to mention in connection with that the cross that you mentioned that there's another dimension to the image of the cross and because the cross is actually also a pre-christian or was already a pre-christian symbol the cross has the two dimensions the horizontal the intersection of the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension so you could say this the vertical dimension is where we live here in In the dimension of time and physical reality, and even our psychological reality, is the vertical dimension of life, past and future.
You cannot escape time on the horizontal dimension.
Then there's the possibility of realizing that there is a deeper dimension to life, Then the phenomenal existence that you experience here in the world of a manifest of physical and psychological manifestation, there is the vertical dimension.
And the vertical dimension, going back to the ripple, what happens if the ripple suddenly realizes that it is not just a ripple?
Yes, it is a ripple, but it's also an extension of the ocean.
It's just a way in which the ocean manifests temporarily on the surface.
And then if that ripple suddenly realizes, wow, I'm not just a ripple, suddenly the ripple can sense the vastness out of which it has come and the vastness to which it is still connected, always connected, ultimately always one with.
And suddenly, The identity of the ripple, which is, in this analogy, it's a human being, of course, the identity of the ripple suddenly shifts from being exclusively identified with the physical and psychological form of me on the horizontal plane, it begins to identify with the ocean itself.
Now, in human terms, let's put aside the analogy now, In human terms, that means the human being suddenly realizes that he or she, or they, or whatever, suddenly realizes they are not just the human, this is how I use the terminology that I now use, and they're not just human, they're also the being.
The human is the personality lives on the horizontal dimension, the physical body, And the psychological entity that is the person or the personality.
Fine.
Nothing wrong with that.
It's fine.
It needs to be honored and recognized and treated well.
That's a horizontal existence.
And then, that's the human.
But the question is always, are you just a human?
Or have you realized that you are a human being?
The being is the transcendent dimension.
That in the analogy that I just used, the being is the ocean.
So they're not separate.
They go together.
You have the two dimensions.
You are a person, but you are infinitely more than just this person.
On the horizontal plane of existence.
So, in that sense, we could summarize all spiritual experience or spiritual realization by saying that no matter what tradition, you begin to sense It's actually not that complicated.
There's not much to understand here.
Intellectually, it's not a conceptual thing.
It's not a conceptual realization.
Awakening is not a conceptual thing at all.
It doesn't mean you suddenly understand everything or you suddenly understand more.
It doesn't mean that at all.
It's a sudden sensing, even if it's just come just a glimpse at first, that there is an animating presence within you that far transcends the person, but is not separate from the person.
And not only is that animating presence in you, you can begin to... I hope it's not too mystical.
It's actually quite practical.
You begin to sense that the entire universe It's permeated by an animating present that manifests as millions and billions of life forms.
It takes on disguises in different vibrational frequencies of the one animating presence that pervades the universe.
That is the organizing principle, the vast intelligence behind the manifestation of life in this form.
There is vast intelligence expressing itself, gradually growing in this dimension where there's time.
It gradually evolves in this dimension.
You can see how life has evolved on this planet alone, from just minerals, to plant life, to animal life, to human life.
And it's still evolving.
So the creation of the universe is not complete.
God is still working on it.
It's a work in progress.
And humans... Now, what is... I mentioned God.
I don't usually mention God because there's so many misconceptions about God.
Is this animating presence God, you could ask?
By the way, to sense the animating presence, all that's required is for your mind for a moment to come to a cessation without loss of consciousness, so you're not falling below thought.
The thinking mind stops for a moment.
And what's left, what is left, when the thinking mind stops for a moment, you're still aware.
There's an awareness, you're still, you can sense perceptions, you're aware of everything, but you're not interpreting it.
In other words, there's a stillness behind the sense perceptions, and that stillness behind sense perceptions is the awareness, or the consciousness, is another word for it.
So you suddenly sense The consciousness that is the essence of your being, not that you have consciousness, you are consciousness.
If you have it, then you are too, who are you?
You are consciousness.
So it's incredible.
Your destiny is to realize that in this lifetime, And then live in connectedness with it, so that you're no longer confined only to the personal identity.
There is a deeper identity in addition to that.
Yes, you still have a personal identity, the narrative in your mind, Opinions, you can see in the contemporary world how people are identified with their opinions.
The opinions, they become part of their identity and that's very dangerous.
When opinion becomes identity, then you're lost in your mental positions and they become part of your ego.
There was a Zen master who said, don't seek for the truth, just stop cherishing opinions.
That was the Zen master's main teaching.
Stop cherishing opinions.
He didn't say stop having opinions, he said stop cherishing.
Now what does cherishing mean?
What he was talking about, identifying it, to seek a self, In your opinion, then you are lost.
And so millions of humans are lost on that level of existence, unfortunately.
And then they create a world of problems.
Imagine it's not just the individual human being that's lost.
The entire collectives are lost in that dimension of identification with mental positions and so on.
And so that is the The essence of unconscious living.
We need to become free of that.
Sir, it's difficult not to imagine that this process of concretising the present awareness with the opinion is not somehow, if not a deliberate project, then a fully immersive one in our culture at this time, that we are hemmed in to dominions of opinion, that we're We are held there, we are held in a space of external identification that we're encouraged almost to do it.
When you invite us to, for a moment, not identify with our ever assessing and categorizing mind and to simply be present, I've once either read or experienced you suggesting Bring your awareness to the hands.
You can feel that there is energy in your hands.
Your hands are not thinking.
And I found that a useful tool.
And I note that when I'm able to access this sense of presence, it feels to me correlative of charisma.
And another word for which, of course, is presence.
You sense when someone is very, this person is present.
They're not just in a lot of thought.
They're actually there in the moment.
And it's, whoa, this person is here.
You feel it.
It's sort of an energizing phenomenon.
I have some challenges around the sort of quantification of metaphysical information, i.e.
below thought, above thought.
These kind of concepts can be difficult.
And I feel that perhaps the greatest, do you agree, Eckhart, the greatest ideological argument, ongoing one, is one of material rationalism, post-enlightenment thinking, that continually tethers us to the measurable.
I can see how the great scientific and technological revolutions that led to the unbelievable instruments that we are currently utilizing also leads us to identify with that that can be measured.
And there is something that is Unquantifiable about this prima materia to which you refer, this oceanic oneness, this beingness that it seems that we are all an expression of.
In this time where we are obsessed narcissistically with our identity, not to challenge the individual identities that certain cultural groups may have had in adversity with other more oppressive cultural identity formats, but when we are wedded and welded to our individual identity, whether that's as me, Russell, or me, a man, or me as a white man.
I think it becomes increasingly difficult for us to experience and live in accordance with what appears to be a principle of unity.
And you said, interestingly, that we do not think it, we sense it.
I've often wondered if the feeling of love was an awareness beyond the individual consciousness, as it were, the persona consciousness, of unity.
A feeling of unity.
A feeling of non-separateness.
That when I am in love, I am not separate from the beloved.
And the challenge becomes to make the beloved all things, without distinction, to love as I would my children.
You know, all beings.
Yes.
Now, words are always limited, so when we use feeling, I use sensing rather than feeling to differentiate it from, you feel emotions too.
Emotions come and go, and you can have conflicting emotions, you can laugh.
On the emotional level, you can, what is called love, that's another word that has many meanings in many levels, Everybody has experienced, they love one person one day, and the next day they hate the same person.
This is not uncommon in relationships.
There's always, there's a wedding, which means you have found a person that makes you happy.
And a few years later, there's a divorce, which means the very person that made you happy is now the person that makes you unhappy.
So feelings are not that reliable.
They're fine to be acknowledged as they arise, but it's actually deeper than a feeling.
This is why language is so limited.
So I didn't want to use feelings to describe this realization, the realization of that Dimension within you that one could call the unconditioned consciousness or pure consciousness.
So I call it the sensing.
You can sense it.
It's actually deeper than any emotion.
And so you sense that depth.
And when you sense it, then you look at another person or you interact with another person.
You see them, you listen to them.
And as you look at them and as you listen to their words or whatever it is, At the same time, you can sense that presence that is in you.
That is the attention, the conscious attention.
Listening is a wonderful art.
If you're able to listen to another person in that state of openness where you're not already formulating the next question, already mentally arguing with what the person is saying.
Yeah.
So there are many people who are not really listening.
So when you talk to them, to really listen, there needs to be an alert, open attention.
And not an interference of the thinking mind that immediately evaluates, interprets, criticizes, whatever it does.
That's not the real listening.
There was a beautiful, there's this beautiful school of psychology, Carl Rogers, He created an American psychotherapist.
His main teaching was for the therapist to be in that state of pure listening, which really implies that while you listened, you give your attention, yes, to the words, but you're not thinking while you listen.
You're simply aware.
So thinking is replaced With awareness.
I like that.
That is the important shift.
Yeah, feeling with sensing and thinking with awareness.
Actually, Dan, who's operating the camera also, I do training with Dan and we once did a meditation where he said, move from mental activity to mental awareness, just awareness.
It was a nice meditation we did.
So, Eckhart, I'm just going to invite now Subhi, who runs our social media here, who's going to, with your permission sir, pass on some of the questions from the people in our community.
And to cover this moment, I'll say that one time, I know that I go there and I get there.
That story I was describing about seeing the bins and the pigeons and seeing the great sort of playful beauty which I've I experience it intermittently.
I experience it.
One time I in fact, using you of course as an example, I said to one of my meditation teachers who I love very much, Bobby Roth, who runs the David Lynch Foundation, I said, I get there.
I get there sometimes.
But I said, sometimes I'm not there in meditation.
Sometimes in meditation I'm not there at all.
I feel like I am witnessing thoughts.
And I said, I feel it sometimes in relationship.
And I said, I know Eckhart Tolle.
I said, I know he's there all the time.
I can tell when I'm talking to him.
I want to be there all the time.
And he said, for you, Russell, we are not all on the same exact wave.
You are going to be a person that you have dharma with people.
You have dharma with people.
You're going to find it in relationship.
You are not going to be in the cave.
What does that sound like to you, that bit of information, Eckhart?
Yes, it manifests differently to different people because it's like you're the lampshade.
The lampshades filter the light in different ways.
The light is the same, but then the light shines through the lampshade and gets filtered in different ways.
So there's a multiplicity of humans through which the being that's behind the human manifests through the human.
For example, spiritual teachings and teachers Zen, I love Zen teachings, the Japanese form of, well, originally Chinese and Japanese form of Buddhist teachings.
The Zen teachings are very simple.
Again, it's about when I was, many years ago, I was trying to figure out what Zen is all about and through reading books.
And then I talked to a Zen monk and he said, oh, it's all quite simple.
It's just about stopping thinking.
I'm already doing that.
I've been, I've actually, a lot of the time I've already, I had this spiritual awakening and my life changed.
I became very, very peaceful.
And two years after having been so peaceful every day, living in London at the time, I was peaceful even on the Northern Line, which at the time was called the Misery Line.
It was so terrible, the subway.
But even there I was peaceful.
And then when I talked to that Zen monk, he said it's about cessation of thinking.
Then I realized that's why I'm so peaceful.
I didn't realize that actually my mind was much less active than before.
All the superfluous thinking that created so much misery in my life, that had fallen away.
So there was already, the amount of thinking I was doing had been reduced by, I don't know, difficultly expressing percentages, 70% or something, less thinking.
That's why I felt so peaceful.
I could still think, I could do, more than enough left to deal with things, I could still think.
In fact, thinking eventually became more focused and more empowered than before.
I was able to finally write a book and then another book because my thinking process became more empowered and more focused rather than this random thinking that creates so many absurd problems in one's life, many of which have no actual existence like all thoughts of anxiety for what might happen and all that
thing. So the, that's the, it manifests differently.
The Zen teachers, many of them, they have a lot of yang energy.
They look quite fierce, traditionally, the Zen teachers in Japan.
If you look at drawings, of famous Zen teachers they all they look at you like they don't look like some Christian saints so they look or the or even the Buddha itself has this lovely hint of a smile that you see in the some of the Buddha images the Buddha statues that you have the Buddha has a slight hint of a smile just oh the denty just they look at you like
Like that, bulging eyes.
And they even, as you know, they hit you if you meditate.
They have a stick, they go around and they hit you if you see you're nodding off.
Some will even slap you.
So they have a very young form of teaching.
It's not suitable for everybody.
Some people hate it.
But again, it can manifest in different ways through different people.
So it's better not to want to imitate any one human being, even if you think they have a lot to offer.
The way in which it manifests through you will be different from the way it manifests through me or another person.
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