An Interview with Eckhart Tolle by Sounds True
For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk
by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In
the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word
spreads that the man is a "mystic," and has discovered something
that brings peace and meaning into our lives. It sounds like
fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known worldwide for
his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the
present moment. His first book, The Power of Now, is an
international bestseller, and has been translated into 17 languages.
More than 20 years have passed since Eckhart Tolle answered his
first question on that park bench. While his audience has grown, his
message remains the same: that it is possible to stop struggling in
your life, and find joy and fulfillment in this moment, and no
other.
Can you describe to us your own experience of spiritual
awakening (and of course, can you define spiritual awakening as
well)? Was there a singular event that occurred or has it been a
gradual process?
Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of
metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness.
There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance
of being awake, of not falling back to sleep. The word Buddha comes
from the Sanskrit word Budh, meaning, "to be awake." So Buddha is
not a name and ultimately not a person, but a state of
consciousness. All this implies that humans are potentially capable
of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal
wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming. This is why some spiritual
teachings use terms like "shared hallucination" or "universal
hypnotism" to describe normal human existence. Pick up any history
book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and
you will find that a large part of the history of our species has
all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare
or an insane hallucination.
The nature of spiritual awakening is frequently misunderstood. The
adoption of spiritual beliefs, seeing visions of God or celestial
beings, the ability to channel, to heal, to foretell the future, or
other paranormal powers – all such phenomena are of value and are
not to be dismissed, but none of them is in itself indicative of
spiritual awakening in a person who experiences them. They may occur
in a person who has not awakened spiritually and they may or may not
accompany the awakened state.
Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the
state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of
them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state. So what is
it that we awaken from when spiritual awakening occurs? We awaken
from identification with our thoughts. Everybody who is not awake
spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking
mind – the incessant voice in the head. Thinking is compulsive: you
can’t stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don’t even
want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the
continuous mental noise becomes unbearable. In the unawakened state
you don’t use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could
almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective
conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of
years. You don’t see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by
mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns.
Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep
telling yourself in your head. "Me and my story": this what your
life is reduced to in the unawakened state. And when your life is
thus reduced, you can never be happy for long, because you are not
yourself.
Does that mean you don’t think anymore when you awaken spiritually?
No, of course not. In fact, you can use thought much more
effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your
Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought.
It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a
tiny aspect. For many people, the first indication of a spiritual
awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They
become a witness to their thoughts, so to speak. They are not
completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to
sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known
before.
For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely
does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually
brought about by intense suffering. That was certainly true in my
case. For years my life alternated between depression and acute
anxiety. One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear,
more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed
meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly
the thought came into my mind, "I cannot live with myself any
longer." The thought kept repeating itself several times. Suddenly,
I stepped back from the thought, and looked at it, as it were, and I
became aware of the strangeness of that thought: "If I cannot live
with myself, there must be two of me – the I and the self that I
cannot live with." And the question arose, "Who is the ‘I’ and who
is the self that I cannot live with?" There was no answer to that
question, and all thinking stopped. For a moment, there was complete
inner silence. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into a whirlpool or a
vortex of energy. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body
started to shake. I heard the words, "Resist nothing," as if spoken
inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void.
Suddenly, all fear disappeared, and I let myself fall into that
void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.
The next morning I awoke as if I had just been born into this world.
Everything seemed fresh and pristine and intensely alive. A vibrant
stillness filled my entire being. As I walked around the city that
day, the world looked as if it had just come into existence,
completely devoid of the past. I was in a state of amazement at the
peace I felt within and the beauty I saw without, even in the midst
of the traffic. I was no longer labeling and interpreting my sense
perceptions – an almost complete absence of mental commentary. To
this day, I perceive and interact with the world in this way:
through stillness, not through mental noise. The peace that I felt
that day, more than 20 years ago, has never left me, although it has
varying degrees of intensity.
At the time, I had no conceptual framework to help me understand
what had happened to me. Years later, I realized that the acute
suffering I felt that night must have forced my consciousness to
withdraw from identification with the unhappy self, the suffering
"little me," which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This
withdrawal must have been so complete that the suffering self
collapsed as if the plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy.
What was left was my true nature as the ever present "I AM":
consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form.
You may also call it pure awareness or presence.
In your own life story there seems to have been a relationship
between intense personal suffering and a breakthrough spiritual
experience. Do you believe that for all people there is some
connection between personal suffering and the intensity that is
needed for a spiritual breakthrough?
Yes, that seems to be true in most cases. When you are trapped in a
nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than
that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream. On all
levels, evolution occurs in response to a crisis situation, not
infrequently a life-threatening one, when the old structures, inner
or outer, are breaking down or are not working anymore. On a
personal level, this often means the experience of loss of one kind
or another: the death of a loved one, the end of a close
relationship, loss of possessions, your home, status, or a breakdown
of the external structures of your life that provided a sense of
security. For many people, illness – loss of health – represents the
crisis situation that triggers an awakening. With serious illness
comes awareness of your own mortality, the greatest loss of all.
For many people alive at this time, loss is experienced as loss of
meaning. In other words, life seems to lack purpose and doesn’t make
sense anymore. Loss of meaning is often part of the suffering that
comes with physical loss, but it can also happen to people who have
gained everything the world has to offer – who have "made it" in the
eyes of the world – and suddenly find that their success or
possessions are empty and unfulfilling. What the world and the
surrounding culture tells them is important and of value turns out
to be empty and this leaves a kind of painful inner void, often
accompanied by great mental confusion.
Now the question arises: What exactly is the connection between
suffering and spiritual awakening? How does one lead to the other?
When you look closely at the nature of human suffering you will find
that an essential ingredient in most kinds of suffering is a
diminishment of one’s sense of self. Take illness, for example.
Illness makes you feel smaller, no longer in control, helpless. You
seem to loose your autonomy, perhaps become dependent on others. You
become reduced in size, figuratively speaking. Any major loss has a
similar effect: some form that was an important part of your sense
of who you are – a person, a possession, a social role – dissolves
or leaves you and you suffer because you had become identified with
it and it seems you are losing yourself or a part of yourself. In
reality, of course, what feels like a diminishment or loss of your
sense of self is the crumbling of an image of who you are held in
the mind. What dissolves is identification with thought forms that
had given you your sense of self. But that sense of self is
ultimately false, is ultimately a mental fiction. It is the egoic
mind or the "little me" as I sometimes call it. To be identified
with a mental image of who you are is to be unconscious, to be
unawakened spiritually. This unawakened state creates suffering, but
suffering creates the possibility of awakening. When you no longer
resist the diminishment of self that comes with suffering, all
role-playing, which is normal in the unawakened state, comes to an
end. You become humble, simple, real. And, paradoxically, when you
say “yes” to that death, because that’s what it is, you realize that
the mind-made sense of self had obscured the truth of who you are –
not as defined by your past, but timelessly. And when who you think
you are dissolves, you connect with a vast power which is the
essence of your very being. Jesus called it: "eternal life." In
Buddhism, it is sometimes called the "deathless realm."
Now, does this mean that if you haven’t experienced intense
suffering in your life, there is no possibility of awakening?
Firstly, the fact that you are drawn to a spiritual teaching or
teacher means you must have had your share of suffering already, and
the awakening process has probably already begun. A teacher or
teaching is not even essential for spiritual awakening, but they
save time. Secondly, humanity as a whole has already gone through
unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of
which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This
collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human
beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening. For
many individuals alive now, this means: they have suffered enough.
No further suffering is necessary. The end of suffering: that is
also the essence of every true spiritual teaching. Be grateful that
your suffering has taken you to this realization: I don’t need to
suffer anymore.
Your teaching about "the power of now" seems so simple. Is
that really our primary spiritual task – to fully engage the present
moment?
Identification with thoughts and the emotions that go with those
thoughts creates a false mind-made sense of self, conditioned by the
past: the "little me" and its story. This false self is never happy
or fulfilled for long. Its normal state is one of unease, fear,
insufficiency, and nonfulfillment. It says it looks for happiness,
and yet it continuously creates conflict and unhappiness. In fact,
it needs conflict and "enemies" to sustain the sense of separateness
that ensures its continued survival. Look at all the conflict
between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies,
because they provide the sense of separateness on which their
collective egoic identity depends. The false self lives mainly
through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main
preoccupation. The present moment, at best, is a means to an end, a
stepping stone to the future, because the future promises
fulfillment, the future promises salvation in one form or another.
The only problem is the future never comes. Life is always now.
Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it’s
always now. It’s all there is. And if you continuously miss the now
– resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a
means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are
stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations,
judgments – the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be
"yourself." And so you are disconnected from the fullness of life
that is the “suchness” of this moment. When you are out of alignment
with what is, you are out of alignment with life. You are struggling
to reach a point in the future where there is greater security,
aliveness, abundance, love, joy ... unaware that those things make
up the essence of who you are already. All that is required of you
to have access to that essence is to make the present moment into
your friend. And you may realize that most of your life you made the
present moment into an enemy. You didn’t say “yes” to it, didn’t
embrace it. You were out of alignment with the now, and so life
became a struggle. It seemed so normal, because everyone around you
lived in the same way. The amazing thing is: Life, the great
intelligence that pervades the entire cosmos, becomes supportive
when you say “yes” to it. Where is life? Here. Now. The “isness” of
this moment. The now seems so small at first, a little segment
between past and future, and yet all of life’s power is concealed
within it. When there is spiritual awakening, you awaken into the
fullness, the aliveness, and also the sacredness of now. You were
absent, asleep, and now you are present, awake. The secret of
awakening is to unconditionally accept this moment as it is. Some
people do it because they can no longer stand the suffering that
comes with nonacceptance of the isness of this moment. They are
almost forced into awakening. Others have suffered enough and are
ready to voluntarily embrace the now. When you become present in
this way, the judgments, labels, and concepts of your mind are no
longer all that important, as a greater intelligence is now
operating in and through you. And yet the mind can then be used very
effectively and creatively when needed.
Now the question may arise: Would there be anything left to strive
for when you are so present in the now? Wouldn’t you become passive
in that state? Many meaningless activities may fall away, but the
state of presence is the only state in which creative energy is
available to you. When your fulfillment and sense of self are no
longer dependent on the future outcome, joy flows into whatever you
do. You do what you do because the action itself is fulfilling.
Whatever you do or create in that state is of high quality. This is
because it is not a means to and end, and so a loving care flows
into your doing.
Being "in the present" sounds so obvious, and yet is quite
hard to sustain. Do you have any practical tips for people for
maintaining awareness of the present moment?
Although the old consciousness or rather unconsciousness still has
considerable momentum and to a large extent still runs this world,
the new awakened consciousness – presence – has already began to
emerge in many human beings. In my book The Power of Now, I mention
ways in which you can maintain present moment awareness, but the
main thing is to allow this new state of consciousness to emerge
rather then believe that you have to try hard to make it happen. How
do you allow it to emerge? Simply by allowing this moment to be as
it is. This means to relinquish inner resistance to what is – the
suchness of now. This allows life to unfold beautifully. There is no
greater spiritual practice than this.
On your video The Flowering of Human Consciousness, you talk
about a "new" consciousness that is emerging in our time. What do
you mean? Hasn’t the present moment always been available to genuine
seekers? What’s new about our current time in history? Are you
pointing to a certain evolutionary process – an acceleration in
human spiritual development?
Yes, the present moment has always been available to spiritual
seekers, but as long as you are seeking you are not available to the
present moment. "Seeking" implies that you are looking to the future
for some answer, or for some achievement, spiritual or otherwise.
Everybody is in the seeking mode, seeking to add something to who
they are, whether it be money, relationships, possessions,
knowledge, status – or spiritual attainment. "Seeking" means you
need more time, more future, more of this or that. And there is
nothing wrong with it. All that has its place in this world. To make
money, to gather knowledge, to learn a new skill, to explore new
territory, even to get from A to B – for all these things you need
time. For almost everything you need time, except for one thing: to
embrace the present moment. You need no time to open yourself to the
power of now and so awaken to who you are beyond name and form and
realize that in the depth of your being, you are already complete,
whole, one with the timeless essence of all life. For that you not
only need no time, but time is the obstacle to that realization,
seeking is the obstacle, needing to add something to who you are is
the obstacle. The story of your life, how it all unfolds, whether
you succeed or fail in this world...Yes, it matters, yes, it’s
important – relatively, not absolutely. Only one thing is of
absolute importance and this is it. If you miss it, you miss the
deeper purpose of your life, which I call the flowering of human
consciousness. And ultimately nothing else will satisfy you.
Some of the first human beings in whom the new consciousness emerged
fully became the great teachers of humanity, such as Buddha, Lao
Tzu, or Jesus, although their teachings were greatly misunderstood,
especially when they turned into organized religion. They were the
first manifestations of the flowering of human consciousness. Later
others appeared, some of whom became famous and respected teachers,
whereas others probably remained relatively unknown or perhaps even
completely unrecognized. On the periphery of the established
religions, from time to time certain movements appeared through
which the new consciousness manifested. This enabled a number of
individuals within those movements to awaken spiritually. Such
movements, in Christianity, were Gnosticism and medieval mysticism;
in Buddhism, Zen; in Islam, the Sufi movement; in Hinduism, the
teachings called Advaita Vedanta.
But those men and women who awakened fully were always few and far
between – rare flowerings of consciousness. Until fairly recently,
there was not yet a need for large numbers of human beings to
awaken. For the first time in human history, a large-scale
transformation of consciousness has now become a necessity if
humanity is to survive. Science and technology have amplified the
effects of the dysfunction of the human mind in its unawakened state
to such a degree that humanity, and probably the planet, would not
survive for another hundred years if human consciousness remains
unchanged. As I said earlier, evolution usually occurs in response
to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis
situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in
the awakening process of our species.
This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not
within the confines of the established religions, but outside of
those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the
existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of
those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief
systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation
on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival.
How much time and effort is required to realize "the power of
now?" Can this really occur in an instant or is this the work of a
lifetime?
The power of now can only be realized now. It requires no time and
effort. Effort means you’re trying hard to get somewhere, and so you
are not present, welcoming this moment as it is.
Whereas it requires no time to awaken – you can only awaken now – it
does take time before you can stay awake in all situations. Often
you may find yourself being pulled back into old conditioned
reactive patterns, particularly when faced with the challenges of
daily living and of relationships. You lose the witnessing presence
and become identified again with the "voice in the head," the
continuous stream of thoughts, with its labels, judgments and
opinions. You no longer know that they are only labels, judgments,
and mental positions (opinions) – but completely believe in them.
And so you create conflict. And then you suffer. And that suffering
wakes you up again. Until presence becomes your predominant state,
you may find yourself moving back and forth for a while between the
old consciousness and the new, between mind identification and
presence. "How long is it going to take?" is not a good question to
ask. It makes you lose the now.
How would you recommend that people listen and watch "The
Power of Now" teaching series in order to get the most out of the
teachings? In your opinion, why are audio and video teaching tapes
such a powerful way for people to learn?
If at all possible, you should not be engaged in other activity
while you are listening or watching so that you can give your
complete attention not only to the words but also to the silent
spaces between the words. You will most likely learn many helpful
facts about the emerging state of presence as well as the obstacles
you are most likely to encounter. But this is only the secondary
function of these tapes. Their primary purpose is not to convey
information, but to help you access the state of presence as you
listen. As in all true spiritual teachings, the significance of the
words that are being spoken goes far beyond their informational
content. Words that arise spontaneously out of the state of presence
are charged with spiritual power: the power to awaken. All that is
required of you is to be in a state of attentive listening. Don’t
just listen with the head. Listen with your entire body, so to
speak. Feel the aliveness, the animating presence, throughout the
body as you listen.
I recommend that you listen and/or watch these tapes over and over.
Each time you listen, it will feel as if you were listening for the
first time. Each time you listen, you will grow in presence. But do
not listen compulsively. Allow a gap of at least two or three days,
and ideally more, before you listen to the same tape again. Each
time after you finish listening, just sit in silence for a few
minutes.
Enjoy the greatest adventure a human being can be engaged in: to be
part of the emergence of a new consciousness.
Source:
Sounds True Publishing Company
