Are You Awake?

Are You Awake? 

Let us analyze more deeply the implication of the word "spiritual". Whatever be the nature of anyone's spiritual experience or consciousness, trace it to an analytical terminus and it will be discovered that it is his mind that tells him of it and it is his mind that enables him to know it as existent in his life. Now the mind can only make us aware of anything---whether it be a tiny fly or a great God---by entertaining the thought of it. Therefore whatever is known in any way is known ultimately as a thought. Spiritual experiences and spiritual consciousness are no exception to this universal rule. They too are really nothing more than thoughts, however unusual in character they might otherwise be. Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental. All conscious life is thought-life. The most "spiritual" man lives in thoughts as much as the most materialistic man. He cannot do otherwise and remain awake///

Now for those who are awake it goes beyond  thought. Zen is very simple: You don't rely on thought anymore; you go beyond thinking. Then I realized that's what had happened. All that unhappy, repetitive thinking wasn't there anymore.  

 

O Talks to Eckhart Tolle

 

The remarkable spiritual teacher whose new book O calls the most important she's ever chosen for her book club explains how to free yourself from the tyranny of the past, live more fully in the present, and come to the calm, joyful place where intuition, creativity, and wisdom live and breathe. 

When I interviewed Meg Ryan eight years ago, she told me about The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, by Eckhart Tolle. It's one of the most transformative books I've ever read; I keep a copy with me wherever I go, flipping through its highlighted pages time and time again. For anyone seeking to lead a more connected, vibrant life, The Power of Now is essential reading, and Eckhart's follow-up books-Stillness Speaks and A New Earth-explain the core principle that has resonated so deeply with me and many others: The only moment we ever really have is this one. Happiness isn't in the future or the past but in mindful awareness of the present.

Eckhart should know. By 29 the German-born author had become an eminent research scholar in comparative literature at the University of Cambridge in England, but success wasn't enough to halt his descent into a depression so severe that he considered ending his life. In what could have been his final hour, Eckhart stumbled upon an insight that started him on the path to becoming a spiritual teacher: We are not our thoughts. The very fact that we can objectively observe our thinking, he reasoned, suggests that the constant and often negative dialogue in our heads is separate from who we really are. Realizing this can bring us closer to the kind of fearlessness and peace that Eckhart has experienced since his dark night of the soul. 

It was one of the great joys of my career to talk to Eckhart on Oprah Radio on XM Satellite Radio as part of my Soul Series. He gave a kind of course on conscious living: trading our autopilot existence for intentional awareness; recognizing how we create our own suffering through obsessing over our past history; and learning how to be present, for ourselves and for the people around us, in a compassionate, nonjudgmental way. His encouraging inspiration has allowed me and many other people to see the possibility of an awakened consciousness. I think he is a prophet for our time.

O: In the beginning of The Power of Now, you describe how, at 29 years old and considering suicide, you thought, "I cannot live with myself any longer.... Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe...only one of them is real." I love this because it's the first time I thought, When I say I'm going to tell myself something, who is the "I" and who is the "self" I'm telling? That's the fundamental question, isn't it? 

ECKHART: That's right. Most people are not aware that they have a little man or woman in their heads that keeps talking and talking and whom they are completely identified with. In my case, and in many people's cases, the voice in the head is a predominantly unhappy one, so there's an enormous amount of negativity that is continuously generated by this unconscious internal dialogue. 

O: What happened that enabled you to realize this? 

ECKHART: One night, at the moment you were referring to, a separation occurred between the voice that was the incessant stream of thinking and the sense of self that identified with that voice, and a deeper sense of self that I later recognized as consciousness itself, rather than something that consciousness had become through thinking. 

O: When you realized that the voice in your head was separate from the awareness, did it blow your mind? 

ECKHART: Yes, it did. I didn't understand it; I just realized the next day that I was suddenly at peace. There was a deep sense of inner calm, although externally nothing had changed, so I knew something drastic had happened. A while after this transformation, I was talking to a Buddhist monk who said that Zen is very simple: You don't rely on thought anymore; you go beyond thinking. Then I realized that's what had happened. All that unhappy, repetitive thinking wasn't there anymore. 

O: Where does our identification with these thoughts and this voice in our heads come from? 

ECKHART: That identification that is derived from our thinking-which includes all of one's memories, one's conditioning, and one's sense of self-is a conceptual one that is derived from the past. It's essential for people to recognize that this voice is going on inside them incessantly, and it's always a breakthrough when people realize, "Here are all my habitual, repetitive, negative thoughts, and here I am, knowing that these thoughts are going through my head." The identification is suddenly broken. That, for many people, is the first real spiritual breakthrough. 

O: How is it spiritual? 

ECKHART: I see it as not believing in this or that, but as stepping out of identification with a stream of thinking. You suddenly find there's another dimension deeper than thought inside you. 

O: And what is that? 

ECKHART: I call it stillness. It's an aware presence, nothing to do with past or future. We can also call it waking up. That's why many spiritual traditions use the term awakening. You wake up out of this dream of thinking. You become present.

O: Your book Stillness Speaks is all about that awareness. I love this line: "When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice-the thinker-but the one who is aware of it." 

ECKHART: That's right. The stream of thinking is connected with the past. All your memories, reactive patterns, old emotions, and so on, they're all part of that, but it is not who you are. That's an amazing realization. Of course, the mind may then say, "Well then, who am I?" 

O: That's the big question. So what is the answer? 

ECKHART: The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one. You are the consciousness out of which everything comes; every thought comes out of that consciousness, and every thought disappears back into it. You are a conscious, aware space, and all your sense perceptions, thinking, and emotions come and go in that aware space.

O: You've often characterized thinking as a terrible affliction, even a disease, that is the greatest barrier to the power of now. But isn't to think to be human? Isn't that how we differ from other animals? 

ECKHART: Yes, and thinking can be a powerful and wonderful tool. It only becomes an affliction if we derive our sense of who we are from this dream of thought. In that case, you're continuously telling yourself what I call "the story of me." For many people, it's an unhappy story, so they're always dwelling on the past. That's a dysfunctional and unhappy state. 

Read more: https://www.oprah.com/spirit/oprah-talks-to-eckhart-tolle/all#ixzz6C5NIOAi7