Eckhart Tolle: The Dark Night of the Soul

I brought you a note in which I explained a dark night of the soul experience that I'd had a number of years ago in which really culminated in a catastrophic breakdown of sorts for me maybe sort of similar to what I read in your book the power of now and during that there was a cathartic release I was in the fetal position on the floor crying frankly and there was a cutter and complete surrender it's a sort of a humbling story after that happened I was sitting in an empty room in a chair and there was this unbelievable post cathartic stillness that took him took over me and there was complete silence and then the strangest things started happening early I began witnessing my thoughts and as I witnessed my thoughts I had this unbelievably simple awareness that if I'm witnessing my thoughts what am i and that completely changed my life I can't even begin to tell you what happened after after awareness happened and then one thing led to another and then there was a point where I started realizing that what I am I couldn't find a boundary for okay and so I was sort of interested because in your book you talked about this in the in the power of now about the dark night of the soul experience but I'm sort of wondering about your journey from there through the process of realizing that this awareness that I am is not personal it's intimate but it's not personal and that seems to be the toughest part of it all to really get a handle on so if you could walk me through that I would appreciate it it seems that I will comment but the most important thing I think is the your it seems that what your mind is trying to do is to understand awareness and you can't really be the mind can't so you cannot really come to a satisfying conclusion about the nature of awareness it's only awareness itself really in awareness awareness is known but awareness as an object for thought is not it and that's why the doubting starts with inline the DAO that can be spoken of is not the true town so all that language can do is use pointers to point you in the direction of awareness all language can point out the obstacles deep likely or possible obstacles in yourself to the state of awareness so that these two kinds of pointers one is points the pointers to the moon awareness being the moon so the the word says there's only this moment and so on it all it all points to the same level whatever I talked about it's really the old pointers they're either pointers towards awareness or they are pointers that look at the obstacles that may arise in yourself in a human being so that you recognize them when they happen so that the obstacles in the form of certain mind patterns don't take you over and obscure the arising awareness but once awareness has arisen the mind is not useful anymore and you don't need further pointers in order to the mind will continue wanting to understand a bit more about awareness but really this is where conceptual understanding comes to an end and I can call awareness personal and I can call it impersonal it's not personal in the usual sense everybody has a certain sense of I'll just say a few words about it but we're not trying to understand awareness we can't everybody has a sense of honest of identity everybody has this sense of him or herself as a hard to describe this the sense of I know usually the sense of I is mixed up with certain mind movements thought patterns which you could also call stories they saw patterns that hang together as a story and so your sense of I gets mixed up with a story thoughts in your mind and that is called the personal sense of self but the story really is nothing they just thought forms temporary thought forms the real sense of I is the awareness inside the thought forms without which the thought forms could not even be there so the true sense of offer of I is the awareness that got mixed up with the story of the thoughts so most people have a sense of identity that is of that mixed kind where consciousness or awareness has become entangled in thinking and then people only know themselves through thinking they believe they are what their mind tells them they are and their memories and so on and that's called the personal sense of self but even there the real the substance behind it and in it is the consciousness it's not the story it's where the sense of the preciousness that everybody feels that I am and when the mind says I don't want to lose that I don't want to die this is what people are scared of they might lose themselves they might lose that preciousness everybody deep down on the fieldset preciousness inside even people who are unhappy still they're still here they haven't jumped off the bridge yet they feel a preciousness still inside hiding somewhere and that not that preciousness is consciousness itself it's not your story know that consciousness is not personal it really only becomes personal when it gets mixed up with memories into story or expectations and memories so if you're dissing what happened to you then what's the disentanglement happens spontaneously and so there was the realization of that which is there when consciousness is no longer entangled in form because the consciousness is the formless it's the unconditioned consciousness so that is called then self-realization in some traditions or it's called awakening in other traditions whatever you call it that's the realization of the formless essence of who you are and so the mind of course continues but there's no longer investment in it some consciousness still flows into mind activity but the important thing is there is no longer a self in the mind activity and so because the self is realized as essentially formless in timeless so that's a beautiful thing now the fact that mind activity still continues means that occasionally the mind is wandering about consciousness and awareness and so the mind needs to then see that it is futile and since there's no self in it anymore it won't be too difficult to the mind we'll just needs to be told that it cannot you cannot come to any kind of satisfying or satisfactory conclusion about the nature of awareness or further conceptual understanding the boat awareness is all about the mind would like that but there's a vastness in awareness and awareness begins to operate through your mind without needing your mind to understand more about it because that's what the mind always says I need to understand more you don't you can't understand a lot more about the things of this world there's many things that you can still study everybody can you can there many books you can still read things you can still learn there's always the possibility of acquiring more in this world it's fine nothing wrong with that but as far as a ssin is concerned there's no more there may be a deepening or the the aware state may express itself more and more fully through your mind and your mind may have the your mind becoming the servant of awareness can take a bit adjustment from a self-serving mind to becoming aligned with the aware state may take a while I'm speaking from my own experience not that I ever could explain awareness you can't explain emptiness but the ability to to say things to point to give pointers to other people the ability to understand even what had happened to me when the shift happened that took several years to understand for example to understand that my mind had mind activity had become reduced after the shift but by perhaps 80% in other words I was spending long stretches to talk on the point of the external point of view of time I was spending long stretches in the timeless calm paradox here because you have the outer and the inner and this was the reason why I felt so peaceful but I didn't know that my mind wasn't saying much anymore because it wasn't saying I'm not saying much and all I knew it was there was a deep sense of peace and aliveness and I was looking through Percy leaving things through the sense of peace and aliveness so that even the traffic became peaceful there was nothing wrong with the traffic and there was or whatever and things that before I had resented having to live in I had little money so living in a little room which in England is called a bed sitter well you have a little stove in a corner and then you have your bed and you have a seating area and then you say the bathroom is I think eight or nine people in different rooms and so before I didn't like where I was and suddenly it was great it was fine because there was this beautiful light shining through the window the little objects on the table were full of aliveness and even waiting for the bathroom wasn't that problematic anymore except occasionally I had ended I've developed constipation because of the waiting but that in itself wasn't a problem either it was the same city or I had complained about going take having to go by tube or underground which is the subway in London can be very unpleasant at times and okay there were blissful states travelling in the subway waiting for the Train but it all it wasn't in the world of the world of form it was especially the form was perceived through the awareness but understanding very little all I could have said I suddenly I'm so peaceful I don't know what happened that was all that was my limit of for two years approximately there was the limit of my understanding and so that's how it is so what does taked then perhaps time from our external viewpoint is the alignment of your mind with the way estate and then gradually it can flow into the mine structures and you can speak about opening yourself up to awareness and many other things you can have pointers will arise it may be helpful for others you may write a book but not too soon it's often the case that people write books too soon so just let it mature and the only the one thing that you won't get much further in this conceptual understanding of awareness itself and that's the answer [Laughter] you

Channel: stillnessspeaksvideo

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Keywords: eckhart tolle, chris hebard, dark night of the soul

Id: 9mpybTfz6rU

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2016