How To Love Without Losing Yourself | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

There are, what is conventionally called love can be many different things, and there are many different levels to it. Some people call it love when they fall into, fall in love with someone, which is a clinging, a needing, that is partly usually physical, emotional, needing of the other, and that's called love, but that is a lower manifestation of what is love and can easily turn into its opposite from one moment to the next, as many people have experienced, how the person that you've fallen in love with, you hate a few days later, a few weeks later, suddenly love, hate are so closely related, the opposites in that kind of love, but the love for your children is a different matter. There's a strong emotional bond with your children, and it can probably, I haven't experienced a mother's love, but probably I can understand that you might get a sense of losing yourself in the other, and that is that strong emotional bond, and then there's another higher manifestation of love that may already be also part of your emotional bond, but probably a mixture of emotion plus something else, but that something else is spiritual love, and in some languages, there's completely different words for different kinds of love. For example, in Greek, there was eros, eros is one kind of love, agape is another kind of love. What I'm talking about here now is agape is the love of the other because it comes from knowing who or what you are and recognizing yourself in the other, and that is what we call the spiritual love, and that's the direction in which you are moving, so the foundation for that is not, I would say, as it's conventionally called, loving yourself. That's a strange thing. Now, many people, quite a few, hate themselves more than they love themselves. Now, it's better, of course, to love yourself than to hate yourself. It's something that people who practice positive thinking and want to shift negative mind patterns may put notices up throughout their house with little messages to themselves, which might say, I completely accept and love myself. Well, I'm sure that's better than I completely hate myself, much better, but there's still a duality there, and it's a very strange thing. Who is loving whom? I love myself. Who are you, and who is that self that you love? People who say, I love myself, don't think about it, what that really means, and there's a little bit of a duality there. I love myself, so there must be two of me. There's the I that does the loving, and there's the myself that's being loved. Hmm, strange, really weird. And then, as you begin to awaken spiritually, awaken to the presence, then what gradually comes to an end is having a relationship with yourself until that happens, people have a relationship with themselves, which is sometimes even manifests as dialogues they have in their head. One part of you talks to another part of you. You are talking to yourself. Now, you really should make an effort to do better. I know you can do better. And the other part of it is, well, I've done my best, but what else can I do than do my best? Then, no, that wasn't your best. You should have done, remember the voice of your mother, and then you hear the voice of your mother in the background. You should really, should be doing better. Why do you mess up your whole life? You're just like your dad. That was my mom when I gave up my academic career. Oh, that's your dad in there. You have a relationship with yourself. Very strange. It's kind of split that happens. And that's a part of a normal state of consciousness. Everybody, unless they are awakened or at least awakening, in which case that begins to recede, but everybody else, they have a relationship with themselves, which may be sometimes good, sometimes bad, uneasy. They're proud of themselves, and then they're ashamed, and then they call themselves a loser, or somebody else calls them a loser, and they believe it, or all kinds of weird things, narratives, and so on. And as you awaken spiritually, what gradually comes to an end is having a relationship with yourself. So what is that replaced with? When you no longer have a relationship with yourself, you are yourself. I am. There's no longer two of you here. There's just one. And that happens when you no longer live through a narrative in your head that creates two of you, sometimes even more than two. You have a whole crowd in there sometimes. And then you have various sub-personalities that are just lurking in the background, waiting to get triggered. So when you no longer have a relationship with yourself, that is the beginning of the end of living through a conceptual identity in your head. You have a certain set of opinions about who you are, which you've adopted from what other people, society tells you who you are, or you're reacting against what society tells you about yourself, and you adopt the completely opposite position. For example, society might tell you that you haven't achieved anything, but you believe that you haven't done anything because the world is not worthy of you. Because you could write the greatest book ever written, but what's the point? The world is crazy anyway. I can't be bothered. If I wrote a book, it would be the greatest ever. You can have all kinds of ideas about yourself, whether you adopt society's view of who you are, or you adopt a reactive position against it, it doesn't matter. When you transcend that, you again, you just are yourself. You no longer live through an opinion in your head about who you are, because who you are is the presence. And that presence, that you recognize in yourself as your essence, and when I talk about it, it's always a duality. It's not that you recognize the presence, it's the presence recognizes itself. You are, you recognize. That's what arises. And then you look at the other. It might be your child. And then you have two things happening simultaneously. One is the emotional bond that you feel with people close to you, such as your children, or other people that are very close to you. You feel an emotional bond, an emotional connection. But in addition, and more fundamentally, there is a recognition in you of the presence, or the essence of the other, and that's not emotional. To recognize the essence of the other, but you can only recognize it through your own essence, the essence that you are. And then you look at the other, and you can sense beyond the personality, they are consciousness. And you can look into their eyes, and no matter what behavior they manifest as personalities, you kind of sense something that is beyond that. And what you recognize then in the other is yourself, because it is the consciousness that you both share is the one consciousness. And to recognize the consciousness of the other as your consciousness, as one with your consciousness, that is spiritual love. And there you don't lose yourself. You have found yourself. And so you don't lose yourself in the other anymore. If there's only emotion, then you could lose yourself in the other. But the emotional bond, and then the recognition of the other as yourself happens with anyone. You have the same love for somebody you meet casually somewhere for a few minutes as to a close family member. But with a close family member, you have the additional emotional bond. But the spiritual love does not single out one or two people as special. The specialness comes in on the emotional level, and that's fine. So that's gradually you will... There will be a shift. The emotion will still be there, but there's an underlying recognition of the other because you've recognized who or what you are in your essence. And there's no longer... Then emotion is fine. There's no loss of self in it anymore because you know who you are or what you are. So gradually that dimension, because I can predict because you're here, that gradually that dimension will come more and more into the relationship with your child, children? Yeah. And it doesn't do away with the emotion, but something deeper comes in. And that transcends the emotion. Transcend doesn't mean that it excludes it or it comes to an end. Transcend means it contains it, but it is much faster.