The Mind's Limitation in Understanding Awareness | Eckhart Tolle

I wrote 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, Power Now. And during that there was a cathartic release. I was in the fetal position on the floor crying, frankly, and there was an utter and complete surrender. This is 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 over me, and there was complete silence. And then the strangest thing started happening. 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 that 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. And so I was sort of interested, because in your book you talked about this 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, it seems that what your mind is trying to do is to understand awareness, and you can't really. 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 or thought is not it. And that's why the Tao Te Ching starts with the line, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. So all that language can do is use pointers to point you in the direction of awareness, or language can point out the obstacles, the likely or possible obstacles in yourself to a state of awareness. So there are these two kinds of pointers. One is the pointers to the moon, awareness being the moon. So the words, there's only this moment, and so on. It all points to the same. Whatever I talk about is really they're all 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. 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 I-ness, of identity. Everybody has the sense of him or herself as a, hard to describe, the sense of I. Now usually the sense of I is mixed up with certain mind movements, thought patterns, which you could also call stories, the thought 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're 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 I is the awareness that got mixed up with the story or 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 substance behind it and in it is the consciousness. It's not the story. That's where the sense of the preciousness that everybody feels that I am, and where 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 feels that preciousness inside. Even people who are unhappy, they're still here. They haven't jumped off the bridge yet. They feel a preciousness still inside, hiding somewhere. Now that preciousness is consciousness itself. It's not your story. Now that consciousness is not personal. It really only becomes personal when it gets mixed up with memories and a story or expectations and memories. So what happened to you then was the disentanglement happened 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 and timeless. So that's a beautiful thing. Now, the fact that mind activity still continues means that occasionally the mind is wondering 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. The mind will 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 of what awareness is all about. The mind would like that. But there is 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 understand a lot more about the things of this world. There's many things that you can still study. Everybody can. You can, there are 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 self-realization is concerned, there's no more. There may be a deepening or the aware state may express itself more fully through your mind. Your mind may have, your mind becoming the servant of awareness can take a good 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 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 by perhaps 80%. In other words, I was spending long stretches to talk from the point of the external point of view of time. I was spending long stretches in the timeless paradox here because you have the outer and the inner. 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. All I knew was there was a deep sense of peace and aliveness. I was looking through, perceiving things through the sense of peace and aliveness so that even the traffic became peaceful and there was nothing wrong with the traffic or whatever. 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 bedsitter, where you have a little stove in a corner and then you have your bed and you have a seating area and then you share the bathroom with eight or nine people in different rooms. 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. Even waiting for the bathroom wasn't that problematic anymore except occasionally I had developed constipation because of the waiting, but that in itself wasn't a problem either. I had complained about having to go by tube or underground which is the subway in London. It can be very unpleasant at times. There were blissful states travelling in the subway, waiting for the train, but it wasn't in the world of form. The form was perceived through the awareness, but understanding, very little. All I could have said, suddenly I'm so peaceful I don't know what happened. That was all. That was my limit for two years approximately. That was the limit of my understanding. That's how it is. What does take perhaps time from our external viewpoint is the alignment of your mind with the aware state and then gradually it can flow into the mind structures and you can speak about opening yourself up to awareness and many other things. Pointers will arise that 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. The one thing that you won't get much further in is the conceptual understanding of awareness itself. And that's the answer.