Episode 45 - Eckhart Tolle – Part 1: Evolutionary Perspective on The Power of Now, leading to A New Earth

Transcript

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[musical interlude]

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning—a dia (flow) of logos (meaning)--beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in “Living Dialogues”.

Welcome to “Living Dialogues”. I'm your host, Duncan Campbell. With me for this particular Dialogue, I'm truly delighted to have Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.” Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany where he spent the first 13 years of his life. After graduating from the University of London, he was a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University.

When he was 29, a profound spiritual transformation virtually dissolved his old identity and radically changed the course of his life. The next few years of his life were devoted to understanding, integrating, and deepening that transformation which marked the beginning of an intense inward journey which has resulted now in over a decade of teaching throughout the world.

Eckhart is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition. In his teachings, he conveys a simple yet profound message with the timeless and uncomplicated clarity of the ancient spiritual masters. “There is a way out of suffering, indeed through suffering and into peace.” Eckhart is currently traveling extensively, taking his teachings and his presence throughout the world. He has lived in Vancouver, Canada since 1996.

So, Eckhart, it's a true delight to have you here on the studio participating with me in “Living Dialogues.”

Eckhart Tolle: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Duncan Campbell: I had the pleasure yesterday--a great pleasure, in fact--to be in present with several hundred people here in Boulder, Colorado spending an afternoon together with you. One of the things that I think would be most interesting for our audience to begin with is to describe how that profound transformation occurred to you when you were about 29 years old. What is that--now about 24 years ago--and in particular, how in the years preceding that, you were suffering from acute and, in fact, deep anxiety even suicidal despair.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes, that’s right. The despair started even in childhood when I quite often contemplated the idea of suicide living in a dysfunctional family environment. Then, it intensified in my 20’s and I became very successful in the academic world and the motivating force behind that success really was anxiety and fear. So it made me worked very hard, so I got the highest grades at London University until I got into Cambridge. I got the scholarship there doing research and started doing teaching there also and becoming increasingly unhappy, sometimes deeply depressed for weeks at a time in very extreme anxiety.

That culminated one night, I woke up in the middle of the night as I had done before many times, but the anxiety was more intense that night. I woke up, the fear, that sense of dread was almost unbearable and something, a thought suddenly came into my mind. That thought was I cannot live with myself any longer. That thought repeated itself many times, I can't live with myself any longer.

After repeating itself a few times, suddenly, there was a kind of stepping back from that thought, so to speak, and I looked at the thought and the structure of that sentence “I cannot live with myself.” I said, “This is very strange.” If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me. Are there two, am I one? There's a self and there's an I and the I cannot live with that self, and that was an amazing thought--but looking at that thought and seeing the peculiar nature of that thought, somehow made my mind stop.

At that point, I felt myself being drawn into a kind of void or emptiness and not understanding any of that. There was a disassociation of I and self which I didn’t understand at that point. Only much later did I understand what happened that night. The I, the consciousness that I am disidentified from the self structure of the mind. The mind made sense of self with its unhappy story and it's accumulation of unhappiness. There was an immediate seeing into the ultimately fictitious nature of that mind made sense of self, that was the self that I couldn't live with.

So when that disassociation happened, suddenly, the self that I couldn't live with collapsed and what was left was simply a sense being this of presence which is the I that has nothing to do with past. That is the eternal presence, that is the essence of every human being and that was left when the form of the I, the mind-made I collapsed that night. The next morning I woke up, and the first thing I noticed was, when I looked around the room, everything seemed fresh and alive. All the old familiar objects had an intense aliveness to them and I felt an incredible sense of peace and aliveness within.

I walked out of the house, I walked through the streets, and again, all the sense perceptions that happened to me that morning happened within a field of great peace and stillness. All I knew at that point was I'm totally at peace now, I'd no idea what happened. What had happened to me that it took me several years to understand what had happened that night.

Only later did I understand that the way in which then I began to perceive the world and interact with the world was no longer through the conditioned mind but through an inner stillness in which the sense perceptions happened. They were not labeled, not interpreted as they happened. They were just allowed to be. I also realized only much later that the reason for that peace was that my thought activity had been reduced by--it's hard to quantify but--I'd say about 80%. So I did a lot less thinking than I used to do. [laughs]

Duncan Campbell: It's interesting, too, because you had been driven, as you said, by the fear and anxiety to become such an accomplished thinker as well as an obsessive thinker in your time in university.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes, and living in an environment that is totally focused on thought.

Duncan Campbell: In fact, in your remarks yesterday, you were saying that the egoic structure of the sense of self and identifying with the content begins at a primitive level sometimes with accumulating possessions. It's what the Tibetan Trungpa Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa used to call “The Three Lords of Materialism”, that you begin with material materialism and progress to psychological materialism and then to spiritual materialism.

In that first early stage, you might identify with your possessions. If you have a Lexus or if you're a teenager, you have Varnay sunglasses or the right kind of tennis shoes. This provides a sense of stability and security and belongingness in a universe that often fills alienated and alienating. As you become more sophisticated, you’ll look for affirmation and confirmation from the world in other ways.

In that academic context, you're ability to think powerfully and to have the content of your mind recognized was apparently on the surface, very reassuring and confirming and it was only because of the intensity of this underlying suffering that you called “the pain body”. As you put it very beautifully, you were literally driven out of your mind by this psychic pain that was created by the tension between trying to maintain the mask of the fictional self in the face of the immensity of your real being which you had not even suspected at that point.

Eckhart Tolle: Yes, that’s right. So my egoic identity will that around the accumulated knowledge. I hadn’t accumulated possessions, I didn’t have that much physical strength or beauty so I had to find an identity somewhere. That identity then was in the realm of thought and accumulated knowledge so I built a strong egoic identity around that. In fact, it became very strong, I lived in continuous unease as all strong egos do and with the continuous undercurrent of fear, intense fear.

So that was there until I couldn't stand it anymore. As I put it, it drove me out of my mind. This suffering that was generated by living a fiction ultimately by the falseness of it all. I didn’t know it at the time, that would [xx] intense suffering of not being really myself, that self of complete incompleteness of lack of fear.

Duncan Campbell: As you put it yesterday, one way of looking at that sense of incompleteness is that the egoic structure itself, since it's not rooted in any ground of being but it's like what we might call like “epiphenomenon”, it is constantly in fear of its life. It's literally running scared at all times and in its cunningness, reinterprets this fear and drivenness as a kind of heroic ambition that learning more or accumulating more or expressing itself and manifesting more is its heroic destiny in the world and to not meet that challenge. So manifestation would be cowardly.

You point out very beautifully in your book that indeed this is really topsy-turvy. That what ego perceives as strength is, in fact, weakness and fear in what our culture as an expression of egoic formation perceives as strength is, in fact, weakness and vulnerability, ultimately, is the true invulnerability. So perhaps, you could elaborate on that which you expressed very beautifully in your book, “The Power of Now.”

Eckhart Tolle: Yes. The keyword that you mentioned here, the body in which the ego functions, is the need for more to add more to the insufficient, seemingly incomplete sense of self so it needs to add more content, more to identify with, more experiences. At first, it may be the search for material possessions so you can identify with that. You can add that content to the mind-made self and say, “That is me. I feel that is me.”

Maybe, a search for adding knowledge as I did and so grow in knowledge and the hope in the misguided belief that by acquiring more knowledge, you will eventually acquire an enhanced stronger for that sense of who you are, a sense of self. Then comes, perhaps you go beyond that also, and then they may become a spiritual search. You may have gone beyond identification with material possessions.

You may have gone beyond identifications with me as a great intellect or whatever it might be and then you embark on the spiritual search and not infrequently, they are also the old egoic mindset even when you embark on the spiritual search, still operating and that manifest as the great need to achieve a more enlightened, and again, an enhanced fuller sense of who you are.

You might have an idea of perfection. You've read books in which they’d tell you that there is such a state as enlightenment or spiritual mastery and then that becomes the egoic goal. It isn’t always reaching out into future, it's an attempt to find yourself in the future at some point through adding something through the content and, ultimately, the content of my mind, seeking to add something through the content because it's all these is really thought.

Even material possessions, they're only valuable because they become thought and identify with the thought that are the reflection of the material possessions. The knowledge of thought is all really thought, its mental content so there's the urge for greater and greater, to have more of that content, more of me. This search then flows also into the spiritual search. So many spiritual seekers don’t realize that the old mindset of needing to add more, perhaps the ultimate spiritual experience, perhaps on striving towards that. When I attained the ultimate spiritual experience, I will finally become fully myself.

You are looking for yourself not here, you'll then looking for yourself again in the future. So everybody is looking for themselves, those people who are running around the shopping malls, looking for new things to add in the hope that some added possession will make you feel a little bit better for a while. It does for the day or two, or going to workshops, hoping to add more experiences there.

Not that there's anything wrong with adding because we live here on the level of form, so it's a natural part of everybody’s life here to acquire occasionally, we go out and buy things. We acquire a new knowledge, we might travel and explore new territories. In that sense, we also add to the content of our experiences, nothing wrong with that, it's part of living here. It only becomes dysfunctional when it is self-seeking in this adding and which this, of course, is how most people still live.

It's not just a playful adding, the simply enjoyment of adding something and then, of course, losing something somewhere else because you cannot continuously add, life takes things away, too. It becomes dysfunctional when you are looking for yourself through the adding. So you're looking for yourself, an enhanced fuller identity through more content and more future and never find yourself there.

As old many spiritual seekers have reached the stage of frustration because they’ve been doing the meditations hoping to become a better meditator. They’ve gone to workshops, they’ve written the books and then they're still reaching out for more. So after 20 or 30 years of looking for that and they still haven’t found it, they become frustrated and sometimes a sense of almost hopelessness sets in with ever making it and that’s a wonderful point to reach, that hopelessness.

Hopelessness looks negative looking it from one perspective, but as that hopelessness sets in, it's the beginning of the collapse of psychological future. Beginning of that looks negative but hiding on the other side of hopelessness is the state in which you actually don’t need hope. What emerges now is the state of presence where you find yourself in the fullness of this moment which perhaps you'd been running away from all your life. Hoping to find a better moment, you find yourself in the only moment that there is ever which is this one, the only place where you can find yourself, the only thing that ever is in your life.

Whatever you do, think, feel, can only be now so the now is the only place where you can find yourself. So with the hopelessness, suddenly, you relinquish hope that the future is going to be better than this. Then, you can begin to enter the present moment and that’s an amazing realization that this, the essence of who you are, is also the essence of this moment. The only thing that never leaves you--and many people who have gone through so many changes in their lives that it's almost as if they’d had many incarnations even in this lifetime, yet, the only thing that didn’t ever change that it was always no, whatever you experience unfolded in that space, that is this moment.

So to become aware of not just what happens in the now, it is important to honor whatever arises in this moment, but the secret is as you honor and embrace the suchness of this moment, you also become aware beyond what happens in the moment, you become aware of this moment as the field in which it happens. You become aware of the now independent of what we could almost say of what is happening in the now and that is an enormous radical inner transformation.

That is the arising of a state of consciousness that I sometimes call “presence”, a sense of great spaciousness around things that happened. So you are, ultimately, that spaciousness and that is the secret of spiritual transformation, not adding more, realizing that you never need it to add more. You are already complete.

Now, in as that spaciousness, you're not complete on the level of content because you can always add more, there's always more to explore, more to do, more to learn, more to buy that you can never be complete. But in your essence, that is already that completeness. So you're now no longer seeking through future, so you become, from a spiritual seeker, you become a spiritual finder.

Or, as I put it last night in the talk, one way of putting it is you could say that it's fine to seek but you've been seeking in the wrong place. You've been seeking in and through future, why not seek for yourself because--ultimately, that’s what everybody is seeking--seek in the now. Become attentive to now, bring greater attention into now, and so that a depths now happens through the now because the surface [sp] of now may not be all that great nor that interesting.

But when you honor that totally, there's a depth to it that goes beyond what's happening in the now. I sometimes call it, there's a deep goodness in it that is nothing to do with the good and bad of our external world.

Duncan Campbell: And the fascinating thing about it from your own personal journey in how you explain this is that the path to the present and the path away from the future is often perhaps [xx] for most, if not all of us, through pain, through suffering. I recall, a great Buddhist teacher once been asked by a student, “Why did the Buddha call the first novel truth the “Truth of Suffering? Why is it noble?”

He replied, “Because without it, there's no doorway into liberation from the imprisonment of ego.” That’s why the first noble truth is called “suffering”. The second is discovering the source of suffering, the desire, and attachment, not desire but desire and attachment. Then the third noble truth being the possibility of liberation and the fourth being meditation or the practice to achieve liberation.

What I'm thinking of now is a poem recently translated by Coleman Barks of Rumi, talking about the role of grief. He says, and this is Rumi from the 13th century, “I have broken through to longing now, filled with the grief I have felt before but never like this. The center leads to love so opens to creation core. Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.”

“Hold on to your particular pain. That, too, can take you to God.” I have the sense that many people are going through this particular longing and grieving that maybe familiar but it's add a new level of intensity. As you've described, that the frustration of people in many countries around the world who have perhaps been many years on the so called “spiritual search” and our experience in a new kind of hopelessness, a level of despair that they’ve not experience before.

This may be the doorway to a collective awakening as you suggest in your book. This is not an isolated experience but there is apparently a kind of democratization of the mystical experience that traditionally has been isolated with the few people in different traditions such as Rumi in the Sufi Tradition, such as Jesus, such as Buddha, such as Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition and so on. But now, there seems to be a very wide experience of this and as a result, I'd like you to talk a little bit more about what you mean by the pain body?

Again, as you put it, because you had a particularly heavy karmic pain body, your particular pain was particular heavy, it drove you out of your mind. You talk about the pain body not as an individual experience only but as a kind of collective experience. So perhaps we could spend our time for the remainder of this first Dialogue, talking about the pain body and how are individual and collective experience is merging and mutually informing.

Eckhart Tolle: What I call pain body? Of course, like everything else, and language is a perspective on something [xx] adopt other perspectives. So nothing that we speak about is the ultimate truth, whatever language expresses is always a relative truth. Knowing that, we can talk about this particular perspective that I have on human pain. What I call pain body is the accumulation of emotional pain from the past, not only of one’s own personal past--and of course, there's an accumulation of pain from everybody’s childhood and [xx] life also--but also, pain that is part of collective human pain.

If you look at human history, you can see a very large part of human history is the history of self-inflicted suffering of humans inflicting dreadful suffering on each other, on themselves also, of course. Twentieth century was the supreme example of that, what I call “the collective madness” where I believe nobody knows the exact trigger but perhaps 100 million people were killed by other humans and this is the height of madness.

This has been going on, this magnified knowledge through science and technology, so it's the destructiveness of all of that. But yet, if this has been going on forever since recorded history and before that, I'm sure, so that incredible so much pain in human history collectively. I'm sure that pain gets genetically passed on, it's probably even build into the DNA, every DNA has a built-in pain. So every human being partakes of collective human emotional pain.

Now, most human beings don’t know that. They believe their own pain is a very personal matter. They don’t realize very often that the pain they carry inside, a lot of that is simply human pain. So what I call pain body is an accumulation, an energy field, a residue left by past pain, an emotional field of heaviness or turbulence or tightness and that leaves in the body as that heaviness, that tightness. The way I look on the pain body--and I believe it's a very useful perspective--is to say it's almost as if it were an entity, an independent--like a parasitic entity that lives in you. Don’t take it as the ultimate choice, it's just a useful perspective.

So that pain body lives in each human being, in some manifest, it manifest more strongly than in others. It is not always active, it has a dormant stage and it has an active stage. So at times, the pain body, you can hardly feel it, or it may just be in the background. Then something happens, a trigger happens, a thought comes into your head or somebody says something or a little thing goes wrong and that suddenly produces an enormous influx of emotional pain. When that happens, that means the accumulated pain needs to come up and feed on more pain. I call that “the pain body awakens.” Suddenly, you are flooded with emotional pain.

So this pain body, this parasitic entity, ultimately, it's not an enemy at all but it's just a way of looking at it, it needs periodically to feed. When the time comes for it to feed, it will use any excuse in your surroundings or in your mind to wake up. Suddenly, intense anger or intense depression or great fear arises and that moves into your mind and suddenly controls your thinking. All your thinking then becomes aligned with the painful energy field, what you feel, the thinking becomes dominated by the pain body.

So pain body moves into thought, into mind, and it flows into what I call “the egoic mind structures”, the me, my story which isn’t all that happy and the best of times. It's not that wonderful, it's never quite right, and never good enough, or at least, not for long. But when the pain body moves into the egoic mind structures of me and my story, that me becomes an extremely heavy, extremely painful me.

Suddenly, enormous amount of mind activities happening and it's all to do with how dreadful things are, how dreadful my life is, how dreadful other people are. That must have been when Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is this other people.” He must have been, at that time, possessed by the pain body and this is how the pain body perceives the world and you're a hell to yourself.

So the pain body actually feeds on all the negative thoughts because every thought form is a little energy field and the pain body loves those painful thoughts because they add energy to its own energy field. They correspond to the vibrational frequency of that pain. So that’s actually how the pain body operates. It uses your thoughts to feed on. Not only that, it uses other people’s reactions, it will try to provoke a reaction in other people. What it's basically saying--not openly, of course--is, “Please, give me some more pain.” It wants the angry reaction.

So in relationships, you can see it as the need for drama that periodically comes into almost every relationship. [laughs] So you feed on your partner’s reaction, the pain body loves that. When you are immersed in the middle of drama, then it makes you identified with the pain body, immersed in negative thoughts streams and your sense of self is identified with the pain body, it becomes totally personalized. At that time, of course, you don’t want to get out of it, you want the pain at that moment. That is how it operates.

Once it has fed and taken in enough food, it will then suddenly withdraw and disappear. Suddenly, the energy goes into the background, pain body goes into its dormant stage, digest its food. It has added enough pain and then until next time, it won't bother you. But a few days later or a week or two later, it will be there again. That is the vicious cycle of pain body, renewing itself as long as you're unconscious of that process.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell