An interview with Eckhart Tolle by Andrew Cohen
AC: What exactly do you mean when you say that the purpose of the world lies in the transcendence of it?
ET: The world promises fulfillment somewhere in
time, and there is a continuous striving toward that fulfillment in
time. Many times people feel, “Yes, now I have arrived,” and then they
realize that, no, they haven’t arrived, and then the striving continues.
It is expressed beautifully in A Course in Miracles, where it says that
the dictum of the ego is “Seek but do not find.” People look to the
future for salvation, but the future never arrives.
So ultimately, suffering arises through not finding. And that is the
beginning of an awakening—when the realization dawns that “Perhaps this
is not the way. Perhaps I will never get to where I am striving to
reach; perhaps it’s not in the future at all.” After having been lost in
the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization
comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment
and in the future.
That’s an important point for many people to reach. That sense of
deep crisis — when the world as they have known it, and the sense of
self that they have known that is identified with the world, become
meaningless. That happened to me. I was just that close to suicide and
then something else happened — a death of the sense of self that lived
through identifications, identifications with my story, things around
me, the world.
Something arose at that moment that was a sense of deep and intense
stillness and aliveness, beingness. I later called it “presence.” I
realized that beyond words, that is who I am. But this realization
wasn’t a mental process. I realized that that vibrantly alive, deep
stillness is who I am.
Years later, I called that stillness “pure consciousness,” whereas
everything else is the conditioned consciousness. The human mind is the
conditioned consciousness that has taken form as thought. The
conditioned consciousness is the whole world that is created by the
conditioned mind.
Everything is our conditioned consciousness; even objects are.
Conditioned consciousness has taken birth as form and then that becomes
the world. So to be lost in the conditioned seems to be necessary for
humans. It seems to be part of their path to be lost in the world, to be
lost in the mind, which is the conditioned consciousness.
Then, due to the suffering that arises out of being lost, one finds
the unconditioned as oneself. And that is why we need the world to
transcend the world. So I’m infinitely grateful for having been lost.
The purpose of the world is for you to be lost in it, ultimately. The
purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that
seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen. And then once
the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is
unnecessary now. You have reached the end of suffering because you have
transcended the world. It is the place that is free of suffering.
This seems to be everybody’s path. Perhaps it is not everybody’s path
in this lifetime, but it seems to be a universal path. Even without a
spiritual teaching or a spiritual teacher, I believe that everybody
would get there eventually. But that could take time.
AC: A long time.
ET: Much longer. A spiritual teaching is there to
save time. The basic message of the teaching is that you don’t need any
more time, you don’t need any more suffering. I tell this to people who
come to me: “You are ready to hear this because you are listening to it.
There are still millions of people out there who aren’t listening to
it. They still need time. But I’m not talking to them. You are hearing
that you don’t need time anymore and you don’t need to suffer anymore.
You’ve been seeking in time and you’ve been seeking further suffering.”
And to suddenly hear that “You don’t need that anymore — for some, that
can be the moment of transformation.
So the beauty of the spiritual teaching is that it saves lifetimes of –
AC: Unnecessary suffering.
ET: Yes, so it’s good that people are lost in the
world. I enjoy traveling to New York and Los Angeles, where it seems
that people are totally involved. I was looking out of the window in New
York. We were next to the Empire State Building, doing a group. And
everybody was rushing around, almost running. Everybody seemed to be in a
state of intense nervous tension, anxiety. It’s suffering, really, but
it’s not recognized as suffering.
And I thought, where are they all running to? And of course, they are
all running to the future. They are needing to get somewhere, which is
not here. It is a point in time: not now — then. They are running to a
then. They are suffering, but they don’t even know it. But to me, even
watching that was joyful. I didn’t feel, “Oh, they should know better.”
They are on their spiritual path. At the moment, that is their spiritual
path, and it works beautifully.
AC: Often the word enlightenment is
interpreted to mean the end of division within the self and the
simultaneous discovery of a perspective or way of seeing that is whole,
complete, or free from duality. Some who have experienced this
perspective claim that the ultimate realization is that there is no
difference between the world and God or the Absolute, between samsara
and nirvana, between the manifest and the unmanifest.
But there are others who claim that, in fact, the ultimate
realization is that the world doesn’t actually exist at all — that the
world is only an illusion, completely empty of meaning, significance, or
reality. So in your own experience, is the world real? Is the world
unreal? Both?
ET: Even when I’m interacting with people or walking
in a city, doing ordinary things, the way I perceive the world is like
ripples on the surface of being. Underneath the world of sense
perceptions and the world of mind activity, there’s the vastness of
being. There’s a vast spaciousness. There’s a vast stillness and there’s
a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn’t separate, just
like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.
So there’s no separation in the way I perceive it. There’s no
separation between being and the manifested world, between the
manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster,
deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested.
Every phenomenon in the manifested is so short-lived and so fleeting
that, yes, one could almost say that from the perspective of the
unmanifested, which is the timeless beingness or presence, all that
happens in the manifested realm really seems like a play of shadows.
It seems like vapor or mist with continuously new forms arising and
disappearing, arising and disappearing. So to the one who is deeply
rooted in the unmanifested, the manifested could very easily be called
unreal. I don’t call it unreal because I see it as not separate from
anything.
AC: So it is real?
ET: All that is real is beingness itself. Consciousness is all there is, pure consciousness.
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