Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks
When people say, “You have to go inside yourself to find out who you are,” which is something you hear often, the mind has a way of playing tricks on us.
It leads us to believe there’s some objective “me” that we’ll find if we search and search for it.
And so we become involved in a mental search, trying to find who we are.
Search all you want, however deeply you want to go inside yourself, but you will never find the objective “me” you are seeking.
Once we’ve given up searching for ourselves in the external world, such as in our achievements or our relationships, this inward search hooks lots of us into it for years to come. The reality is that the inward search for ourselves is just as futile as the exterior search.
We can’t “find” ourselves either outside ourselves or inside ourselves.
In his book Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle explains why:
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don’t need time to be who you are.
Note the crucial insight Eckhart points us to, which is that this isn’t about finding an objective self but simply about being who we are.
There’s nothing to seek for, which is why it should never be our aim to be a “spiritual seeker.”
As Jesus said, “Seek, and you will find.” And to make sure we get that he’s talking about a Now experience instead of a search for something future, he adds: “Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”
How long does it take to answer a knock at the door?
We are talking not about a search for something that requires time, but about stepping into a reality that’s already here now. It’s as simply as opening our eyes or knocking on a door and being admitted.
Eckhart adds:
You say, “I want to know myself.” You are the “I.” You are the Knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself.
There is nothing to know beyond that, and yet all knowing arises out of it. The “I” cannot make itself into an object of knowledge, of consciousness.
What we can do is be who we are, in each moment, right Now.
But to do this requires that we give up all searching and simply begin enjoying—something so many of us are loathe to do.
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving--A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors.
If you would like to go deeper into being your true self, powerfully present in the now, we invite you to enjoy the daily blog Consciousness Rising - http://www.namastepublishing.com/blog/author/david-robert-ord.