Eckhart Tolle shares the importance of detaching from your body identity and recognizing your true self. Learn how both pride in your appearance and unhappiness with your body can strengthen the ego, hindering spiritual growth. Discover the path to deeper self-awareness and lasting fulfillment beyond physical identification. Join Eckhart Tolle on a journey to embrace the timeless present and break free from the ego's grip.
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Eckhart Tolle is widely recognized as one of the most inspiring and visionary spiritual teachers in the world today. With his international bestsellers, The Power of Now and A New Earth—translated into more than 50 languages—he has introduced millions to the joy and freedom of living life in the present moment. The New York Times has described him as “the most popular spiritual author in the United States,” and in 2011, Watkins Review (now Watkins Mind Body Spirit) named him “the most spiritually influential person in the world.”
Eckhart’s profound yet simple teachings have helped countless people around the globe experience a state of vibrantly alive inner peace in their daily lives. His teachings focus on the significance and power of Presence, the awakened state of consciousness, which transcends ego and discursive thinking. Eckhart sees this awakening as the essential next step in human evolution.
And then you can contemplate with detachment
what time is doing to your body
because your sense of identity
is no longer derived from body,
who you are, obviously.
That's sometimes a difficult step to take
to go deeper beyond.
There are some people who have a particularly
body that is more beautiful
or more well-developed than normal bodies.
Normal bodies are kind of, I'm not sure.
And then there are other bodies
that are definitely not great.
But people to still identify, it makes them unhappy.
For many years, I had body identification too,
but not in a proud way.
It made me unhappy because it was much less good-looking
than most other bodies, actually.
And so, if you have body identification,
it can either, it can create pride
and enhance your ego.
Well, any identification enhances your ego,
even a negative one.
So I had body, negative body identification
made me unhappy for quite a few years.
And that's also ego.
The ego, the negative profile of ego.
Egos are not always happy egos.
Many egos are miserable egos,
just as strong as the happy ones
that say, I'm the greatest.
And then the other, I'm the most miserable,
just as strong as the other.
So ego is not just, look at me.
What's the egos?
Oh no, why is all these horrible things
always happening to me?
I feel so miserable.
I'm not, it's all still egos and narratives.
So anyway, I had ego identification,
but I could see perhaps a little bit easier
for if you have a negative identification with the body,
it's perhaps easier to let go
because you're more motivated to let go of that.
But if you have a positive body identification,
very good looking,
whether man or woman or strength.
If you look like Arnold in his younger years,
how can you not identify with your body
if your body looks just like some ancient Greek god
or something?
And so, or you're very beautiful
and every time you look in the mirror,
you see how beautiful you are
and you continuously, these days,
you continuously post images of yourself into the world.
Look at me, look at me, look at me.
And you have thousands of people who love you.
They send love signs.
Me, me.
And so many people have this,
their strongest identification is with body
and the rest, the psychological entities come secondary.
That's also ego, of course,
but psychological entity,
whatever they are on the level of their personality,
it becomes secondary or whatever,
what they have achieved becomes even secondary.
But the body figures so prominently
in their sense of identity
that goes on for years.
When I was in my 20s,
and if somebody had asked me,
some god had come down and asked and said to me,
I offer you a deal.
I take away, I'll give you a great body like Arnold,
or well, not, it doesn't have to be that extreme,
but just a good looking body.
Some would say Arnold is a bit going over the top a bit,
that's a bit, but just a beautiful,
I would have that,
but we have to give up 20 years of your life,
you are 20 years younger,
but I'll give you a great body
that you can enjoy for a few decades.
For three decades, you can enjoy this.
I would have said, it's a deal.
And I would be dead now.
I wouldn't be here.
I would have enjoyed perhaps ego satisfaction
during those years and sensory satisfaction
through countless physical encounters.
And would have exhausted myself,
and would have died young as predicted by the god who came.
We were walking, or I was walking on a waterfront,
I believe in Sydney, Australia.
It was a lovely day.
It was perhaps a Sunday morning.
And not excessively hot, just a very pleasant temperature.
Everybody was enjoying themselves.
And then I saw one man walking without a shirt on,
just bare.
And he had a fantastic body,
and everybody's kind of looking at him.
And I thought it's strange
that he was the only person who felt too hot
so he had to take off his shirt.
And...
And then comes a time,
the time which eventually becomes your enemy
when it's, let's say, you have,
for years you identified with your good looks,
and then after a while you realize
the same thing is happening to you.
It just takes decades.
That's happening if you put a fresh apple
on your windowsill and wait a few weeks
and see what happens to the apple that you leave there.
It kind of shrinks and becomes,
it develops.
It goes.
Before it looked...
After a few weeks, the apple shrinks,
and it's old, an old apple.
It happens to all life forms,
and that can become a source of great suffering.
There is still time for you when this suffering sets in,
you realize you're no longer beautiful
because old age is eroding your beauty.
And then when you compare yourself to younger humans,
you begin to feel inferior and to get resentful.
Look at these young.
And you feel diminished, and that's painful.
So many humans who are identified with bodies,
as they get older, they move into a period of unhappiness,
increasing unhappiness, unless they can break through that
and go to a deeper level.
Some can, some cannot.
It's, I would advise to go to that deeper level
before the time starts to erode you as soon as possible.
But there's always a chance to go there,
so at the latest, shortly before you die, I would hope.
But for many people, when they reach old age,
the patterns are so deep-seated
that are associated with the ego identity.
They're so, they have become so rigid and so deep-seated
that they get trapped in them.
There's nothing you can do.
We've all met old people like that.
Instead, old age is meant to be a flowering of consciousness.
When the body begins to dissolve, something else emerges,
and it can be a beautiful thing.
In many other cases, this does not happen.
And we've all met old people who are cranky and angry,
and, oh, well, I have one.
But your grandfather, perhaps, so.
You're still in all that spiritual nonsense.
Are you still doing that?
Like, it's all rubbish, obviously.
I know it all.
I've seen it all.
And I have an opinion about everything.
I know everything.
And it's all dreadful.
They're all idiots, all of them.
And then it dies.
So no matter where you're at in the movement of time,
this moment is the best moment
to step out of the movement of time
and take your attention into the timeless
so that you learn to be connected with that consciously
for the rest of your life in this form.
