You have a problem to work out. You sit with it for twenty minutes, then an hour, and by the end you are further from an answer than when you started. Thinking harder is not producing anything. Eckhart Tolle offers a method for this, and it is not what people expect from him. He does not suggest you stop thinking. He suggests you break it. Think about the thing for a few thoughts. Then step back into stillness. Three or four seconds is enough, and the length does not matter. In that gap the mind stops but awareness stays, and then you step forward into thought again. In, out, in, out. If you want to do genuinely effective thinking, he says, that is how to do it. Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes for a decision you are facing or something you are trying to create, and work in that rhythm rather than in one unbroken stream. Underneath the technique is a correction worth hearing. The goal is not to be permanently in one state or the other. At first you will slip between them, still and present one moment, entirely back in the thinking self a minute later. Over time they come together, so a spacious awareness stays in the background even while you speak, act, and think. Thinking was never the problem. Thinking with no gaps in it is. Eckhart goes much further into this in the full session. Join Eckhart Tolle Now to watch. 👇
Video Summary
AI Generated
The speaker addresses the concern of whether personal growth and life experiences are lost after death. Using an ocean analogy, he explains that while individual identity dissolves, the \"energies\" of one's experience are donated to a collective consciousness, ensuring that a person's life contributes to the whole and serves the purpose of returning to one's true nature.
I have a question about reincarnation.
As I understand it, you don't really believe in reincarnation per se.
I'm afraid I don't believe in incarnation, let alone reincarnation.
I have a question anyway.
I'm wondering, all of the things I've learned during my life
and all the development I've been through,
where do all that go when I cease to exist?
Does it benefit the whole?
If not, what's the point?
Do you understand my question?
I do indeed, yes.
Let's use the analogy of the ocean.
Infinite consciousness is like an ocean.
It's without form. It's pure water.
Everything that arises in the ocean is made of the ocean.
Each of us is like an individual wave.
We understand there are no real individual waves.
You can't pluck a wave out of the ocean.
The wave is just a temporary name and form of the ocean.
Each of us is a temporary name and form of the one infinite consciousness.
But having said that, each wave has its own particular name and form.
Every wave is a particular size, a particular shape, a particular duration, and so on.
Just like each of us are particular individual characters or minds.
Each wave has a different frequency, a different amplitude, a different duration, and so on.
When that wave subsides into the ocean, which would correspond with the death of the body,
the energies that went into the make of the wave lose their integrity, so the wave disperses.
But the energies that went into the formation of the wave don't disappear.
They are just dissipated into the broader medium of the ocean.
The energies are the residual content of your mind.
To answer your question, when every finite mind, when every individual wave dies,
I would suggest that it donates its content to the whole.
The residual energies of your mind are then dispersed as ripples.
They are no longer waves, but they are ripples in the broader medium of the ocean,
which contribute to all the other ripples that have been donated by all the other dissolving waves
and become part of the collective mind, the collective unconscious.
Some of those ripples might gather together again and form the basis of a new wave,
which would satisfy your question about reincarnation.
Thank you.
So yes, I don't think your experience is wasted.
I think our experience, we donate our residual experience to the collective mind of humanity.
And thus contribute to humanity.
Our lives are not meaningless.
Otherwise it would have been rather meaningless.
No, I wouldn't.
Even if that were not the case, I wouldn't say that it was meaningless,
because everything that you've experienced in your life thus far has brought you to this understanding.
I don't mean my understanding, I mean your understanding.
And thus they serve the ultimate purpose of your life, which is to return you to your true nature.
That is purpose enough.
So even if your mind was extinguished at death, it would still have served its purpose.
But I think it has a greater purpose than that.
Let's hope so.
Thank you, Rupert.
