'The beginning of freedom is the realisation that you are not "the thinker". The moment that you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realise that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyonf thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realise that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
There is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the life that we have on Earth as human existence, people can describe it as God, Eckhart Tolle calls it Being. It is difficult to describe this, but this is our very presence and is immediately accessible to us as the feeling of presence...our true nature.
You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely on the Now, God can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego like to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with God. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, somewhat that almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflicts within and without become the norm.
The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of your connectedness is identification with you mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from God. It also created a false mind-made self that cast a a shadow of fear and suffering.
Identification with you mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgements, and definitions that block all treu relationships. It comes between you and yourself, between you and fellow man or woman, between you and nature, between you and God.
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
