“I cannot live with myself any longer.”
These are the exact words that took hold in the mind of an anxiety-ridden, suicide-prone man with lifelong depression, words that upon self-reflection instantly freed him into a thoughtless, fearless void of exhilaration, thus transforming him and setting him on a path to become a world-renowned spiritual teacher.
Eckhart Tolle grew up experiencing years of depression and anxiety since childhood, quite intense and debilitating to the extent that he contemplated suicide many times. On one night alone with his thoughts, he found the world utterly alien and meaningless to him that his own existence felt loathsome. As he lay in his bed wondering what was the point in continuing to live with a fatiguing sense of despair, he had one thought on his mind that caught his attention.
‘I cannot live with myself any longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. And then suddenly there was a ‘standing back’ from the thought and looking at that thought, at the structure of that thought, “If I cannot live with myself, who is that self that I cannot live with? Who am I? Am I one or two? If there are two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with, maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”
Eckhart Tolle
Consider any downward spiral moment in life that appears to be overwhelmingly larger than what it is, like emotional distress, fears, insecurities, or anxieties. We feel weak and beaten by the perceived enormity of it, but if we could pay attention and stare at the very heart of it, we will see that things are actually quite simple. There already exists an inbuilt honesty in the fundamental way we articulate these emotions. Clarity is already worked into our vocabulary and it shines with a blinding brilliance if we could calm ourselves down of our drama, pare down our emotions to their basics, and see things for what they truly are.
For instance, when we say, “I am feeling angry/sad/scared/offended” we have established ourselves to be that emotion, feeling the effects of the emotion in our body as tightness in our chest or an ice drop in our gut, and temporarily claiming that emotion as our identity – “I am upset”. But who is the one witnessing your being upset? If ‘you’ are upset you would be existing and vibrating as the energy called ‘upset’ and not articulating it instead as a separate person. If you are able to look at it from a distance and point it out so clearly, doesn’t it imply that ‘you’ are not it? When you later realize that you are no longer upset, who are you then? If you say, “I am now happy”, then who is the ‘you’ that is able to notice that you are happy?
Upset or happy, when there is a ‘you’ witnessing both these states impartially, then is it possible that ‘you’ were never upset to begin with, not the one to feel happy, but that which is simply untouched by whatever comes or goes? While the purpose of the moment was for you to interact with it in a functional manner, is it possible that it was just a thought in the shape of the mind that arose with the moment to sell you stories and to make you imagine a deeply affected ‘I’ while the real ‘I’ is always right there simply witnessing it all?
“I am upset.“
No, you are not.
You are not upset. You are not happy. ‘You’ just are.
We are all inherently simple beings who like to see things as black or white, uncolored by the stories our minds tell us, although situations and emotions sometimes muddle the reality making it appear more grayish. But in absolute reality, there are no gray truths. When we say “it is complicated” or “it is not as simple as you think”, what we really mean is that we don’t have the patience to delve deeper into our own emotion to see its truth. What we see as gray is, at its core, either black or white that has paled itself into gray because of our overthinking. If we keep fine-tuning that gray, look at it long enough to level with its truth, the gray will start to turn either black or white, either truth that is here to serve the real ‘I’ or exaggeration that is here to entertain the mind-imagined ‘I’.
We don’t have to stand at the precipice of desperation like Tolle to have a perspective shift, but all it takes to better our chances at peace is recognizing how we have been habitually overcomplicating our outlook on things when they are in essence, quite simple.
“Every time we find ourself reacting to anyone or anything, we can ask on whose behalf we are reacting. We will nearly always find that it is on behalf of a non-existent self.”
Rupert Spira, The Ashes of Love
