“You are not your thoughts.”  This is the mantra of many new age movements – by ‘new age’ I mean all ranges of new belief systems running the the gamut of ‘flakes’ to scientifically grounded theories of consciousness. 

Many people have found tremendous relief through understanding this statement and this statement is at the heart of the successful ‘Mindfulness’ program hitting the self help market by storm.

Buddhism upon which Mindfulness draws most of its innards states that:

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.”

It follows that there must be an ability to choose which types of thoughts we think, or at least influence them.  That must mean that there is more to us than just our thoughts.

Eckhart Tolle experienced a sudden and profound realization offering him relief from a former life of depression.  At the very depths of his depression, it was almost as if he sunk so low that he emerged in heaven.  He recounts:

I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.

Many new age practitioners call this process the ‘ego death’.  Eckhart spent the next few years in a state of anonymous bliss after which he went on to become one of the most influential spiritual teachers to in the modern era.  What follows is an interview with Tolle which reveals the central tenets of his philosophies: (Listen for discussions of self talk and how it can harm you.)