A Letter to Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle

PO Box 93661 Nelson Park RPO
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6E 4L7

July 01, 2009

Dear Eckhart,

I am writing to share an experience I had while reading your book Stillness Speaks. This was a very frightening experience. I could not sleep for months. I am sure you get plenty of mail nowadays and it may be harder to keep up with it, but I humbly ask you read this letter. I almost lost my mind and my life as I know it by actively exploring your suggestion in Stillness Speaks. Please share compassion if you so chose, read this letter and respond to me when you can.

Sometime around January 15, 2009, I had a terrifying experience. It started like this. Prior to getting home, while on the subway, I was listening to your book, Stillness Speaks. I really like what you have to say and decide to see if I connect to your work authentically, given that my perception increases dramatically while in that state. In the second chapter, Tolle says: “Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought” I am some what intrigued and follow your logic by focusing intensely to see what you actually means by this. In the third chapter:

The next step in evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task… When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future. When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, the mind-made “me.” That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces. When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice…

I become the very words you were saying, my mind stops identifying with thought and the voice in the head. I start dissolving right about here. All I can think of is “The voice in the head is not you… stop identifying with the voice in your head…” I turn to my partner to tell him, do you know what this man is asking? He is asking us to stop thinking. That is the hardest thing anyone can ask of humanity. I start feeling weird and my mind is opening up to something beyond what I normally experience. Tolle’s words became a gateway into something really strange. I tell my partner to turn it off immediately, I felt like Tolle was controlling my mind.

At this point everything I know about myself is stripped naked and suffocating. This was trouble. I don’t feel human. I experienced a sense of loss of identity and obstruction of reality, other realities started to interfere with the one we experience as solid and I start seeing how flimsy the solidity of our everydayness is. I freak out and can’t handle this. I feel like I am getting deeper into this space and get the sense that if I continue, I will never come back. I will be left an empty human shell who lost her mind in this infinite, never ending space. I struggled to control my mind, it felt as if a higher degree of consciousness was invading my mind and I couldn’t make sense of it. I am about to lose my mind, the most uncomfortable feeling in the world. I start hearing voices in my head, but these are the voices of different part of me, like the voice of emotion, the voice of intuition, the voice of reason, etc. They start to disintegrate and I experience and hear them separately now, this scares me and I become very fearful and panic. I tell my partner I am not feeling well. I start losing the sense of what makes me, a bigger, non human, picture was opening in my head. Everything around me was floating and came in waves, not solid obviously. I guide my partner to start talking to me, hug me, to call me by my name, to tell me he loves me and mention things about who I am. This was an effort on my side to regain normalcy and control.

I start getting the sense that each and every one of us is an entire world in its own and that I can enter anyone’s mind and experience their world. This didn’t feel good. I start losing the sense of who I am and open up to an obstructed, unpredictable, anything is possible type of world. After the frenzy of losing control is somewhat fading, fantastic imagery starts forming in my head. I am lost in an inner trip. Incredible questions come to my mind, but not the kind that I would normally ask. They weren’t insane per say, but they were so deep that a human brain may not inquire to such depths. I also start experiencing a sense of other beings who want to share knowledge, anything I wanted to know. I panic again and try to suppress this activity. There are all kind of shapes, colors, and images floating within, but I try to not pay attention. I get a sense that I can go anywhere I want with my mind, I can enter other worlds as it were, kind of what they say about multidimensional traveling. I refuse the offer and stay focused to collect myself. I am afraid to close my eyes. I could not sleep. I toss and turn all night holding on tight to my partner. Throughout the night I am concerned that I will never be the same, that is, I will not return to who I was before this experience. I fear that this shock has somewhat impaired my identity and brain balance.

I love my self and who I am. I wanted to return to the beautiful young woman I identify with. I love her, it is who I am. Such longing to be again the very thing I ended up escaping while searching for more humanness. It felt like I almost lost the very jewel that makes me shine in the human world, the unified collection of my experiences as a human being. I could not handle this loss, it wasn’t to be. So I slowly return to normalcy. It takes me a few days. The flashback are still there, but less intense. I try to forget the details of this event and to an extent succeed in doing so. It takes me a week to share this experience with my partner and other friends without fearing that it will return again. In those days I feared that I triggered psychosis or schizophrenia. I went to the doctor to have a check up and he said I was healthy. I even went to a psychiatrist to check if I was mentally healthy after this experience. She said I was fine and had no mental imbalances.

I am ok now and have returned to my normal self, more enriched I would say. I have a greater appreciation for life, for who I am, and the world I live in. Life is so magic. I can’t even begin to explain how miraculous life is. I am so happy I am living it.

Nonetheless sometimes I ask, did I have to go this far to learn life is magical? I always knew life is magical. I always had a positive attitude and loved life.

I would like to ask what you make of this experience. I have been open to conscious living for 8 years of my life now, in a spiritual journey if you will, but I have never experienced anything like this. It would be unfair to neglect the content of this experience given what you teach.

I wanted to explore what source were you drawing from, what did it feel like in the state you were speaking from? Why must humanity go there to claim its identity? Why was it not enough to be a harmonious human being? Why did I have to escape humanity to claim what you say we need to survive as a species? Did I have to go to the brink of insanity? What spirituality is that if it robs me of my experiences in this world? I cherish humanity, I cherish this world and I am blessed to have the chance to live it.

Sincerely yours,