Observations placeholder

Eckhart Tolle

One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear, more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly the thought came into my mind,

 "I cannot live with myself any longer."

The thought kept repeating itself several times. Suddenly, I stepped back from the thought, and looked at it, as it were, and I became aware of the strangeness of that thought:

"If I cannot live with myself; there must be two of me - the I and the self that I cannot live with."

And the question arose,

“who is the ‘I’ and who is the self that I cannot live with?"

There was no answer to that question, and all thinking stopped. For a moment, there was complete inner silence. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into a whirlpool or a vortex of energy. I was gripped by an intense fear and my body started to shake. I heard the words,

"Resist nothing,"

as if spoken inside my chest.  I could feel myself being sucked into a void. Suddenly, all fear disappeared, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that. The next morning I awoke as if I had just been born into this world. Everything seemed fresh and pristine and intensely alive. A vibrant stillness filled my entire being