Remembering The Essential Identity

 Suffering arises through knowing yourself only as form identity.

Eckhart Tolle

Do you feel and sense  an essence in you or others that has nothing to do with form? Or do you still see yourself as this body/ mind duo? This personality that you call "me"?

The roots of all suffering, I agree with Tolle, is our identity confusion. We are delusional believing that we are this "personality" that operates in the world of form, a  helpless victim to all our perception of a "dangerous world" provides.  

Amnesia? 

It, our identity confusion,  is like having amnesia...not remembering who we were before the accident, relying on others to fill in the information that does not feel right in our core.  We know we are more than the bits of information we are given to help us remember. More than the job we are told we have, the face we see in the mirror, the wife, husband, sister, brother, mother, father we are told we are, the home we live in, the neighborhood, the nationality, the church we may go to or the things we are told we believe in. We are more than what possessions we supposedly own. Somehow we know we are more than all this. We don't remember a bit of it, but we still are.!

It is not the amnesia of form identity making us suffer 

What we are told we are is just not enough...that these things do not mean anything to us. We may have lost our memory, but in truth,  we have lost nothing We don't necessarily want to remember our past, we want to remember and feel who we  really are. Forgetting form identity is not a problem, forgetting Self is.  And it is that lack of true realization that is driving us crazy! Not remembering who we are beyond form is creating suffering! 

So many of us  fail to realize who we truly are, getting lost in this view of self  on a superficial level and not seeing what lay deeper within us. It is that which lay deeper within us that is who we truly are. 

You are more truly yourself when you don't remember your past than when you do remember it. You are more truly yourself when there is not a single thought in your head than when you are full of thinking-thinking of "myself "and its problems.  ...

You are never more truly yourself than when you are still....  It is then that you can sense the essence of who you are. 

Hmm! Let's a few moments of stillness where we can forget what we appear to be to the world and see who we are beyond memory, past or future, or thought .

Eckhart Tolle (July, 2020) The Beginning of Awakening & Essential Identity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_o2iOavxYI