self
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One night in 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from long periods of depression, Tolle says he experienced an “inner transformation”. That night he awakened from his sleep, suffering from feelings of depression that were “almost unbearable,” but then experienced a life-changing epiphany. Recounting the experience, he says, “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.” Tolle recalls going out for a walk in London the next morning, and finding that “everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic.“ The feeling continued, and he began to feel a strong underlying sense of peace in any situation.
— Eckhart Tolle
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The Buddhist concept of reincarnation differs from others in that there is no eternal “soul,” “spirit” or “self” but only a “stream of consciousness” that links life with life. The actual process of change from one life to the next is called punarbhava (Sanskrit) or punabbhava (Pāli), literally “becoming again,” or more briefly bhava, “becoming.” The early Buddhist texts discuss techniques for recalling previous births, predicated on the development of high levels of meditative concentration.[15] Buddha reportedly warned that this experience can be misleading and should be interpreted with care. He taught a distinct concept of rebirth constrained by the concepts of anattā, that there is no irreducible atman or “self” tying these lives together, which serves as a contrast to Hinduism, where everything is connected, and in a sense, “everything is everything.”
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“Life is a true lover. It will always destroy any attempt to hold on to something, not because it doesn’t want us to feel safe, but because it will always lead us back to what we truly are.”
— Esther Teule
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God doesn’t make mistakes, especially not when He made you.
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“In philosophy, the self is the relationship of an individual’s own being, knowledge and values. Self relates the experiences of one’s inner and outer living in presence.”