"Dreadful suffering at night. I would often wake up in extreme feeling of dread and fear; consumed by dread and fear. The whole world seemed alien. I saw the thought one night, I woke up again and the thought came, I can't live with myself any longer. I just can't live with myself any longer, it's so painful. And that thought repeated itself a few times. And then suddenly, something happened inside me and I looked at the thought. That was of course awareness. I didn't know at that time what it was. I became aware of the thought and I said, I cannot live with myself.
That's strange, so there must be "I" and there must be "myself". Am I one or two? I seem to be two.
Because if "I" can’t live with "myself", there must be two of me here.
And then I became aware of the structure of the sentence. And said if that's the case, then who is the self that I cannot live with? And who am I?
And that moment of separation happened completely between the essential eye, which is the essential consciousness that I am, beyond past and future; the eternal stillness.
But awake stillness. And all my thought processes which were ego would be – all my thought process, well that created the dreadful suffering. The mind created entity; the unhappy me was continuously fed by my thinking. It consisted of thinking; a stream of thinking. It was a kind of spiritual suicide, so the ego died instead of me having to jump off a bridge, fortunately, the ego died. The ego dissolved as the unobserved mind dissolved.
And the next morning I woke up and looked around and looked, everything looked so fresh. All the old furniture, the pencil. Everything looked fresh and alive. As I caught a bird song outside as if I’d never heard it before. Because the mind had become still and there was simply the beautiful perception of everything. The sunlight coming through the curtains. Incredible. I’ve never seen that before."
~Eckhart Tolle
I love Eckhart Tolle! He is so so smart but at times hard to translate with the way he talks.