Am I One or Two?

"...the whole motivating power behind my academic success was fear and unhappiness.  It all changed one night when I woke up in the middle of the night. The fear, anxiety and heaviness of depression were becoming so intense, it was almost unbearable... Everything was totally alien and almost hostile. I later saw a book written by Jean-Paul Sartre called Nausea. That was the state that I was in, nausea of the world. [Chuckle] And the thought came into my head, "I can't live with myself any longer." That thought kept repeating itself again and again...

"If I cannot live with myself, who is that self that I cannot live with? Who am I? Am I one—or two?" And I saw that I was "two." There was an "I," and (here was a self. And the self was deeply unhappy, the miserable self. And the burden of that I could not live with. At that moment, a dis-identification happened. "I" consciousness withdrew from its identification with the self, the mind-made fictitious entity, the unhappy "little me" and its story. And the fictitious entity collapsed completely in that moment, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What remained was a single sense of presence or "Beingness" which is pure consciousness prior to identification with form—the eternal I AM. I didn't know all of that at the time, of course. It just happened, and for a long time there was no understanding of what had happened.

As the self collapsed, there was still a moment of intense fear...
I felt like being sucked into a hole. But a voice from within said, "Resist nothing." So I let go. It was almost like I was being sucked into a void, not an external void, but a void within. And then fear disappeared and there was nothing that I remember after that except waking up in the morning in a state of total and complete "newness." I woke up in a state of incredible inner peace, bliss in fact. With my eyes still closed, I heard the sound of a bird and realized how precious that was. And then I opened my eyes and saw the sunlight coming through the curtains and felt: There is far more to that than we realize. It felt like love coming through the curtains. And then as I walked around the old familiar objects in the room I realized I had never really seen them before. It was as if I had just been born into this world; a state of wonder. And then I went for a walk in the city. I was still in London. Everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic. [Chuckle]

I knew something incredible had happened, although I didn't understand it. I even started writing down in a diary, "Something incredible has happened. I just want to write this down," I said, "in case it leaves me again or I lose it." And only later did I realize (that my thought processes after waking up that morning had been reduced by about eighty to ninety percent. So a lot of the time I was walking around in a state of inner stillness, and perceiving the world through inner stillness.

And that is the peace, the deep peace that comes when there is no longer anybody commenting on sense perceptions or anything that happens. No labeling, no need to interpret what is happening, it just is as it is and it is fine. [Laughter] There was no longer a "me" entity.  After that transformation happened, I could not have said anything about it. "Something happened. I am totally at peace. I don't know what it means." That is all I could have said..."

~ Eckhart Tolle from a book called  Dialogues With Emerging Spiritual Teachers by John W Parker

"Tolle stopped studying...and for...two years...spent much of his time sitting, “in a state of deep bliss," on park benches in Russell Square, Central London, "watching the world go by.” He stayed with friends, in a Buddhist monastery, or otherwise slept rough on Hampstead Heath. His family thought him “irresponsible, even insane". Ulrich Tölle changed his first name to Eckhart. Former Cambridge students and people he had met by chance began to ask Tolle about his beliefs. He began working as a counselor and spiritual teacher...He relocated to Glastonbury, a major centre of alternative living. In 1995, he settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he met his future wife, Kim Eng."

~ wikipedia