The Death of the Self (The Me) ~by Eckhart Tolle

Some people, who have been sitting with a dying person, have reported that, in certain instances, something shines through suddenly. It’s almost a light that comes through, and that happens when the mentally made sense of identity, the fictitious sense of identity, dissolves, because it heavily obscures the light of consciousness that is underneath, and it can happen shortly before death, that fiction dissolves and suddenly it’s like a flowering and there’s an enormous light shining through as if a flower had just opened; and, it could have opened before, but it opened, and only a few minutes before death, but at least it opened. One could say that the purpose of that life is fulfilled.

But, the message here is that you don’t need to wait for your death approaching before you can know who you are beyond a mental image of who you are. You don’t have to wait for death to approach, because you might not get it even then. You may be trapped in that image even as you die and that means that you would die in terrible, terrible fear and anxiety, because that image is dying, the me is dying.

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So, you’ve been trapped in a suffering sense of self and the suffering has become so acute that something within you said, “This is too much. There must be something else. I cannot go on like this.” I’m saying this because it happened to me. So, it looks as if you had chosen to come here and that’s fine, that’s one perspective on it, but really, you were driven here because you want to die. You want to die that death of the self. The little me in the head, because that’s not who you are.

~by Eckhart Tolle (Source: The Flowering of Human Consciousness dvd)