What I Am & What I Am Not

Thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and whatever you experience make up the content of your life. "My life" is what you derive your sense of self from, and "my life" is content, or so you believe.

You continuously overlook the most obvious fact: your innermost sense of I Am has nothing to do with what happens in your life, nothing to do with content. That sense of I Am is one with the Now. It always remains the same.

In childhood and old age, in health or sickness, in success or failure, the I Am - the space of Now - remains unchanged at its deepest level. It usually gets confused with content, and so you experience I Am or the Now only faintly and indirectly, through the content of your life.

In other words: your sense of Being becomes obscured by circumstances, your stream of thinking, and the many things of this world. The Now becomes obscured by time.

And so you forgot your rootedness in Being, your divine reality, and lose yourself in the world. Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are.

Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home:

I am not

my thoughts,

emotions,

sense perceptions,

and experiences.

I am not

the content

of my life.

I am Life.

I am the space

in which all things

happen.

I am consciousness.

I am the Now.

I Am.

~Eckhart Tolle Book "Stillness Speaks"