What If Your Body Was Just a Vessel?

Published: April 22, 2024, 5:46 p.m.

I recently read 2 of Eckhart Tolle's books - "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth". Without a doubt, some of the most important books I've read in a really long time. Instead of trying to explain them through content, though, let me lead you through a hypothetical scenario.

Imagine you are a God. The whole reality, the whole universe, everything is your creation. Every person you know, every concept you grasp, everything is a reminiscent of the world beyond, the world outside the dream you live in. In this world, your body, and everyone you know is you. You are one, just like the single lone electron in one electron theory, performing every single duty of the universe. The body and the brain you subjectively have confines everything you remember, feel, and experience into one perspective, and you can't see beyond that (something akin to privilege separation found in computers), but it's not the entire you.

In classical computers we have a kernel preemptively scheduling thousands of processes to work in seemingly parallel nature. However, if you look closely, it's not many individual applications working independently - it's one kernel (ignoring multicore setups), driving the world of the computer one step at a time, by constantly switching roles, by constantly entering different process' execution state and acting on behalf of it. The processes are not independent, the processes are not acting by themselves. They are being acted upon by the one party that pulls all the strings - the kernel, and at even lower level, the CPU.

What if your experience is just an experience of a single process in an infinitely vast experience of unfathomably larger Being? Every moment, the Being cycles through every single subjective experience in the universe, and experiences it. Churning through everything, femtosecond by femtosecond. What if your body is just a vessel for this larger consciousness, and your main purpose is to spread the knowledge that helps every single body shape their brains to become more self aware, and by extension - bring more power in self-expression of the Being's true nature?

The books ultimately aim to make you question the nature of your reality with a few key ideas at hand - acceptance of reality leads to peace, escaping reality leads to pain and suffering. Metaphysically speaking, the scenario I described earlier is neither provable nor disprovable - it goes outside the confines of one's subjective view of reality. However, bringing your mind to capacity to at least entertain these scenarios as plausible, may allow you to be more at peace when confronted with the incomprehensible, such as death. Tolle wants you to accept that death is coming, and it's neither good nor bad, it's just reality. Tolle wants you to consider that every moment you spend ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future is a moment spent not living in the only place where you can live - the present moment. Tolle wants you to invert your view of reality, claiming that "life is a dancer, and you are the dance". Tolle is suggesting a way to view our experience in a way that alleviates most of pain and suffering.

Now, I have some points of contention with those books. They are written in an overly confident, extremely pretentious manner. That ultimately reminds me of the overly preachy way religion is taught, and is naturally repulsive to me, because the unexplainable is being explained by "just trust me bro". However, if you are able to suspend your disbelief, and process those ideas in a manner that is more digestible by you, I think you would be able to change your perspective in a good way, and I would wholeheartedly recommend you to pick these books up.