ECKHART TOLLE

   When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find fulfilment in the future.
           Can you see that this “I” is fleeing, a temporary formation, like a wave pattern on the surface of water?
           Who is it that sees this? Who is it that is aware of the fleetingness of your physical and psychological form? I Am. This is the deeper “I” that has nothing to do with past and future….
           When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made “me.” That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's whys fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
           When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.
           Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.
           The egoic self is always engaged in seeking. It is seeking more of this or that to add to itself, to make itself feel more complete. This explains the ego’s compulsive preoccupation with future.
           Whenever you become aware of yourself “living for the next moment,” you have already stepped out of that egoic mind pattern, and the possibility of choosing to give your full attention to this moment arise simultaneously.
           By giving your full attention to this moment, an intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life.   

further information on Eckhart Tolle can be found here

In their many different idioms the classical spiritual writers have attempted to throw light on the eternal question of union with God. 
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