When the past and the present collide...

Before my talk I visited the local library to try to borrow Eckhart Tolle's book 'The Power of Now'. I wanted this because the experience he recounts of his bedroom epiphany is the closest thing I have read to my own experience. Unsurprisingly the book was already out and there was a long reserve list for it. Browsing the shelves my attention was drawn to a book entitled 'Introducing Buddha'. Feeling a strange compulsion I took it to the automated book borrowing desk and after some frustrating minutes managed to ascertain from the slip which emerged from the machine orifice that leaving the library would not set off every alarm in the place. When I got home I started to read it. I was amazed when one paragraph in particular grabbed my consciousness and I thought to myself 'it is the same realization in the day of the Buddha and for me today. I am going to replicate this paragraph.

Buddha says 'People are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance causes them to suffer over and over again. I too have been caught up in the same mechanical process. The being which I believed in was a fictional construction. I have a name, a personal history, memories, thoughts, emotions, dreams; but when I look they are quite illusory. What I have been looking for has never been lost, either to me or to anyone else. There is nothing to attain and no longer any struggle to attain it. The projections of my mind are in essence empty. It is like a raindrop merging into the vastness of the ocean. Or like a cloud disappearing in the sky, arising from space and dissolving into space' .

This to me is the clearest explanation of the identity which I have asserted human being mistakes for their real self. Freedom comes when the consciousness is freed from identifying with the identity (if that makes sense). What is it going to take to have human being realize this not simply intellectualise it. Writing this I feel such frustration that Buddha realized this and yet the world continued as it was.....feel like really giving up tonight....