Eckhart Tolle: Awakening in the Digital Age @ Wisdom 2.0

in listening to saurons introduction to you and knowing that I came to know your work also through listening to you reading your books and then listening to you now and knowing from our conversation that you chose intentionally to lead a meditation it really was a meditation by teaching how is it that when some people talk for half an hour and they're teaching it's an intellectual exercise and you also are sharing teachings and yet it's a it's an experience that you've created for thousands here and watching how are you crossing over from teaching to experience in such a special way well the words by being continuously aware of the underlying presence in you the quality of what your mind present produces is enhanced one could say it is more alive more powerful more relevant to this specific moment so to be in touch with that produces a more empowered or inspiring fresher way to of speaking of course it doesn't only affect speaking it affects sense perceptions too because you perceive things also in a fresh way I enjoy sense perceptions I enjoy even walking in the street and looking at the multiplicity of people and cars and things going on but they when the real joy comes from as you perceive you can sense the underlying presence while you look that's the joy so we could call it the joy of BA so sometimes words come out of it it's a an inner state of connectedness and the estranged experience is I don't although I'm not channeling as such I've nothing against channeling but I'm not standing in the way that I my eyes go funny and I say this is so it's all talking that's not yet that's fine too but but I still I don't feel that I am actually that the person is not giving the talk the person becomes an instrument for the consciousness to speak through and that's all so that reason also I don't know what is going to be set next there's no plan and that's very enjoyable too and this complete surrender to the present moment the complete surrender to life to presence at first it was a little strange to be on stage and when I started speaking sometimes my mind came in before coming on stage that's okay you should be thinking now what are you going to talk about and then okay I'm going to start with this and then I'm going to say that but then finally I got onto the stage and most of the time that dissolved and a few times when I actually did say what I thought I was going to say it wasn't very powerful and then I'm throwing away my question actually I am this is about growth looks like right right in front of us I I'm curious about a couple of things that you said and and one of them has to do with story and the relationship between story and self and how important our stories are not only in justifying our suffering or soliciting sympathy but also in helping us in our connectedness with other people even when you know we connected yesterday we compared what has happened in the time since we saw each other last you know so there's something about story that helps us relate and connect and and yet I certainly hear you on story potentially being the the layers that prohibit you from actually being in the vertical self as you were describing so how do we integrate story in a healthy way into self particularly in connection to others yes well the story is what happened and remembering or talking about what happened or maybe a shared memory and that's fine but it cannot be a substitute for something deeper that is more important and that is the actual connect to an action between us beyond words and concepts when I look at you if I only look at you through our story that would be very limiting even if it's a nice story mmm-hmm it's but in many cases it's not nice and of course the stories that are not nice get stuck in the mind much more than the nice stories a nice story so okay he's a nice person very nice person what else can you say well he's so helpful okay and then finally after two minutes of mind doesn't say anymore but if it's an obnoxious person the mind can think about it for hours so the the stories are fine as long as that we are not confined to the stories in that so that in the actual moment of interacting there is another dimension present and then the stories are fine and even if the stories let's say if we met we met a couple of years ago and we had a pleasant interaction but let's just imagine that we met a couple of years ago and we had an unpleasant interaction then if we only remembered our story that would totally obscure our ability to relate to each other or there would be just further unpleasantness added to what's already there which would be stuff in your mind and stuff in my mind and that stuff tends to release rate it produces more and more of the same the same kind of thoughts so even more important to be present with another person if this is a negative story in your past with that person so and then so to to look at another human being so that yet the transcendent I mentioned needs to be there even as you remember the story so how does that happen it happens by practicing at first and then it becomes second nature to you by practicing when a person talks to you or you're looking at them not to think while you'd look now how do you do that thinking is kind of obsessive for many people a bit you obsessive that and they think if they stop thinking they have their bad they die or they they have no idea what's going on anymore if you've totally lost if they can't interpret every moment and there's this obsessive need also to interpret every person that they meet immediately formulate opinions which are all just reflections of your past conditioning in many cases totally unreal in some cases there may be some correlation with what you're looking at in what you're judging but whatever you're judging in the other person is the story and the conditioning of the other person never the essence of who that being is so it's only by refraining from thinking how do you do that what use the inner body as an anchor an anchor while you're looking feel the aliveness that's one way of being present and then you look and and yet then you become the spacious awareness and you this is the greatest gift you can give another human being is to give pure attention to another human being and there's no longer any intention egoic intention what can you do for me or what did you do to me last year you shouldn't have done or what did what you see but if you want from me all kinds of stories that are interfere with true relationship so as I look at you and you look at me and I can sense and feel that you experience you realize right now what I'm talking about there is the presence in you you are not touching me and this is a wonderful gift it feels live on the other person feels liberated because intuitively they know they are not being judged now usually you don't get that from human beings you want to get it from your dog and that's why that's why it's so lovely to look into the eyes of a dog it's so heartwarming and then because the the beingness speaks through unobscured by mental stuff so that the being ER speaks through the eyes of the dog and by looking into the eyes of the dog you int you feel really a very alert why do you laugh when except one or two of you might have a phobia because you have got bitten when you were five but that mostly or you can take a cat too but let's doesn't work as well let's talk about jobs there is a there is something you look into the eyes of a dog you go ah for a moment it frees you from your mind and you can sense the beingness and you can recognize now you might not know this but the reason why people love looking into the eyes of the dog or touching the dog is they realize their own beingness more when they look into the eyes because it's a shared there's a consciousness in the dog what you love in the dog is not the fur or they might be nice and warm to touch it what you love in the dog ad means not the physical form and what you love in another human being of course the same way you love the consciousness of the dog and when you look into the dog's eyes the consciousness shines through and by acknowledging that it arises in you and that is the function of animals living with humans it's a it's a spiritual function that they have and the same can happen with humans it requires more presence to look at another human without thought because often from other humans you get judgement so more intense presence is required but it's a beautiful practice so there's always two dimensions in you there's the personal dimension mental formations emotional formations feelings leave this the limit itself and there is the spacious being self the two conducting a dance and so the mastery of life is to have both active to acknowledge the world of form the world of stories the world of personalities and the physical world but at the same time not be confined and trapped only in that dimension to also have what I sometimes call space consciousness to know yourself also and more essentially as the space right all its sometimes it's called stillness whatever pointer you want to use before your I'm talking for too long I know but just one more thing you can commit in me well you can compare yourself among the analogy you can give if to yourself let's I've done it you may have listened me give it before but as always free expression new to me so I'll say let's say you are this room and you want to know yourself so if you are this room let's say you're the ceiling the floor the walls are your physical body and the content is you know this room is the content of your mind the emotion the mental emotional accumulations your mind now most people only know themselves as that let's so this room then knows itself only as a ceiling the floor the walls and the furniture and all the stuff in the room if I ask the room is there more to you than the stuff in the ledge images in here and the walls and ceilings the room would say no that's me it's the stuff in here and the room is an overlooked at the room essentially is space the essence of this room is not what's in it the essence of this room is what enables the stuff to be in it in space and if the room discovered its essence identity a space that would be awakening that's the end of the analogy I want to stay on story and stillness for another minute and extend the complexity one thing many of us I think struggle with is when you extend out than between two people to a family or a team of people who work together regularly any kind of system where you not only have the individual story but the collective story so I'm the I'm the Joker and you're the critic or whatever roles we play that the system in a sense often keeps that reinforces those roles and they take on something larger than their life and difficult to change so that even some behavior change isn't seen in the system so if we if we assume that not everyone in the system is practicing at stillness or maybe they are but there are different places in their process how does an individual in a system become more genuinely their freshly each time against that the power of the dynamic you know what I'm talking about so in other words you're surrounded by people who are still identified to a large extent with their mental accumulations mental accumulations about themselves and that's right and you as they play roles which they may be unconsciously playing so and those may be either people you work with or they may be family members the hardest test and the most important test or one of the most important test to find out whether you are able to practice presence and live it rather than only experience presence when you go or even exact well power so you mustn't think clenching the real test is of family members people with whom you share a lot of past because so much is accumulated and so many opinions and of judgments of who you are have accumulated in family members Minds so there it's it's very quiet really intense presence as the Dalit not that are around us of course as you know said if you think you're so enlightened go spend a week with your parents and that's very true and the I experienced that in my life to have a lot of resentment about my dad some about my mom but more mad my dad because he Xperia T terrible anger issues now mostly the anger was directed to meet most of it went to my mum but that was just as painful and force even when I was a young adult I had lots of resentment built up against his insensitive and sometimes violent behavior and then when the shift in consciousness happened it felt very liberating I was able to see that not only he but every human being cannot act beyond their level of consciousness so compassion suddenly came in or they at first I didn't know that that's called compassion it just meant I didn't have a grievance anymore and I actually felt love towards him and realized he did what he did at that time his level of consciousness did not allow him to behave any differently so that I was able to forgive without having to go through a mental act of forgiveness it just happened didn't and contented was strange thing happened then his ego which was very strong part of it crumbled another part remained strong until the end of his life for depend depending what situation he was on but suddenly there were things the spiritual truths some occasionally came through him the moment I saw I'd gave up but my resentment towards him something in him shifty there is not a total shift it never was some of the ego remained very very obnoxious to the age of 90 when he passed away but something deeper also came through and that was a miraculous thing to say and then he came up with wonderful sometimes in some areas he suddenly became his behavior was virtually enlightened he would never complained when he was waiting for some ways at all fine I can way which doesn't matter how long it takes I can be here hour half an hour two hours I don't mind and then he had liked me he almost never went to see a doctor but he had lots of little ailments and he came up with great wisdom sayings like I live in Pacific coexistence with my illnesses when he said they died Wow a spiritual master talking so that was received and then at work of course let's say at a meeting it may well be that you are the only one who has any realization of presence now a little danger here is of course the thought arises in your mind not in yours but it could happen to somebody else somebody else thought arises in your mind that you are superior to these because you are spiritually realized and and then you have to somewhat teach them and if that thought arises in your mind of course your experience experienced a lot of frustration because you're not going to teach them anything but you can be in a particular state and I will recommend that you practice in non critical situation which non critical situations are looking at a dog this time and realize what it means to be present in that situation I'm taking away the advice that we start with trees yes not in critical situation trees have no accumulated radius about you they don't talk back to you and so it's a freezer wonderful beings they are beings so they're very still they don't make a noise except when it's windy but it's a very lovely noise they're very still they are very rude to eat of course their rules eat and they are just in summer there for hundreds of years and they're just if if I made a noise they don't make a noise but if they made a noise it would be a bit likely all wonderful wonderful energy there so that's a great help in being present and then you graduate and then you your present with people you meet casually at the supermarket people you ask at the information counter at the airline counter or somebody was talking earlier today about the the the flight attendants and so on stair you you practice presence you look at them and and you don't reduce them to a role but realized you can sense their beingness but you can only sense if they're there presence if you can sense your own presence it's only through that that you can go look beyond the personality which may be obnoxious in some cases it is may be very difficult and then it gets challenging so then you practice with brief encounters which is beautiful too and then you go into their workplace and then you Angell practice there be the presence in a meeting the next meeting continuously be aware of your state of consciousness hold-hold that presence if you can without any willpower it is not through willpower with presence simply arises and some of you are at the pond many of you at the point where you can actually choose to be present and then you look around the room and one person starts talking and you can and you could give you a complete attention to that person and this is a wonderful wonderful thing to be able to do to give your complete attention to that to you neither argue with him mentally nor do you need to prepare the next thing to say you're just present and so if then you may find that when you begin to speak words will begin to come out of your mouth and they will be inspired and you will say something that is relevant fresh and new and will not contribute to the conflict in that situation so you're not fueling the conflict and even if others are beginning to fight that you need to be really alert not to get drawn in because the egoic unconsciousness of a group can be extraordinarily as an extraordinary powerful pull and if then sometimes happen that in a in a group or meeting one unconscious person can pull the entire group into unconscious reactivity and negativity just one unconscious cover and then and then everybody else who loses presence even they try to fall so it's a it's taken ages but the good thing is presence is also in a good sense contagious so it presence also effects people around you so a wonderful practice meetings and so on are great places I can hear phone ringing somewhere think it's behind okay well this is the world we live is the world we live in what marriage mommy no it isn't time to take a selfie and post it on Facebook yeah this is me in where are we what does it mean when the most present person on the planet says where it means that you're in our conversations and in our talk we are here that's all we're here that's wonderful well I think we should we should talk a little bit about devices given that exchange and I have to tell you all I did have the honor of being seated at the table next to a card at dinner a couple of years ago and I kept thinking you know well first of all I have to put all my devices away and make sure they're all turned off because that would just be awful if anything happened and then I thought I wonder you know if you live as a Luddite I wonder if you actually live device free and you probably have people who read email for you and take phone calls for you because how else can you be fully in the now and so I had this sort of image my story about you it was flattering but it was elevated a bit and yes exactly exactly and so we're talking at some point and we got to talking about dogs because we are both deep dog lovers and all of a sudden you said let me show you a picture of my dog and out comes the phone and the dog with Kim and and we saddled I loved all those dogs and I told that took out my phone then officially and we exchanged pictures of dogs and and so I said okay well that preconceived notion is gone you actually have a phone and it's a smart phone not like an old phone and you use it and there's pictures on it and so you became quite human in that moment to me I already admired you you just became me you're more suitable so so we live in this device world and you do too and and so we're here in part because of the intersection of technology and our wisdom practices and and technology can be helpful but it often isn't and can be distracting and you spoke about that during your your meditative lecture I'll call it how's that as a label yes so how have you navigated the temptation of device distraction and and how can we collectively learn how to continue to stay present and it's really part of the essence of this conference is how do we live in this digital age some of your thoughts on that well I'm I am connected now to the digital world but not as much as most people I must admit I have a cell phone and have a first generation iPad and next and I have the iPad Mini 2 which Kim gave me for my birthday and I enjoy them I'm the I get emails but not in the way that most people get emails because most emails go to the office and only a few people I really admire Arianna of the who earlier today gave you all her email address and I must admit I am NOT going to do that fair enough one reason being although it might be good practice for you but one reason being is it's unlikely that you would get an answer and that would be good practice for you to say oh no answer rather than building a story around it this is a similar if I may just devotion sometimes people send me books but not sometimes I'm I am drowning in manuscripts and books that people send me and they I was the same when I wrote the power of now somebody that you must send they spoke to a Deepak and to Oprah and I said okay on centage of course I didn't get any answer from Deepak or Oprah at first they don't actually look at the books they can't they are drowning in stuff so they cannot look at these things fortunately I didn't have an ego that would indulge in saying they didn't even bother to reply to me they know how can you who are they they pretend to be enlightened didn't even bother to send me a little car that's a it's a lovely story for the ego the ego loves getting in there and saying again but it was fine they didn't answer that's all and it was fine and she two or three years later the book reached them in some way but not because I sent it to them the universe somehow arranged it so the quickly become people have stories quickly about things like that so no emails because you probably wouldn't get an answer and people those few people who have my email address most of them know that they may or may not get an answer and they're fine with it I used sometimes texting which I quite enjoy not obsessively but I use it from time to time with people and as I mentioned two years ago perhaps already I sometimes enjoy sending a space message rather than a text message which goes like this you press on open bracket you have an empty space you go then you close the bracket and then you send it and when that person receives it like they did if their phone goes Bing or whatever it does and they go oh a message without content pure space so and then later I found a turnfight spacing so I recommend it but I would talk to the people beforehand to say that you might get a space passage from me otherwise they won't know what's going on yeah so I also noticed that there is an addictive quality to these things listen to the Internet and there's an addictive quality to all these gadgets that there's already an addictive quality to watching television which was a thing before the all these gadgets came television was the main psychologically addictive thing and people were glued to their sets but now with all those we need to be aware until several speakers have of course gone into it in more detail than I can their enormous possibilities of connectedness and the dissemination of information in our digital age there are wonderful possibilities opening up and some people are fully using like Arianna and some people are fully using an Oprah they're fully using the possibilities that this offers reaching people and getting the message out but there are also enormous dangers for because I mentioned a little earlier the the stuff that people are identified with as themselves and the incessant stream of thinking that of course that wasn't created by the by the digital devices but it's being the addiction to stuff the addiction to the next thought in the next and having to go wherever it wants to pull you which is an unconscious addiction really I call it the addiction to thinking usually when people talk about addiction they don't think of thinking but thinking for most people is addictive and because they the end and it's toxic in many cases so it's like a drug because why is it drug because their sense of who the i's bound up with thinking they've got to think about my life they there's no such thing is your life except as a story in the head life is now you are life you are that so the gadgets they amplify that tendency that was already there full to be no there for thousands of years so the next thing they tend to fill in your mind up even more with one thing after another Facebook Twitter text message email web surfing which all comes in and and you have to and the mind goes reaches there whatever thing demands the minds attention might immediately goes there and at night it's wonderful that Arianna said she has a bit of a bedroom that is free of devices and that's a wonderful practice there you have create a space we need some discipline otherwise the technology which has enormous potential may destroy us I don't know the wish you look at the children young children no longer interacting with their their peers their parents think they're all they don't physical movement they many become obese at five years of age because they don't move anymore and their mind gets sucked into the devices and they feel you take it away from them they experience an enormous pain in the same way that an addict experiences pain when you remove the drug it goes well give my iPad complet with my life and other attention deficit disorder comes in the can't focus on anything for very long because these gadgets are one image flashes one after another so if you want to write a dystopian science fiction novel dystopian of se-na meaning negative utopia I would suggest right technology new technology arises it has an addictive effect it then the generation it's going up grows up with it it prevents people from from focusing attention for anything for very long which is the prerequisite for coming up with anything creative is to become still go in go within and then creative solution comes so a generation grows up this is completely out of touch with the inner being they can no longer have find creative solutions to problems because the deeper place where creativity arises is not accessible to there anymore and two or three generations later the entire civilization collapses this is a dystopian novel which you can write as a warning for what could happen but this is a good sign the fact that we are here it's not going to go that way but it cooked it seems to me there to two potential problems that are interrelated and one other one is the presence of the devices themselves we've talked about and practicing discipline and as you say a number of speakers have talked about rituals in a sense or habits or rules for themselves that allow discipline around when and how to use them the other is that the devices essentially just bring ones work closer but the work is a different kind of pressure and I think we have a room of people many of whom are extremely committed to the work that they're doing the careers their professions the the world-changing work or the device creating work but it's very or both in the same person there's a level of pressure and and excitement and ambition and so forth and so if you imagine the person who works in the sort of competitive fast-paced very exciting technology environment how do you integrate stillness into that in a way that doesn't feel like you have to choose to step off the train you know can you can you be still and be in an environment that is is as wild as that yes that's very challenging some of course to realize that if you don't find the space within where the stuff of your mind is transcended then sooner or later you will encounter suffering a lot of suffering and heal and you will burn out and you will no longer have any creative ideas and you will just maybe try to problem-solve it'll what you need to realize first of all the importance of for yourself the grit is more important as has been said today by there speakers much more important than what you achieve in this world because it's all relative and nothing is going to last for that long much more important than what you achieve is the awakening within you the awakening of consciousness knowing who you are beyond all that knowing what we could call the transcendent dimension to who you are which goes back thousands of years in human spirituality they've all pointed to it in different ways in different words and if you don't realize that is the most important thing in your life then you're going to become unhappy if you're not unhappy already some young people have a residue of vitality so they might not be unhappy yet but then they use that up and then they become very unhappy because they've never found any anything beyond the stuff of their minds this is a terrible fate so this is why this is so important so that requires sense some decisions perhaps and discipline on your part so that you do not allow those things to take over your life in the same way that you do not allow your mind to take over your life and of course in many cases even long before these digital gadgets the human mind has tended to take human beings over and edge and say this is who I am me the story self so it requires discipline and some kind of perhaps even a routine one being what was suggested earlier not to engage in communication through like emails between its certain time period whatever it may be evening and morning so that at night when you wake up you don't go there and and for your children also create space only allow them you could probably cannot totally take it away from them because it's in the culture it's everywhere but create a structure so that for a certain amount of time and don't let the children get lost in the digital world it's a terrible fate don't please don't don't allow the dystopian novel that I just to become reality it will become reality if you allow your children to get totally lost in the digital realm so that that becomes more important to them than the life they can no longer relate to a dream come back to trees we can they can no longer related to them to the river they cannot sensory sensory experience disappears from their lives and it's all concepts and digital images it's a turn distressing so I'm not going to let you end on the dystopian novel but our friends with the ringing phone have have told us we've used our extra time oh I know I didn't say one quickly so rather than end on the dystopia can you tell us briefly where does your hope come from so we can we can end with of hope my hole comes out of this moment being here would you have known that

Channel: Wisdom 2.0 with Soren Gordhamer

Views: 893,970

Keywords: Eckhart Tolle, Wisdom 2.0, Mindfulness, Awakening

Id: fp0gaxFxbB4

Length: 44min 33sec (2673 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 03 2014