- There are thousands
or hundreds of thousands where you go on every day,
they look on their screen, waiting for the next
scene to be offended by. (crowd laughs) And the ego loves it. (bell chimes) The transcendence of thinking means the transcendence of the egoic mind. It means that you are able to spend part of your time relatively free of compulsive thinking, certainly free of self-serving thinking and destructive thinking that continuously creates unhappiness for yourself and the people around you. How many people live in
the compulsive narrative in your mind, that for many
people is very negative, constantly critical, constantly complaining and
never at ease with what is? There's always something
wrong, forward finding, because the ego grows through
the constant opposition, constant antagonism, never at ease, always looking for the next
thing to complain about. And it strengthens the egoic itself, the more you complain. Offended is a new version these days that's very popular on the internet. (crowd laughs) I'm very offended. Outrageous. How dare you? There are thousands or
hundreds of thousands that you go on every day,
they look on their screen, waiting for the next
thing to be offended by. (crowd laughs) And the ego loves it. And for many of them, it's the only way they can inflate their ego,
by sitting on the screen and sending out tweets. (crowd laughs)
(Eckhart laughs) The transcendent of thinking is not any kind of regressive movement. We are not regressing
to the state of somebody whose mind is relatively undeveloped and who does not have a
problem with egoic thinking because there's very little
going on in their minds, what used to be called before it became
politically incorrect, idiot (crowd laughs) or fool. The fool was, they were always, you
could see happy fools. There's not enough thinking
to make them unhappy, so they are below egoic thinking. In medieval times, every village had at least
one village idiot or fool, and they were normal. It was accepted, essential
part of the community. And even the royal courts had a fool. A very important figure,
although that figure probably was just pretending to be a fool, and that was one of the most sometimes very influential position
in the royal court, but also one of the most
dangerous jobs you could have, 'cause you could lose
your head at any moment. But only the fool was able
to tell the king or queen what was wrong by making
it into a funny story. But the fool is more deeply connected, as we know from mythology, the fool is more deeply
connected with the source. Still hasn't gone as far out
as a normally developed human. He's more simple. He, the fool, for example, of relatively speaking is a simpleton. It's like the Hobbit
in "Lord of the Rings". The Hobbit is a simple guy. Doesn't think in complex terms. Loves the simple things of life,
loves eating and enjoyment, but why the fool has to go
on this important mission that nobody else can carry out, that's a mythological motive. That's often the case because the fool has a
connectedness still with source that the more developed humans don't have. A similar motive in
"Forrest Gump", the movie. The fool does great things,
this guy, Forrest Gump, but he's, because he's, and life always supports him. If you watch that movie again, he always, he saves people in the war, he does heroic things, but
he doesn't claim credit because he doesn't have
much of an ego yet. And all his life gives him the next thing and the
next thing, supports him. But we don't want to go there. When I say cessation of thinking, I'm not talking about regressing to the stage that is
the pre-thinking stage of humanity. I'm thinking about rising above, pointing to the possibility
of rising above thinking. So you stop thinking, which is normally associated with diminishment of consciousness, and transcends of thinking is an intensification of consciousness, turning up the light. This is why the term
attention and alertness, those terms are extremely important. They're also used in zen very frequently. The zen teachings could be described, if you wanted to summarize zen, you can just say simple
things like, pay attention. There was one zen teacher who would whenever they asked
him a question to explain zen, he was became quite famous. He would always raise his finger. "Please explain Zen to us. "What is zen? "I haven't quite understood yet." (crowd laughs) He was calling people to attention. Now, this attention,
there's a state of attention that sometimes people experience when they are engaged
in dangerous activity. You can climb a mountain. Do you think you're doing much thinking when you're hanging on this wall? No, you can't. You have to be absolutely
present in that moment. You have transcended thinking and the situation has forced you, is forcing you into complete presence, this highest degree of alertness. Without it, you slip and you're gone. And so this high degree of alertness, however, has no tension in it. In the case of somebody
practicing dangerous sport, yes, there is physical tension, but the state itself has no tension in it, and you do not need to engage in a dangerous activity in order to (crowd laughs) enter that state. We are entering it here,
because even as I talk about it, I hope, well, I don't really hope anything, but I trust that as I speak about it, simultaneously you're listening to it. You can verify in yourself
this state of attention, which is a state of very high alertness, but there's no tension in it. It's not the alertness that
sometimes goes with fear and then you go, but it's not, ahh. That's really a contraction
of the entire body and it's not really alertness. It's, oh. So that's not it. It's a relaxed alertness. There's both yin and yang in it coming together, and it's that. I also mentioned the other day, when you first look at something
for the first few seconds, a new vista, a new landscape, you enter a room or you step out of a room into the open or whatever it is, or suddenly something new
comes into your field of, into your perceptual field, in the first two or three seconds, you don't know what it is. You have to first take it in, and there's a moment of
alert presence in this, but usually you're only aware
of the sense perception. You're not aware of the background of the alert presence itself. But you can be aware of
the alert presence itself as you take it in, and that's the key. So you're not just alertly present. You're aware of the field of
alert presence in yourself, so to speak, as yourself, and the awareness of it
and it are the same thing. Cessation of thinking, now, you can try it. Let's, even now, I would
suggest that as I'm speaking, you may find or you may not know this yet, in the moments when I'm not speaking, like now, and now,
(crowd laughs) and now, if you're alert, you're not thinking. You're just present. And now. There's just an alert field of presence. So some of you may not be able yet to be
totally free of thinking, but I believe that most
people are able to, well, they have short gaps of no thought, pure awareness or no
thought, just to show. (Eckhart hisses) And then you look around. In that moment, your whole, your personal
sense of self has receded. In a moment of pure
presence, which is just this, you have no memories and you
have no expectations for future because you have no thought, but you're not, you haven't fallen asleep. You're very awake. In that moment, you're
not a person anymore. What are you? Just a field of consciousness,
conscious presence. Something has emerged from within you and has taken place of the person. The person is still there. It's just gone receded. If the only thing you achieve in life is this, that you are able to be free of compulsive
and addictive thinking, if you're able to, almost one could say, to choose not to think when there's
nothing in particular to think about, when
you can just be present, in other words, if you
can step out of thinking into aware presence, that alert space, then that is the greatest thing you could achieve in this lifetime, that any human could
achieve in this lifetime. And yet there's nobody left
to say, I have achieved it. That's a problem for the ego. The ego would love to say, oh, I have achieved the state of presence. (crowd laughs) (Eckhart laughs) So it's not an achievement. I'm just saying it's an achievement, but it's not really. (crowd laughs) Because you didn't do it. You got out of the way
and then it happened. (waterfall rushes)
