Meditation: Eckhart Tolle

well good to be here and now on the screen that I have here maybe it's a prompter although I'm not going to read anything from there it says the power of the present moment of meditation so that's what I'm supposed to do with you now this is not a meditation where you need to go because sometimes the moment one says meditation everybody goes [Music] [Applause] you can't sit like that all the time and it's but it's always the present moment so with the present moment meditation it's something slightly different it's a amazing thing the present moment usually overlooked so the most amazing thing I call it singing of course it's not a thing the most amazing thing in your life for most people in the normal state of consciousness and normal means somewhat or very insane in the normal state of consciousness the present moment is usually overlooked habitually unconsciously people have been conditioned to overlook the most important thing there ever is because the entire life consists of the present moment there never has been anything else everything happened in the present moment and when you remember it it's the present moment and when you think about the future which of course never arrives as the future it can only arrive as the present moment but people live as if the present moment were undesirable or an obstacle or they actively disliked it and some people habitually live actively disliking the isness of the present moment and that's their normal state of consciousness sometimes it's hidden so when you become aware of the present moment and sometimes people realize when I talk about it all of you of course know this already but there may be some tuning in through the media who don't know this yet when you realize that that's all there ever is the entire life consists of the now it can only unfold in the now which is now any emotion you feel anything you think anything that happens any experience it's all inseparable from the now but the now to most people is an abstract thing and not interesting enough so let's see what that means and let's make it into meditation so let's call this our meditation this afternoon the journey into the now usually when you talk about the now then people it's usually associated with okay the first thing that appears when in your awareness perhaps is your surroundings and that's already a great step into the now is the first important step into the now to become aware of whatever surrounds you the space that surrounds you wherever you may be and whatever takes place in that space and you may notice when you become aware of those sense perceptions because it's true sense perceptions that you become aware of whatever happens around you that involves visual auditory and such to some extent the other senses to the main ones being visual and seeing and hearing so as we enter the now we become more aware of our surroundings it's the first step into the now and know when you do that and let's do that now just not as not thinking I'm going to practice now not just become aware of your surroundings no practice and it's not a doing it's just it and awareness arises of this room the people in this room the man sitting on the chair talking the lights beautiful arrangement there and that is the space of now so you so what the word to use is you acknowledge what is and close to acknowledging you go a little bit deeper you appreciate what is what before you probably overlooked completely and that's already a wonderful thing and there are some people who are not yet ready to go any deeper than that and that's fine it's enough to just go two steps into the now well let's just call it three people like the idea of steps let's call it step one you become more aware of your surroundings step two you acknowledge and with the acknowledgement comes a sense of the goodness of the ways in which life manifests continuously around you there is an aliveness in everything even in the middle of a city you might say oh I prefer the forest or the beach or the mountains but even in the middle of the city whatever happens all the movements in the middle of a city are manifestations of life - manifesting as human beings running around as cars as houses buildings and noise and so on and there's also something there that is fine knowledge of life and then it comes an appreciation you might see something that you thought before had not appreciated the sky for example how many times are you aware of the sky and say oh and it's beautiful and even a cloudy sky is always this light filtering through the clouds now you might notice when you become aware of the what I call the surface of now which are the sensory perceptions that reveal the world to you already a shift in consciousness happens because now you're not thinking as much you cannot be very much aware of sense perception and really be looking at the sky or at a tree or a flower or a street scene and be thinking a lot you have to be really there as the presence for example now so you simply acknowledge the totality of this rules and that's beautiful and then you go a little deeper still the next step takes you deeper then you can ask yourself what else is there to the now apart from the things that arise in my sense perception what else is there say anything else is that what the now is what appears in the now no it's what appears in the now but it's not yet the now so to become aware of the present moment to become aware of sense perceptions is an important step and some people are so out of touch with their surroundings they are never where they are they are in their the stream of their thinking with only enough attention not to bump into things like that's a but that's all the attention they gave they of their can they can maneuver their way through the furniture or the streets but most of their attention is on the stream of thinking a lot of it by the way useless you might have noticed and a lot of that negative too critical critical complaining having an issue with this of that thinking about an unpleasant person yesterday or 10 years ago and thinking what might go wrong tomorrow or tonight in all kinds of it takes you to that that consciousness is continuously being absorbed by thinking and people are in the grip of the stream of thinking it pulls you along amplified these days by the digital gadgets we might be talking about it a little later so the grip of compulsive thinking with one thing after another arises in your mind and you identify with everything that comes into your mind amplified as I said by the digital stuff which called want your attention this is important another email coming in a text message it must be important somebody just posted something on Facebook and you see a photo of a dinner plate having dinner and of course then you have to reply and say cool cool that's great and that absorbs all the attention is continuously being so it was bad enough before the digital things but now it gets amplified most stuff in your mind stuff more stuff and you're drowning it stuff and I'm not meaning physical stuff some people also drown in physical stuff but you're drowning in mental stuff one thought after another one text message after another one Facebook posted after another one unpleasant memory or anxious thought after another one complaint of after another about other people what they didn't fail to do and should have done but didn't do but so it's there's no end to the stuff and you missing the present moment you continuously your attention is absorbed by useless and compulsive thinking and imagine living like that for 10 20 30 40 years what that does to your have bit your state of consciousness and you as a person what kind of person does that state of consciousness produce anxious angry whatever the material state is to continuously dissatisfied continuously needing desperately the next thing which never it's never enough that's it so this is what we are getting out of just wanted to show you a little illustration of a normal state so now we go back into the present moment and as you become more aware of your sense perceptions your alertness and when I say alertness don't let that be just a conceptual thing alertness needs to be something that you can only can only know what alert awareness is by experiencing alert awareness you cannot understand conceptually what alert awareness is and everybody here I would can no knows already and can verify in their own experience the difference between being absorbed in your inner being identified with a voice in your head which is a bit your compulsive thinking and being in a state of alert awareness which looks like this you don't have to look like that I'm acting it I'm just wanting to give a visual representation of it and you may notice suddenly this is called now oh by the way there's been a lot of talk about mindfulness here I just wanted to mention I never used the word mindfulness except when I explained why I don't use it there's there's nothing wrong with mindfulness it's just that my preference is to use to call it presence reason being to me mindfulness implies that your mind is full and we don't want that so but if you you're very welcome to use it's perfectly fine to use that word it's just my preference its presence so what arises here is presence when you become a mayor aware of your sense perceptions there needs to be less thinking and more presence so thinking subsides with that alertness it arises and don't let it just be words now as I speak you can verify in yourself that there can be a subtle shift from being involved in thinking and to suddenly being being fully here with your attention so your little thought now because he can't be fully aware and be thinking now the next step down into the now is as you become more aware of your sense perceptions you may also sense the simple but beautiful fact that you are alive and how do you sense that that sometimes comes naturally as thinking subside somewhat alertness remains and you can feel that there's an aliveness pervading your entire body subtle somewhere but you can sense that in your arms your legs your feet there is an aliveness and that become part of it can become part of your experience of them now so now you begin to be present what we could call present within and present without so you can sense your own aliveness if you can't sense it ask yourself for those few people here probably very few who cannot sense the inner energy field of the body what I call the inner body I asked sometimes if you close your eyes hold your hands like this and ask yourself how can I know without looking or moving my hands whether my hands are still there it's a funny question how can I know without looking at my hands or moving my hands or touching anything how can I know that my hands are still there and at that moment you cannot get a conceptual answer for that you can only get an experiential answer by suddenly experiencing an aliveness inside your hands because your attention has moved from thinking has disengaged from the movement of thought and it's flowing into your hands and in the same way if you can feel your hands you can feel your feet at the same time and that you can feel the entire body is a subtle energy field and that's lovely place to be and that you begin to be more rooted in the and you are present within and without as being in the body I call that sometimes an anchor for staying present it can be helpful because the mind is very the egoic mind the unconscious mind is very clever and if you don't especially as you begin to practice presence if you don't have an anchor for the present moment the mind will very quickly come in with a thought and that thought could be anything but it will claim to be extraordinarily important and it will say follow me you need to think about this this requires your immediate attention at 3:30 in the morning in bed and that thought of course may proliferate into other thoughts anxious thoughts regretful thoughts what if that what about my whole life I have to work out my life where what smile it's the Albany useless whatever done with my life what about my life is what is my life it's a mental construct that you call my life and you miss the actual life in the present moment but so you need to know that the thought will that's very seductive and hypnotic at you it will come in and grab your attention again if you don't know what it's doing but if you know that this is what it's doing then you can say oh not just say it you can just be aware that there's another thought that wants to come in and at that moment when there's an awareness you don't have to follow the thought you can just let allow it to pass through your mind and then it's gone again and then you can say my choice is to have my attention in the body and you don't even have to verbalize that the choice comes you know that this is your choice and then you're no longer suffering from an unpleasant sleepless night you're actually having a wonderful meditation and not asking that this moment should be any different from the way it is and you sense the aliveness in your energy field that's your life and the present moment the aliveness of the present moment and then perhaps and now we can go even deeper sense perceptions acknowledging appreciating feeling the energy field in the body all these things arise in the present moment and have you missed anything without what is it that makes up the totality of the present moment it is sense perceptions feelings there may be thoughts still coming and going you don't have to follow them but they still come and go some thoughts and then their spaces in between new thoughts and this is extraordinarily important to discover that there is such a thing in you as a space between one thought and another so there's no longer an uninterrupted stream of thinking suddenly you become aware of a space and that feels extraordinarily good and powerful and you feel then really you come to yourself not the self that has a story not the self the sense of self that is identified with your history your personal history but something that transcends your personal history something that transcends also whatever arises in your sense perceptions what is it the deepest level of now and actually the essence of now is this what is it that enables you to be aware of your sense perceptions what is it that enables you to have a thought what is it that enables you to feel your body so there's something else there that's not a thing and we could call that your presence or we could call that the space of awareness or we could call that consciousness itself and the most wonderful thing in your meditation is the discovery of yourself not as a person with a limited history that also that dimension still exists but there is a deeper dimension in you where whatever happened to the person good of that is transcended and becomes irrelevant a deeper sense of beings or self when you can realize that that which makes your sense reception possible your any thought possible and emotion possible is the fact that there is a light of presence in you in that light of presence you perceive this room in that light of presence as thought comes and goes if too many thoughts come and you no longer have any gap in thoughts the light of presence becomes obscured it's still there but it's like a totally cloudy day you can't see the Sun anymore it's still filtering through but you don't know it all you see is the clouds and that's normal the destiny for millions of humans still on the planet all they all they know is the stuff in their minds the entire sense of self is derived from the stuff in their mind dreadful fate but nobody tells us that it's dreadful it's so normal if you're born in a mental asylum then you don't know that everybody is insane because if everybody's the same so this is what we are going beyond is a what arises the possibility of entering a different state of consciousness not just as an isolated experience as a meditation track but to bring to bring that let's go back into it now the awareness that you are aware that sounds a little funny can you be aware right now that everything that you perceive or think or feel can only be there because you are there as the space for it the space of awareness in which that arises another question one could ask to point you to that inner reality is to ask what does it feel like to be you without taking recourse to memory to be you and now not remembering your story it's only a story in the mind but what does it feel like to be you now you can only there's no conceptual answer because I was asking about an actual experience or realization right now here now what does it feel like what is the essence of who you are can you can you see can you sense your own presence now when I say your own it's not only correct it's not yours but let's just put it an extra moment can you sense the very presence that you that is the essence of who you are and it has no form it is just spacious awareness that's the amazing thing to know yourself as spacious awareness that frees you from believing that your personal history is who you are because your personal history is not that great mine isn't it would be frustrating if I thought of my personal history Who I am is it's come about through transcending my personal history not but it's not my pass on history showing this great things no it's realizing the relative insignificance of my personal history the present your own present so for some people one pointer works better than another pointer that's why I give you a choice of pointers so you can ask yourself oh I can ask you are you aware or can you be aware right now of the fact that you are aware can you be conscious of the fact that you are conscious that still sounds realistic because I was using language but it's only because I'm using language what really happens when you are aware that you're conscious is not that here is me and here's I'm aware of my consciousness subject an object that's not how consciously can't be aware of consciousness like that you can only be aware of consciousness as yourself as the eternal subject it can your consciousness can never become something that becomes an object in consciousness that everything else is an object in consciousness but you cannot be aware of consciousness as an object because consciousness is you the essence of you and that essence of you is the essence of the present moment so when we go to the deepest level of the present moment when you go to the deepest level of the moment what do you find and what do you discover yourself the essence of you so the essence of youth which is conscious space is inseparable from the essence of the present moment so when you go deep into the present moment which is the vertical dimension where most of life unfolds on the horizontal dimension past and future I need to do this to get there and remember this the vertical dimension is associated with the stuff in your mind and that keeps you trapped and over here suddenly in the mouth of the horizontal dimension is the stuff in your mind the vertical is no it takes you deeper into the now and to the point of discovery that the essence of now is ultimately who you are and this is a wonderfully liberating realization because it frees you from a false sense of self if you don't realize the essence of who you are you spent your whole life in a false sense of self which I call the ego it's a false sense of self that is derived from mind activity + emotions that accompany mind activity and an entire because and because you are so identified with the mind an entire sense of self which is the ego is derived from certain habitual and repetitive thought patterns + emotional and reactive patterns that bundle of repetitive unconscious compulsive thought patterns and REE active and emotional patterns that go with it that bundle that people who don't know that the deeper levels of who they are that is called the person the bundle of habitual thoughts that tell you your story and you you tell it to others - you want to hear my story you have suffered not listen to my story your suffering is nothing oh it's my dad used to say whenever somebody said I have a pain here I have a pain there you say you have a pain I've had a pain for years I don't even talk about it you can enhance your sense of self in that way it's all a false sense of self and you are trapped in that what the Buddha called the the delusory self Mississippi the self that has no ultimate reality so the Buddha said there is no self the self are not in the Pali language in the old scriptures the unreality of the self is mind made to entity and so the Buddha's teaching was it pointed one of the essences in the Buddhist teaching is emptiness what does that remind you a when spacious awareness presents emptiness no form Jesus has the same message the kingdom of heaven does not come with signs to be perceived does that mean it means you can never say oh there it is why can't you say oh there it is because you are it it can never become an object in your consciousness because it is consciousness itself and people have been repeating the words of Jesus for 2,000 years with who under who is understood them very few maybe one or two Buddhists [Applause] so this this is the secret of life and it's so simple she's not who you are know who you are beyond the surface itself and doesn't mean you can't remember your history anymore of course you can remember your personal history that's fine but you are no longer trapped in that exclusively personalized sense of me it's such a frustrating way to live with sustenance little me always feels threatened by things and needs to it but identify with other things and never feeling complete never feeling satisfied for very long always a sense of not enough awful way to live so we are transcending that and that's the shift in consciousness and then as you breathe you bring in into your daily life that spacious awareness the awareness of yourself as spacious consciousness she can also call stillness there's a stillness even as you speak you can still feel the underlying presence in the foreground you speak you listen you do things in the background the spacious awareness in other words you sense your own presence which is not your own because it's the it your own presence is one with universal presence you might have noticed I don't use the word God because the moment you use God it becomes another concept in your mind so the Buddha very wisely avoided it and when they asked the Buddha you never talk about God they say to the Buddha why is there God and of course this is the end of our meditation the Buddha's answer was as reported in the scriptures when he was asked is there a god the Buddha kept noble silence that's the answer you

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 2,909,263

Rating: 4.827271 out of 5

Keywords: Eckhart Tolle (Author), Meditation, Wisdom 2.0, mindfulness

Id: foU1qgOdtwg

Length: 36min 22sec (2182 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 02 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/holden_caulfield1]

I work for an hour and then watch tolle for 15 mins and then work for another hour and then tolle and that's how my day goes. I sleep to his voice and wake up with alertness and joy.His teachings have a direct effect on me. Am I crazy , am I od'ing on him?

[u/nichefiend]

I stumbled upon Eckhart Tolle on YouTube one day whilst I was in the midst of a very hard time in my life. The hardest and darkest in fact. I watched video after video from there and read The Power of Now. I cannot stress enough the impact he has had on my life and how much of a better place I am in now. Life is infinitely better and I see life and the world in a new way.

[u/AbominableAlmond]

“A New Earth” by Tolle is a fantastic, eye-opening read.

[u/thespeakergoboom]

Eckart has the gift of teaching the essence of mindfulness in such a beautifully simple way. I reread The Power of Now every few years and my practice deepens each time.

[u/Nixus043-]

Saved for later . Thanks

[u/mkhural]

Not exactly the best example to follow though. He didn't work for his supposed enlightenment as many of us are trying to do. He just woke up with it one day. I find his diction grandiose and pretentious in the literal meaning.

If it helps you then by all means listen to him. My main criticism of him is that he teaches that we should be present above all else and to ignore our thoughts and feelings. This clearly goes against the foundation of mindfulness meditation and why it is so effective. Mindfulness meditation instead teaches to acknowledge and understand your thoughts and feelings so that you can free yourself from their hold. Tolle's path instead seems to promote the illusion of presence via delusion, instead of expanded awareness.

[u/mazuzu212]

I really like the way he puts it especially the humor :)

[u/[deleted]]

I want to bring up a common criticism of Tolle -- that he speaks of "auras". I believe this is the only "woowoo" in his teachings (which I am very familiar with). In a similar vein would be his description of the "pain body" that develops in people and even collective trauma of society.

If you had told folks 100 years ago that thoughts physically exist, they would not be able to understand what you were saying. If you said it today, many or most would not.

But the reality is, thoughts have a physical component. At what level? I couldn't speak to. I am merely stating what I consider an indisputable truth -- that the thoughts in your mind have a corresponding physiological state, be it neurons or brain chemistry -- things beyond my understanding.

But because it exists, I know it is real.

I also know that feelings and emotions exist on levels deeper than what surfaces in the conscious mind. Most would consider that another indisputable truth.

But somehow, to put these concepts together and describe the collective attunement we have to each other's mood states (which people are sensitive to, and many animals as well such as dogs -- this is well studied and understood) as auras makes him a nut job?

Is he a nutjob for recognizing the way a bad mood can spread? Or because he speaks of the way the inner anger of a person can manifest in subtle ways, picked up subconsciously by the people around them (some more sensitive than others)?

First, conventional language does not exist to describe much of what he goes into therefore it makes sense he would invent his own terms just to communicate on a functional level. Doesn't make it magic, doesn't make it pseudoscience.

He is simply creating mental space to even begin to contemplate these abstractions with his terms, a necessary precursor to learning.

[u/[deleted]]

This was wonderful! His talk on the normal state of consciousness was profound for me as a beginner at meditation. Thanks for sharing this presentation.