15 Minute Guided Meditation | Complete Attention to This Moment with Eckhart Tolle

Foreign welcome to another live meditation. Sometimes people ask, what is meditation? And meditation could be defined in negative terms simply by saying, you're no longer waiting for the next thing to happen, but you're not going to sleep either. And of course, to be added to this, I'm no longer dwelling on the last thing that happened, or the one before, or the one before. But there's simply complete attention to this moment, and this is what we are here to learn or deepen. Paying complete attention to this moment without reference to past. We're not imposing the past on the present. How do we usually impose the past on the present? By commenting, interpreting, labeling, liking, disliking, saying good, bad. That's how we impose the past on the present, in other words, through thinking. And then we perceive the reality, the external reality, through the veil of thought, which is conditioned by our past, the culture you grew up in, your personal history, the collective history, and so on. An enormous liberation comes, the only true liberation, when you no longer compulsively label and interpret things as they happen or as they are, whether it's things that are happening around you, things that other people say or do. And one could say that a higher form of intelligence begins to operate in your life when you are able to pay attention to something without labeling or interpreting it. And that's a wonderful practice in itself, and we are practicing this now. You can allow this moment to. To be as it is without having to call it anything. The Buddha used the expression, or something like that, freedom from opinions, which points to the same thing. So any situation in your life that arises, you can approach it through the veil of preconceptions and opinions and conditioned thinking and interpreting and labeling, or you can face it as it is in that pure space of awareness, just that you look at it, look in a wider sense, not just visual looking. So we're using. You look at what is. And there's an enormous intelligence behind that, which is non conceptual. It's nothing to do with knowledge. And as this emerges, that which before had run your life, which we could call the personality or the person that consists of incessant mind activity accompanied by waves of emotion, that which normally runs a person's life, what a person is identified with, recedes still there somewhere, of course, but something else emerges, we could call that, and I've called it that before, your essence identity, as opposed to your form identity, which is all that most people know about themselves is their form identity, physical form, psychological form, the me, the psychological me entity, and that in itself, without the essence Awareness of essence, which is awareness itself. Your personality is a kind of present, an enormous limitation that confines you. Trapped in a personalized sense of self and nothing else, nothing, not aware of anything beyond that at all. The spaciousness, the depths within you, the vastness of that, the peace, the aliveness that's there. Completely unaware of that, and just continuously preoccupied with protecting, defending and strengthening that purely personalized sense of self. And that's what makes up most people's lives. And it's boring. It's so boring once you see that there's no solution there ever. To the dilemma that the personalized sense of self finds itself in, even considers it considers itself to be. Most people are a problem to themselves, a walking problem in search of a solution. Part of that is that sense of. There's always something missing here, not quite right, something lacking still, of course there is something lacking, but it's not to be found within the realm of form. That which this personalized sense of self consists of, it can only be found beyond that. And so there suddenly is cessation in the stream of thinking. And just a sense of alive presence. It, as it first arises in you. Perhaps you need a set aside a time or space every day when you access that, when you're not being disturbed. But ultimately that essence identity is not something that then exists in a separate compartment from the form identity, you as the personality, which of course is still there. So it's not that occasionally you take a vacation from your personality. At first it might seem like that that's quite a relief too, from time to time, take a vacation from your personality. And that's why people meditate and other people might take drugs, but they are very different things. So it's not ultimately a question of taking a vacation from your personality, your person, the person, but of bringing the essence identity into everyday life. Not as a separate thing that you do only when you're not being challenged, but to bring that spaciousness into everyday life, even while you're engaged in activities. And then you move in the two dimensions. You embody the two dimensions, which we could call the physical realm, the physical and mental realm. They're all the world of form, whether it's physical forms or mental formations. You embody the physical and mental, and to use an ancient term, the spiritual dimension. In other words, the spiritual dimension. Coming into this world, so to speak. It.