A 30-Second Practice to Become Fully Present | Eckhart Tolle

Sometimes thinking is helpful and you need it, but a lot of the time it's a prison. It imprisons you. So you become free by discovering, discovering your ability to— Another helpful entry point into presence, present moment, that has been used for thousands of years is quite simply your breath, your breathing. Simply become aware that you're breathing right now, even without wanting to do any particular type of breathing. Become aware that your body is breathing. Become aware means you can sense that the breathing is happening. That is perhaps the most immediate entry point into the present moment. Awareness of your breath, already recommended by the Buddha, might even be older than the Buddha, as a meditation method, but not just as a formal meditation method, as a simple entry point into presence. Become aware that you are breathing. Now being aware is not— could be misunderstood. A person might think become aware of your breathing looks like, oh yes, I'm breathing, what's next? That's not awareness. Awareness of your breathing is to be able to, with your attention, follow the breath as it enters the body and as it leaves the body. So your attention moves with the breath. Now what it does is quite simply, it removes effortlessly, it removes thinking. You can't do both. You can't be aware of your breathing and think at the same time. Occasional fragments of thoughts may come in, but they immediately dissolve again. You can verify for yourself. Are you breathing? Just checking. Are you breathing? Are you aware that you're breathing right now? Sometimes the awareness can sometimes have the effect of lengthening your breath almost without wanting to. So when you become aware of your breathing, that's a wonderful entry point into presence. You are aware of your breathing and thinking subsides. Okay, next thing that could happen is you're not only aware of your breathing, you're also aware of the energy field in your body, not the physical body, but that which— and the animating presence, that which animates the body, the life within the body, not the physical body. And you can sense that your breath can put you in touch with that as your breath moves into the body You feel it going into the abdomen and then spreading out the rest. You can feel the body is alive. You can sense it. I call it the inner body. You can sense the energy behind the physical manifestation of body. And thinking subsides. And then it's easy to take the next step. Well, let's— okay, let's start breathing. Beginning to feel to some extent there's an energy field behind the physical body, within the physical body. Sense perceptions. Now you're able to look around and to listen and to hear. Let's just talk about the two predominant sense perceptions: seeing and hearing. And you're able to— and this is an important part of it— you're able to perceive without labeling, without interpretation. This room, flower, man sitting on a chair, and you just see it, but you don't— you don't interpret it, you don't label it in any way. You just allow it. Again, allowing it just to be as it is. What is there to interpret? You can perceive it without thought just through awareness instead of through the veil of thinking. Perceiving through awareness rather than always perceiving through the veil of thinking. Sometimes thinking is helpful and you need it, but a lot of the time it's a prison. It imprisons you. So you become free by discovering, discovering your ability to to perceive without needing to interpret what you're perceiving. And you know what you're perceiving, but this knowing is not conceptual anymore. When you look at another human being in that state of perception, of non-conceptual perception, in a way you know that you're looking, that there's another human being, but not conceptually. So you discover a deeper way of knowing that humans have kind of— they have in the past, perhaps they had it a bit more than they have now. You can know something, there's a knowing through concepts, but there's a deeper knowing where concepts are not needed. So you can look at the flower And you can know this flower without knowing anything about it and without telling yourself anything about it. You can— you perceive the flower in that space of stillness, and you know it, but not conceptually. You know it at a deep level because you can sense. This sounds a little strange, perhaps. You can sense the beingness of the flower, which you could never sense through concepts, mental concepts. You sense it is alive. You sense that there is an essence in the flower that is far beyond the surface appearance of the flower. There's far more to it than what you see on the surface. But it begins with a surface perception. And then if you don't label the surface perception, a depth reveals itself to you that is in all things, a depth that is there that you could never grasp through mental concepts. Now, if you do it with— then you— and then not only that, there is a sense of oneness with that which you are perceiving. When you perceive through concepts, there is immediately a sense of separation from what you're perceiving. So there's this sense of oneness, like the flower and you. It maybe sounds a little mystical, but it's beautiful. The flower and you become almost a single thing. You merge with a flower, so to speak, or it can be a tree, or it can be anything. Now imagine with a human being. Now you're in front of another human being, whether it's a stranger or somebody you know very well, your partner or stranger, doesn't matter. Now you're looking at a human being. Now usually when you are trapped in mental concepts, you have immediately a screen of labels through which you interpret this human being. When you let go of that, you can sense something deeper, just as you could in the flower. You can actually sense the being of that human. And this is why I love the fact that the English language does not have a word for human being. There isn't a single word. In the past, they used man to signify men and women, but you can't do that anymore because— so the German has a word Mensch, which is a human being, could be a man or a woman or any other gender. Now we have human being. The way I use this term is the human is the conditioned entity, you as a person. In most interactions, that's all you ever— the human interacts with another human. That's all there is in— when there's absence of the spiritual dimension, unawakened relationships, there's only an interaction between one conditioned human with another conditioned human. Two forms of conditioning interacting, and it's not surprising that very quickly conflict arises because of the two types of conditioning. So in almost every interaction, in the absence of the deeper, the spiritual dimension, conflict is virtually inevitable. So you're the human interacting with another human, but where is the being? Because you're not just a human, you are a human being. But the being is the unconditioned dimension, the unconditioned consciousness that most humans are unaware of. It's like almost the most important dimension of who they are is not— they don't, haven't never heard about it, have no access to it seemingly. Nobody has told them, even if they go to churches, they didn't quite— this is, if they could see the deeper meaning of the teachings, everybody would know it. There's a— in every human, in yourself, there's a human level which has its forms of conditioning, it has its characteristics of the personality, it's weird kinds of stuff. But behind it is the being. Now, are you able to— before you're able to sense the being of the other human, you have to sense it in yourself, that dimension in yourself. Otherwise, you cannot sense it in the other. So how do we do that? We're already beginning with that by going into We entered the presence through breath awareness. We became aware of sensory perceptions without needing to interpret them, letting the present moment be. And now we become aware this moment, the sense perceptions Breathing. Okay, what else? What else? What else is there to be? Oh, what else is the, the awareness itself that makes it all possible, that makes sense perception possible? That makes thinking possible too. So the question arises: are you able to be aware right now that you are aware? Can you sense the beingness that is the awareness when it becomes conscious, the beingness in you behind the person. Thinking does not help you. Thinking is the hindrance. So you let go of trying to figure out through thinking what it is. If you open up a moment of no thought like now, let's— this space between my two hands symbolizes a space of simple, pure awareness.