This is a YouTube video titled "A Teaching on Inner Spaciousness: 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle" containing a meditation teaching session recorded in July 2022. The content features Eckhart Tolle delivering a monologue on the nature of meditation, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and the transcendent dimension within oneself, emphasizing awareness and inner spaciousness as keys to wisdom and intelligent living.
Welcome to our meditation. That's what it is. I said if that's what it is. Because it's a word that can also be misleading and cause you to believe that there's a separate activity in your life, regular activity, that's called meditation, and that is the rest of your life. What is conventionally called meditation is more than just a practice, it's a state of consciousness. Or you express semantics. You could say that meditation is a practice towards a state of consciousness, and it already becomes problematic because you're now working towards something. So what is conventionally called meditation is not an activity, it's not a doing. So you can't do a meditation. The very idea that you're doing meditation is already the obstacle to true meditation. And true meditation is ultimately not trying to get somewhere, but already realizing that you are already there. It's the realization of being, which is prior to all doing. And it's always there. Usually for most humans, it's not realized simply becoming where? Awareness that you are right now. And it's not concepts, not thoughts, you are not a thought. So any idea you have in your mind about who you are is ultimately false. Becoming aware that I am here now, and that's the arising of spaciousness, inner spaciousness. And the strange thing is that's always there. But if you're not aware of is as if it were not there. In an analogy, one could say you're a wealthy person who doesn't know it, and you're then poor. I use the analogy of the. Somewhere in the book Power of Now, maybe a man sitting on a box, a beggar sitting on a box for years has never looked inside the poor box and the box is full of gold and its ears, but he didn't know it. Or you could have another amusing analogy and say that you. It's like the analogy. Of course, when you use an analogy, we use something from the physical world to point to something that is beyond the physical universe. So we talk about gold, because that's something precious in the physical world. That's how analogies work. So you could also say you're destitute. And you don't really. You don't know that you have a bank account in Switzerland with $100 million, or you've forgotten the number of your bank account. Well, nowadays Swiss bank accounts are not that popular anymore. But just an amusing analogy. It's overlooking something that's incredibly valuable. You can't even decide anything. Nothing in the physical world would even compare, although we use those things. Jesus used the pearl of great price. And so on. Again, things from the physical world to point to something beyond just becoming aware of yourself not as somebody, as a person, but becoming aware of yourself as, one could say, nobody. So you are both. Everybody knows that they are somebody, but not that many people yet. Except those who are awakening know that at a deeper level, they are nobody. No body could also be called no form. On one level, you exist as form, physical form and psychological form as the personality and the body. On another, deeper level, you are the consciousness that's prior to form, but not separate from form. So spiritual awakening is the becoming aware of yourself as just that spacious, formless presence, the light of consciousness. And that realization is inseparable from the present moment. And you could even say that what you are, who or what you are in your essence is the now, the present moment, not what happens in it, but the space of now. The monster, dreadful fate is to be trapped in your personality, not knowing there's anything beyond that. No transcendent and complete unawareness of any transcendent dimension within yourself. And then you carry the burden of a person, personality all your life, the burden of yourself. Troublesome, anxious, angry, depressed, fearful, dissatisfied. Always a sense of something missing. Always looking to some other moment in the future for some kind of fulfillment. And then reaching the end of your life. And it wasn't very enjoyable. And you never really found yourself. Every life is problematic. Occasionally, brief periods may arise in your life when you feel everything is great. And then very quickly, new challenges, new problems arise. It's more normal for life to be problematic than to be free of problems. In fact, externally, life never ceases to be challenging. Almost as if some screenwriter, script writer or write, author in the sky, infinitely creative, would always come up with some new obstacle to put in your path, whatever form it may take. And if you solve one problem, another one crops up somewhere else. Or the very solution, the very way in which you solved a problem, if it was done without wisdom, creates two new ones that are both worse than the original problem. And I just said, in the absence of wisdom, if you try to solve a problem without this essential element, that is not ultimately intelligence, not intelligence that is measured in IQ tests, but something. Because that's a limited form of intelligence, the IQ of intelligence. There's more to intelligence. The real intelligence is wisdom. And that can only rise if you know the transcendent dimension within yourself. You're aware of that, that inner spaciousness, that stillness in the background while you're talking, while you're perceiving things. While you're walking or driving you can sense the beingness that you are the I am the spacious stillness in the background while in the foreground you deal with things you think you do but you're connected to the transcendent dimension which is the essence of who you are if you're connected to transcendent dimension you will still be faced with challenges but the way in which you meet those challenges is very different from the way in which you meet those challenges you are unaware of that dimension the way in which people respond to these challenges is very different what these challenges do to you you're not aware if there's lack of awareness then usually when you try to tackle your problems deal with the challenges of life you do so in a way that is ultimately not intelligent that is reactive and creates further problems also when you are unaware of the transcendent dimension you tend to magnify problems by your reaction you you overreact but you don't know that you think it's a very adequate react it.
