Adding Depth to a Shallow Life | Eckhart Tolle on Experiencing Awakening for Yourself (Part 3)

What we might call a Scheller person is a person who is totally trapped only in the mind activity, the knowledge accumulated by the mind and perceives everything through thoughts. Indeed, in other words, you walk around your life like the tourist who rents this little device and tells them comments about what they are perceiving continuously. That's fine, sometimes it may be necessary. But imagine going through life not being able to get rid of that device. You can't take it off anymore. It keeps commenting. So wherever you go in the street it says, oh, please look at that person there. And you have. And the thing even tells you whether you like it or not. This is. I like that. Oh, I don't like that. That look. I wish I had an answer on. Whatever. And of course, this is how most people live, because they have. They're so identified with the involuntary mind activity, the little voice in the head, they don't even know it. They think they are the voice. And to live through the voice then makes your life quite shallow because whatever you experience lacks depth. You experience it through a concept. Every thought is conceptual. So when you. When, let's say you are in the street, a man or woman comes towards you and your mind immediately has to say something about whether you like or don't like or would like to do something with this person, whatever it may be, or have some kind of reference point or commenting on the way they look weird or strange or nice or I'd love to, whatever. Is there another way of perceiving this human being? Yes, to perceive the human in the same way. If that's what I said about the cathedral, if that resonates with you, if you have had a glimpse of that experience, or perhaps more than a glimpse, then you know the difference between stepping into a place and going, no comment. Well, perhaps the mind says, oh, this is so beautiful. And then there's this stillness again. So there is a still space through which you perceive instead of concepts through which you perceive. And suddenly there's a depth not only you feel. Another dimension is suddenly present, not only outside of you. Another dimension that the tourist who is totally dependent on the. Either the mechanical guide or the human guide is not aware of, that the tourist who only listens to the commentary misses the true aliveness, the sacredness and the depth of that place. And so also within you are trapped in the head. There's no depth into you as a human being where there's something that responds to life and something deeper than the commentary in your head. And so many people these days are trapped Then with this guide, the tourist guide, they can't get rid of. And it's called your mind. And so, not that the mind is not a useful tool. And even in the cathedral, it sometimes it adds a little bit to it if you know something about it. And I would say that's the second stage to come back just for a moment to this cathedral analogy. One could almost say you come back to that, of course, ideally. And what. I do that occasionally, but sometimes we don't have enough time because when we travel first, I love to experience the place without knowing anything and truly experience it, the depth of it, and then perhaps go back to the hotel room and then look at the guidebook and then learn a few facts about it can be quite helpful. Then go back the next day, look at it again, and then you have a balance between knowing things about it and still being able to experience it. So in other words, you have then some information in your head. Oh, this is. I read about that. It was built by such and such, then. And then whatever. And then again, you have the spaciousness where you perceive. Then you look at something else and you, ah, this is a statue of the saint, so. And so. And some. Some knowledge about it that you have had, might have overlooked. Little detail. You can actually see a tear coming out of his eye or whatever. Oh, yeah, there's the tear. He seems to be crying. I don't know why, but it seems to. And then again, you can take it in without the commentary. So that's a little. You can experiment with that. And so I'm using that almost as just an analogy for the whole of your life. Most people are stuck with the tourist guide in the head that's convinced continuously of what's going on in your life and evaluates and interprets and defines in words everything that you perceive. And so in whatever way it is defined or interpreted, depends on your particular conditioning, on the way you were brought up, what you were taught by the surrounding culture, and so on. So the kind of tourist guide you have depends on your past. And so it's really your past talking to you continuously. Certain forms of conditioning from your culture, your education, your family background, what you have read, your fears and ambitions are also expressed there as thought structures become thoughts. What you would like, want, what you fear. What if that happens? Oh, my God, this could go wrong. What if. Of course. So it becomes very problematic because the voice doesn't stop talking except occasional moments when you suddenly feel a heightened sense of aliveness. But perhaps you're out in nature and you're looking up at a tree or a forest or for a moment you say, and then after a few seconds, the mind says, that's beautiful. But for about 10 seconds or 20 seconds, the mind wasn't saying anything. And that's the reason why you. That you can know that it's beautiful. Beautiful is not. The mind cannot really. The mind is concepts. There's no beauty really in that. If something from within you responds to beauty in nature, for a moment, there must have been a space where the tourist guide in the head stopped talking. And in that space there's a deeper experiencing of whatever is there. There's a depth to your experience. What does that mean? It means, yes, what you see is the same, but the state of consciousness through which you see it has deepened. A space has opened up inside you through which the perception happens, and that's the depth. So you could say when you look at something and for a moment, you're not interpreting what you see, there's just the seeing. And you may be aware of the background to what you see, which cannot be defined, but there's a stillness inside while you perceive. This is what I meant when I talked about entering a cathedral. Without the knowledge in your head. So suddenly the mind has become still and the perception happens. So you have two dimensions. You have a stillness in the background, and whatever is going on outside is there. The stillness is the depth that changes your perceptions. Then you see that the tree also has a depth to it and an aliveness and a sacredness that you didn't know before. When you work conceptualizing the tree and said, oh, that's such and such a tree. And whatever knowledge you have, or this tree is in my grandmother's garden too. Or this. I'd like to chop this tree up and use it as my Christmas tree. Or I wonder how much it would be worth the timber if I cut how much the timber would be worth. You're not really. The tree is a surface phenomenon. When you're in that state of consciousness, a utilitarian surface phenomenon on, you cannot sense the depths, the aliveness, the sacredness of the tree. And I'm only using tree as one of many possible examples. Life, really. The tree stands for life.