A Eckhart Tolle talk (YouTube transcript) introducing presence: the present moment as the only true reality, experiential stillness as a portal to the timeless/spiritual dimension, and the human problem of identification with a conditioned mind (mental/emotional noise and the burdensome ego). The speaker uses anecdotes (e.g., reactions to The Power of Now, a Time magazine review) and simple metaphors to contrast presence with compulsive thinking.
The present moment, which is all there ever is for most people. Not you, because you're all awakening beings. Well, most of you except one or two who came here reluctantly because your friend or relative said you need to come. We don't know whether you're ready or not for this. Maybe you are. Maybe you go, wow. Or maybe you go, I can't stand this anymore. He's talking nonsense. Mumbo jumbo. A little anecdote before I carry on. When the Power of Now came out after a year or so, more and more people were communicating, mostly through letters. At the time, I don't know if the Internet existed, but people didn't use it very much. Letters came from all parts of walks of life. Aaron mentioned earlier in the introduction, and people responded to it from. There were old people, some younger people, not younger people. Gradually they came. Also they gradually grew. There were people from Buddhist monks. I got some letters from Buddhist monks, Christians, some Christian nuns. Prisons. Now we work more and more with people in prison. People who were close to death come later and say, wow, this was so wonderful. And finally the book came to the attention of a certain famous news magazine, and they wrote a review of it. And the reviewer was not ready for it. And the reviewer summarized the book as mumbo jumbo. Now, not surprisingly, the name of the magazine was Time. Now I understand why the interviewer did not get it. Because the Power of Now is about the timeless dimension of consciousness. How could a reviewer for Time possibly understand? Not surprisingly, soon after, the magazine went into a slow and then accelerating decline. And I haven't seen it at newsstands in a long time. It may still exist in the cloud or wherever, the mysterious digital world. So it's a little bit like Time. It's a little bit like a criminal who commits bad things. And you see the effect of what the criminal did. Suddenly, this is gone. And then he's destroyed that. Oh, it's destroyed. What happened to it? Well, he was here. Mr. Time came. Where is he now? I don't know. The effect of it you see everywhere. But where is he? A criminal? That you can never see or catch. The effect of time you see everywhere. So there's only the present moment in your immediate experience. That's a very important realization because that takes you the awareness of that fact, not just intellectual recognition that this is actually so, but to actually sense the. I don't dare I say it, to sense the power of the present moment. That is something that one cannot explain. We are very fortunate. I noticed when I came on earlier to do the sound check. We are very fortunate in this place because almost everywhere where I talk there's always some background noise, air conditioning. But here there is absolute stillness. And that's now. And I sometimes recommend to be aware of stillness. And that also that awareness is inseparable from the present moment. So to just. This is the. I sometimes call it the portal into the spiritual dimension, the transcendent dimension, the timeless dimension, the deeper dimension to who you are. To who or what you are. The depth within you that is transcendent. The deep I that is underneath, so to speak, the surface I personality that everybody has one. It is the script that is built into your mental and emotional field. That you grow up as you accumulate. The conditioning of your mental emotional field. Is a certain script that most humans are identified with. And they think that's who or what they truly are. And the scrapistically conditioned mind, all the automatic thinking, the involuntary compulsive thinking, a lot of it. Large percentage, not only completely unnecessary but destructive and toxic. And problem making, not problem solving. Potentially the mind can solve problems and create wonderful things. Potentially a wonderful tool. Unless something goes wrong and something has gone wrong with the human mind. There's still wonderful aspects are still there. But increasingly there seems to be some craziness. And it seems to be growing. There are time periods when it increases and time periods when it decreases on a collective level. But there's the human mind that most people are completely identified with this entity. Me, my person, I can sometimes observe people. How they carry the burden of their own personality. How they carry a heavy burden of themselves. Their self is a burden. And so it makes them say things, do things, react to situations. All because they've been conditioned to say do and react in that way since childhood, perhaps past lifetimes too. But we don't even need to go, there's enough trouble in your present life. So there's a conditioned entity which has certain mind structures and personality forms. It's like something is controlling you, but you think it's you and it's like a stream. And if you're not talking out loud, it's going on in here. Silence in here, A lot of noise. The voice in the head is talking. And when you observe people, there's a total absence. When you look at them, they are not there at all. Because all their consciousness is being absorbed by mental noise. There's an absence there, not a presence. Some people talk to themselves in the street. You've probably seen they talk well, they have a conversation with themselves. And usually it's angry. A lot of the time, it's angry. And many other people have the same thing going on in their heads. They're just not out aloud. So humans identified with the conditioned mind.
