Awareness Without Thought | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

The realization of yourself as essence. Identity can be continuous. And that is, you could call that a spiritual practice, but it's not really the right term. It's simply continuously directing attention in your daily life. In addition to paying attention to whatever you need to pay attention to. Directing attention to what? Directing attention to attention. Becoming aware. Right. For example, now, becoming aware that you are conscious right now, that's a strange thing. There's no content to that. There's simply a presence. And for that to happen, and I'm finally getting to it, that is, there needs to be the cessation of thought. And so this is my invitation to you. You do not need to think continuously in your daily life. It's if your mind tells you that if you do not think and do not worry, then your life is going to collapse. That is not true. It's a lie. But your mind might either explicitly or implicitly say that I need to really think about my life. Thinking has its place. It's a wonderful tool. It can be used for manifesting, it can be used for creating. It's a tool. But if it takes you over, if you identify it with a tool, then it comes to possess you. And that's a terrible limitation. So the new state of consciousness is a mixture of thought and spaciousness. So that you can go about your daily life walking from point A to point to point B in that state of simple, aware, presence. Let's do it now. I call it do, but no doing involved. Simply become aware of yourself as you sit here, just as I am aware of myself as a conscious presence. This is a very strange thing. It's not. You can't say, oh, you cannot become an object to yourself in this. Everything else is an object that arises in your consciousness, an object of consciousness. But knowing yourself, you cannot be an object in your own consciousness. So you cannot know yourself in a subject, object, relationship. In at the deepest level, you can only know yourself as the eternal subject. There is a space of stillness. In that moment of knowing yourself as the essence identity. There is an alive sense of stillness and presence. Like, let's separate, let's just say my two hands. This is thought, your thinking. And then you go, and here's a space of no thought, just awareness. You can't define what that is. You can't think about it. You can only be it. Stillness is one word we could use to point to it. Stillness has nothing to do whether there is noise outside or not. Inner stillness is the cessation of thinking without loss of consciousness. And that is Realizing yourself as the unconditioned consciousness. Because everything else is conditioned by the past. But that is the unconditioned in you. That is your essence, identity. You cannot by exercising willpower, that is not the way to go, to stop yourself from thinking. I'm not even saying stop thinking as an active practice, but simply become so alert that thinking stops by itself. One way you can do it is by becoming aware of sense perceptions. Acutely aware of sense perceptions. I give the example in the Power of now of a cat watching the mouse hole. And the cat watching the mouse hole is in that state of absolute attention. And the cat goes, now you don't have to stare like that. But that is the state of. That is this state of awareness. Consciousness. That's the only thing in your life that you cannot question. That the only thing that is absolutely and undoubtedly real. Everything else you can question, for example, whether our gathering here is a dream or not. You don't really know. It could be that you are dreaming, that you are sitting here and there's a man talking on a chair, suggesting to you that you might be dreaming. You cannot, as many philosophers have pointed out, you cannot know for sure that this life that you are experiencing is not a kind of dream. And from one certain, one perspective, it is a kind of dream. Look at. I like to sometimes look at old photographs made taken in 1900, early days of photography, 1920, whenever of street scenes or gatherings. And you look. You can go to second hand shops and they sell sometimes old photographs. You can buy one for a penny or two. You have no idea who these people are. Nor has anybody else an idea who these people are. But they are running around the city street excited about this or that. And then there's another gathering. See people sitting around a table, eating and laughing in this old photo. And where is that now? It has evaporated like a dream. Nobody even remembers who they are. And that is the same with anything that you experience here. It quickly evaporates. It's so there is a dreamlike quality to human existence, any existence. So you could say, okay, maybe it's all a dream. That may well be, but. But one thing you cannot doubt that is that you are conscious. Because if you're not conscious, there couldn't be a dream. A dream can only arise in the light of consciousness. So the one thing, whether or not this is a dream or not is becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters if it is a dream is whether you can realize what the essence of the dream is. Consciousness. And you can only realize that directly here and now, as this. Oh, Descartes, of course, the French philosopher, said, I think, therefore I am. If he had waited a little bit longer before saying anything, he could have come to the point of cessation of thinking, and then he could have made the more profound I am conscious, therefore I am. Thinking is only an expression of consciousness, a surface expression of consciousness. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.