Become Comfortable with Nothing Happening | A Meditation with Eckhart Tolle to Calm Overstimulation

Welcome to our live meditation. For those of you who are joining us, for the first time, all that's happening here is we become comfortable with nothing happening, so that we can shift our consciousness from doing to being. Doing is not just physical doing, which obviously we are not engaged in right now. Well, the mouse is moving, but that's all. Or you may be twitching a bit, but basically we are sitting or lying. That's physical doing. So we stop doing on the external and more importantly, the mind. So we are here to experience, get a taste of, or perhaps even more than that, go deeply into the state of being which in itself has no content. It's a bit like having lived in a. A room full of furniture stuff for many years, always being worried about polishing it or getting more stuff or getting rid of this stuff and talking about the stuff in your room. And for the first time, you become aware also of the space of the room, which is the essence, without which there wouldn't be a room. And you realize the furniture in the room is secondary to the space in the room. But space you cannot grasp. You can't say, ah, there it is. You can't even point to it. Where you become, you sense it. You become aware of it. You sense, one could almost say, the presence of the space. Wherever you are now, you can do it. You can sense the presence of the space. And to do that, you might notice you can't be thinking. Thinking is to do with the furniture in the room, but thinking is never to do with the space in the room. A different faculty is required. Inner faculty is required to sense or to become aware of the space wherever you are, that is not thinking. And most humans still don't know that they potentially have that ability or that faculty. In other words, it's not awakened in most humans yet. And of course, we are here for some of you to awaken that and for many others who are already awake to it, to deepen it. So let's go back to the room. When you become aware of the space in the room, you might notice it's a very peaceful thing to be aware of the space. It suddenly becomes this, and suddenly an added dimension to where you are. Because before you were concerned with the furniture and whatever filled the room stuff, and that every bit of stuff has. You talk about its history. By the way, may I point out that right now what we are doing, I am using the room as an analogy for, of course, your mind, but I am also talking about the room. So we are on two levels here. So you can Take it literally, and you can take it as an analogy for your. Your mind, or both. So you may notice that suddenly the room, which is the old room that you've lived in for many years, suddenly becomes peaceful in the moment that you can sense the space of the room, rather than always focusing on the different bits and pieces in the room stuff, suddenly you take in the totality which transcends what's in it, the spaciousness of it, and it becomes, oh, there's a sense of peace and almost a peaceful presence, which of course, essentially is. You can say, yes, it's in the room, but of course it's in you. In our analogy, the furniture in the room, the bits and pieces, the stuff corresponds of course, to the content of your mind, the thoughts, most of which are old and repetitive. The furniture, whatever is occupying your mind is the stuff. The furniture, every item wants your attention. You keep the old stuff alive by continuously giving it your attention. And if you become aware of the space in the room, you withdraw attention from what is in the room. And you become aware of that which could be described as the essence of the room, without which there would be no room. Without any room, there's no room. There's space, space, and within you the same. If you don't find this space within you, the spaciousness which is a presence, the presence that you can sense as if it were an external presence in filling the room, is also in you. Now, this is very deeply peaceful. And in many traditions, let's call to the presence of God that all the mystics, whether Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Sufis, they all point to that. That's not the ideological God, not the. But that which underlies all manifestation, the eternal. So the internal is both within and without. The moment you notice that presence outside of you, you can be out in nature or you can be in a room. You are no longer focusing on individual, you're focusing on the space between things one could say. And you sense that as a silent presence. You can't say much about it. If you're a poet, perhaps you could. Some poets have written about it quite beautifully. Sometimes Wordsworth, the English poet, went out into nature and wrote beautiful things all pointing to that. But the moment you notice it outside of you, it's also within you. So I call that usually presence. You can call it the presence of God, you can call it divine presence, or you can forget about those terms. The terms don't really matter. So your entry point then can be. You start with the external, become aware of the essence of wherever you are of that particular place, whether it's in a building or outside the essence of that place, which goes beyond whatever is filling that place, whatever is there as a form, you become aware that there is also the formless dimension to that place. Spirit, another word. And the more you are able to sense that in your life, the more spiritual you are. So how spiritual you are doesn't really have anything to do with your thought processes. So thinking about God for 12 hours a day or more, or talking about God, it doesn't make you spiritual. It's a concept. And the test, of course, is always whether you're able to retain that awareness of the presence. Really, awareness and presence are the same thing. The moment you use language, you separate things into subject objects and bits and pieces. The question is, are you able to retain that aware presence, continuing to sense that presence that is of course, inseparable from the essence of who you are, whether you can retain, sustain that. When all this stuff in your life, whatever is happening, shouts at you, so to speak, and every bit of stuff in your life, I matter absolutely. I demand your complete attention. If you don't give me attention, your life will collapse. I need you to worry about me, says the stuff. If you don't, you're irresponsible. Of course, that's not true. Your most fundamental responsibility is to find that which is beyond the stuff, to access that dimension in you. That's why you are here. That's what the universe wants through you, to awaken to that dimension, to be it consciously. First it seems that it's something outside of you. It's the space in the room or out here in nature. And then you realize, oh, it's within me too. And it's more essentially me than anything else. That's where the whole feeling of who you are actually originates, in that deep sense of being, of presence. And then it gets mixed up with things, with stuff. And then you sense a beingness through the stuff still a little bit. And then a possession can give you a little bit of aliveness. You can sense your car if you just got it. After a while it wears off. If you just got it can give you that little bit of sense of deeper, sense of identity. But where it really any identity, sense of who essential self comes from, is from the formless dimension of presence. And for most people, it can only a little bit filter through all the things in their lives. And it's never very satisfying because it's to a large extent obscured. And it's mistaken for the thing it's like having a lampshade and you're mistaking the light that comes through the lampshade. You're mistaking the lampshade for the light. And then you attach yourself to the lampshade and not realizing what you love about the lampshade is the light that shines through it, and then you worry about the lampshade.