Being with Yourself: A 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

If possible, make sure that you're not disturbed while we are here. And just give this time to yourself. Because really, meditation in a wider sense just means being with yourself. And everybody should take time out every day, even if it's only 10 minutes to be with themselves. Now, you may ask, am I not always with myself throughout the day? And you might even say, I'd rather get away from myself in my usual preoccupations, worries, anxieties, fears. So what does it mean? When I say being with yourself, I don't refer to your usual sense of self, which I call the surface self. That's to do with all the thinking that goes through your mind throughout the day, the emotions you experience, all the things that happen in your life, your memories of who you are. In every human being, there is a deeper dimension to who they are. And getting in touch with a deeper dimension within themselves. That's really what meditation is. And if you've never accessed that deeper dimension in yourself, you will always feel that something really vital is missing in your life. Even though you may have achieved many things on what I call the surface reality, the surface level of your life, maybe you can. You have recognition, maybe you have wealth, you can buy whatever you like. And yet you will notice there's something that seems is still missing. A certain underlying dissatisfaction or discontent. It may not be there all the time, but it always resurfaces. And many people. I've met quite a few people who have achieved fame and fortune. And they all told me that after a while, after the initial elation of being suddenly wealthy or famous, recognized as important by the world. And soon the old discontent came back. A sense of insufficiency, also to do with fear. So no matter what you achieve on the surface level of life, if you haven't found that deeper dimension to who you are, your life is not really fulfilled. And there's so much frustration. The frustration that people continuously experience in life is not really to do with the imperfection on the outer level of their life. Because on the outer level, things can never be perfect or never perfect for very long. Things come and go. You lose here, you gain something there, you lose something here. So the dissatisfaction is not realizing that there is something deeper within you that is more truly who you are than whatever happens on the surface of your life. That really is the spiritual dimension. And that deeper self also connects you with the underlying deeper dimension of the universe. Because just like you, what we see in this world, the universe, the world, whatever you call it, it's all the surface of reality under that. And the great teachers and philosophers since ancient times have said that realized it. There is an unseen dimension underneath that. There is a universal intelligence underneath all the phenomena that we experience through the senses. And you are one with that universal intelligence. And the way to connect with that universal intelligence that underlies all the manifold manifestations of life that continuously unfold around you is miraculous. Underlying all that, there is an intelligence. We can call it. There are other names we can use to talk about it. But it's only in you that you can find it. You can't find it out there, but once you find it in yourself, you recognize it out there. You can sense that that intelligence or that consciousness is in everything. So how. How do you connect with the deeper level within yourself? It's deeper than thinking, so you can't get there through thinking about it. It's deeper than the emotions. And yet it's always there. It's always there. And it's not that it's totally hidden from you. It's that the thinking, the thoughts, the emotions and the sense perceptions draw all your attention to themselves. So people are kind of hypnotized by those things, especially thoughts. So they no longer can sense the dimension of depth. Because every thought really demands your attention. And you go, you follow it with your attention, and then it leads to another thought and another thought. And every thought is a voice in the head. It thinks. It thinks things and you go and you think, that's your life. All the thoughts that come and talk to you about who you are and what other people, who they aren't. And continuously your attention is being drawn into that mind. Activity and emotions go with it. And that's. That's the usual surface sense of self. And it's frustrating if there's nothing else. Everybody has it has that savvy sense of self, of course. But if there's nothing else in your life except that, then your life is shallow and the spiritual dimension is missing. So here we are, because we want to find the dimension of depth within ourselves. And it's already here. We just need to become aware of it. How. Well, that's what. Traditionally, what meditation methods are for. But here I'd like to suggest to you to just investigate without actually using any technique as such. Just investigate with your attention what it means to be yourself on the most essential level. What does it feel like to be yourself? What is that sense of self? Can you get a taste or a glimpse of that sense of self without thinking about yourself? How is it possible that you can Even think about yourself and about your life and all the things that make up your life. What makes that thinking possible? What is the prerequisite for being able to think? You need to be conscious. If you're not conscious, we can't think. But usually this consciousness is completely absorbed by thinking. And that is what keeps you on the surface level of reality and yourself. So you only know yourself as defined by your mind. You then have an image of who you are. And really that is what ego means in the way we use it. You then have a mental image, you have a self talk and you think that's who you are, me. But there is a more fundamental sense of self underneath all that. And that is your simple sense of presence. So I'm inviting you now to sense that there is more to you than all your thinking. What does it feel like without the thinking to be yourself? What is left when you're not thinking, but you're not falling asleep? Let's see if we can. If we can create a little gap in the stream of thinking. To some extent. Me talking to you already does that. So if there's a little gap in the stream of thinking, like now you go and there is a moment of no thought, but something is there, a sense of presence or aliveness, whatever you call it. So can you sense now at this moment, that inherent, deeper sense of alive presence that has nothing to do with your personal history. It has nothing to do with the past, it has nothing to do with the future. It has nothing to do with your situation in life or your name or your background. It's beyond all that. So another way of putting can you sense that presence? You can't define it. It has no content. It's just space, spacious presence. And then you know in that you know that you are alive without having to tell yourself that you are alive. Because the fact that you are alive is self evident because you are conscious. And to say you are conscious, even that is not absolutely correct. Because in essence it's not that you are conscious, but you are consciousness, that strange thing or no thing. That's the essence of who you are. And sensing yourself as that consciousness also frees you, liberates you from being completely trapped in your personal sense of self. Of course that's still there on the surface. But now you can sense that you are actually deeper than that. Now you may notice that as I speak to you, there are little gaps between words or sentences. Now these gaps are not there to hypnotize you. Because we are here to de. Hypnotize you from being totally trapped in your thoughts and deriving your sense of who you are from your thinking. It's to bring you to that presence, pure presence that's so refreshing, so revitalizing to sense yourself as that pure presence. And so these little gaps in between words or sentences as I speak are very important because you may notice that in those gaps you're not thinking in those gaps, for example, now you are just present and that's wonderfully liberating to sense yourself as that presence. Now you may find occasionally your mind may come in and say something. It might even feel threatened by this and there may even be one or two or three of you who couldn't stand it any longer and they are no longer with us here. But if you're still here and you can sense that what I'm saying points to something very important and you can sense the reality of what I'm talking about, you may have noticed the spiritual dimension does not require belief because it's to do with experiencing, knowing directly, not believing in something. It.