Beyond Awareness | Guided Meditation by Eckhart Tolle

I would like to welcome you to our live meditation. And a special welcome to the participants of the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, 300 miles up the road, so to speak, from where I am right now. So welcome to the 2.0 Wisdom Conference. People who are with us now, this is not a conventional meditation. I may be speaking most of the time, but there are also gaps in between the words, which of course are always more important than the words. And if you're aware of the gaps as much as you're aware of the words, then you're already entering the state of meditation without having to go through any preliminary technique. Not that there's anything wrong with techniques. So it's actually quite lovely to be aware not only of the words, but also the stillness that's there. The space, one could say, between the words, even underneath the words. And the miraculous thing is when you're aware of that for a brief moment, whenever you are aware of the space, you are not thinking. So the more you are aware of the space, or the space is, the less absorbed you are in the stream of thinking. And not being absorbed in the stream of thinking, not identifying with the stream of thinking is meditation. And of course, the aim of meditation is that eventually it becomes your normal state of consciousness, in which case you may still want to practice so called formal meditation because you like it, or you may not. Now, usually in your daily life, things constantly arise in your field of awareness, demanding attention, situations, people, things that need to be done. And sometimes things are pulling at you from various directions, demanding your attention at the same time. And when you no longer know where to put your attention, you're beginning to experience so called stress, because stress means one thing is pulling this way, another thing is pulling that way, and so you get stress. And as long as you are unaware, unconscious, spiritually speaking, the world around you determines where your attention goes. People, situation, events, your electronic devices that go ping when the next text message comes in, or whatever sound it is, or go pong when the next email arrives. And immediately your attention goes there. And then somebody else, somebody said. So I call that losing oneself in the world. And then of course, there's your thinking. Every thought that arises seems to say, give me more of your attention, follow me to where I want you to go. And so when you're unaware, then whatever thought comes into your head has this enormous pulling power. And so you identify with the thought and you're completely in it, and it takes you this way and that way and leads to a whole succession of thoughts. And so, on the most primordial level, it's thinking, really, that absorbs your attention, your mind. Because even external things have to be transformed into mind stuff before you can experience it. So that you can experience it all. External objects, before you can be aware of them. Have to be taken in through sensory perception, then transformed into nerve impulses, and then reassembled somewhere to make up this picture of external reality. But it's ultimately all you ever experience is your mind. So that's really what we need to look at. So most people are continuously aware of something. And they are at the mercy of whatever arises in their mind. That has this power to pull in their attention. One thing you learn in meditation is that you have a choice. You can direct your attention to one thing. And then you can see if you can keep your attention on one particular mind object. Which could be becoming aware of your breathing. Or it could be a mantra that you repeat in your mind. One mind object or an external object, the candle flame. So you begin to realize that you can actually direct attention. You don't have to be at the mercy of whatever comes into your mind. So as we sit here, for example, you can direct your attention. Your attention is, of course, in auditory perception and visual perception. But in addition, you can also have some of your attention on your breathing. For example. You're aware even as you listen. And as you watch, if your eyes are open, you can be aware also that at the same time you're breathing. You're choosing to have some attention there, too. That's a very calming thing. And you become aware that your body is alive on the inside. You can become aware that there's a sense of aliveness inside your hands. Another ancient meditation method to do it more methodically. You become aware that your feet are alive on the inside, your legs, your entire body. There's a field of aliveness. You become aware of that. You can then choose to put your attention on that. Rather than on something else where it would habitually go. So gradually, you become aware of your own power. You're not at the mercy of events and things, your thoughts. Ultimately, there's a deeper dimension in you, Deeper than thinking and getting in touch with that, accessing that, realizing that that is the essence of who you are. That's why we are here. The purpose of this is to get in touch with that deeper dimension within your. Deeper than thinking. And what is that? We could describe it as the feeling or the sense of being you at the most fundamental level. What does it feel like to be you now Usually when you speak in terms of I, let's use the first person. What does it feel like? What's it like to be me? What is that sense of identity, the sense of self? Usually you refer then to certain things in your mind. Your history, your conditioned mind, the history of me, the story of me, me and my problems, me and my situation, me and this and this and this. So there's always on that level when you. Your feeling of being yourself is really to be identified with certain things that arise in your mind. But here we are attempting to go deeper, to a more foundational, more real sense of what is it that underlies all that? What is it that makes the story of you that most people tend to be who they are? What is it that makes the story of you possible? What is the space, the light in which it appears? There's something deeper without which there could be no story. And yet it's not separate from it. And that's always the same. There's a deep sense of beingness or presence in you that is prior and deeper than anything that happens in your life or in your mind. So I'd like you to get in touch with that sense of being you at the deepest level. What does that feel like? And it's a very strange question. So usually then, your attention is directed to certain things, objects in your mind. What we're attempting to do here is to ultimately becoming aware of that attention itself, which is awareness. So when I ask you what's it like to be you, I'm really asking you to become aware of your own awareness and that it's not an object. You can't say, ah, there it is, I've got it now. You cannot have it because you are it. It's the essence of who you are. You cannot describe it because it has no form. You cannot talk about it in terms of past or future, because there's no time to is a timeless dimension. And this bare sense of beingness that if that becomes the foundation for your life, so to speak, if you could not lose touch with that, in other words, not lose touch with the most essential dimension within you, then the way in which you experience this world would change because you would be continuously aware of that which is deeper than whatever arises in this world or in your mind. And to feel that within yourself brings about a sense of trust in life. It is as if something were carrying you, something vaster than the little me. And you are connected with a vastness there that goes far beyond you as the person with the history and to sense that within yourself you can feel there is a power there. That is the power of life itself. When you don't know that, all that's available to you is a trickle of that power. But as you become aware of it, which really means become aware of awareness, become conscious of consciousness, which, again, when we speak, when we use words, it's never quite right. Because the moment we construct a sentence, we create duality, subject and object. And you say, I am aware of consciousness. There you have a subject and an object, which isn't quite right because there is no I apart from consciousness. So you'd have to qualify it and say, I'm aware of consciousness as myself. Then you undo the original error that is semantic. That brings about a. A sense of, you can say, rootedness in being and brings about a trust in life. In other words, what is trust? Which in other spiritual editions have other words for it. Faith. It's the absence of fear. That's really what trust is. So when you're in touch with that within yourself, the world is no longer perceived as a fearful place. It.