Beyond the "Little Me" | Guided Meditation by Eckhart Tolle

Welcome to our Saturday meditation. The focus of our meditation is stillness, inner stillness. What happens outside doesn't really matter so much. Stillness is just a word, a pointer. To most people it means absence of noise. And in that sense stillness could be called a negative pointer. It points to the absence of something, but it doesn't really refer to the absence of noise. Even the absence of inner noise. Although it is true that when the inner noise stops, there is stillness. But every point that we use is not really it. It's not quite right, ever. It reduces that to which it points to something we think we can understand. So it's much more than the absence of something. Although as a pointer that works. Another word for stillness is presence. And that's a positive pointer by implication. Presence points to the presence of something. The presence of what? All you can say here is the presence of presence. So there are two levels. One could say to who you are on the one hand, or on one level, you are the presence of certain things, the existence of certain things. You are the existence of the body, the existence of sense perceptions, the existence of emotions, the existence of thoughts. So we can call that the presence of something. That's you as a person. And here we are not concerned with that. We are concerned with who you are beyond the person, that deeper level. And we are here together, a few thousand people, perhaps in different parts of the planet, going beyond the individual persons personalities to a deeper level of being. And that's our meditation. And I am speaking the words point to it. The words, of course, are not it. The silence, the stillness, the presence which cannot be perceived with the senses is what matters here. So there's nothing for you to do except be who you are beyond the personality. And realize there is a stillness in you that has nothing to do with the personality and its problems. Because a large part of your personality consists of your problems. As you access the deeper level of stillness. Or where you just sense, as I sometimes put it, your own presence. It's not your own, but let's just put it this way, where you sense your own presence, or rather where you sense the presence that you are, you are that presence before you become this or that, a person. There is a presence, an aliveness. There is the light of consciousness in which the person arises. But the light of consciousness itself is not the person. It transcends the person. It is not separate from it. The light assumes a certain form and becomes a person. In the same way that when you watch a movie, there's the light, the projectile light, and the ways in which the light is obstructed by the film. And those obstructions of the light, never total obstructions, because then you wouldn't see anything. Partial obstructions of the light. And that becomes the movie, the characters, the events, and so on. That's a little analogy. And normal life isn't really that much different. So if you only know the obstructions to the light of consciousness, the light of God, then you are trapped on the level of problems and drama and difficulties, anxieties, regrets, past, future, me, me. But here we become aware of the presence. Not the presence of something in us that would make it into some formal thing again, but more simply the presence of presence. So the presence underlies the words that I speak. It underlies the words that you hear. And so I am inviting you to be aware of that in you. That underlies the sense perceptions and the thoughts. That's. We could call that the essence of who you are that transcends the person. That's the most important realization in your life. But it seems to be still a secret, because nobody, very few seem to know about it, and many are not interested yet until existence as the person only becomes increasingly frustrating, both for the individual and for the collective. On the planet, societies, civilizations, where the transcendent dimension is missing completely. Nothing, no individual or civilization can remain sane for long. Without it, there's an increasing madness. If that is all you know. And the presence, the realization of presence frees you from bondage to the person, the personality with all its little concerns that keep it busy all day long. And on a larger scale, the collective. You realize that the concerns of the collective that you hear through the media and so on may be relatively important, but ultimately they are not just as your problems, which sometimes are related to the problems of the collective. For example, now, in times of a recession and so on, your problems too are ultimately not that important. They certainly won't be important in 50, 60 years time to anybody and not to you. Because you, as the person, probably won't be there anymore. That's quite soon. I suggest you visit a graveyard from time to time and look at the gravestones with the names on them. All these people thought that their problems were incredibly important. It.