Beyond the Mind’s Clutter: Finding Presence | Eckhart Tolle

When was the last time you saw somebody? Just sit there and look around because you have to get out your phone. It clutters your mind even more. So when I ask, who are you? If I ask that question, don't go, let's do this for a moment. Don't go into the past. Can you. Can you feel or sense who you are without reference to the past in you? You don't even need to remember your name right now. What for? You don't really remember your email address or your phone number or what happened to you 10 years ago. Don't need to remember that. Can you still get a sense without reference to your personal history? Can you get a sense of beingness or presence? There's no past in that at all. But what is that? You can't really describe it. All you know is that you are. I am. You can sense the underlying beingness or presence of you. But to really sense it, what needs to happen is that for a moment, the stream of thinking needs to subside. And it may be happening for many who at this very moment, the stream of thinking that is normal for most people, that never stops except when they fall asleep, this dream of thinking for a moment subsides. And when I asked you whether you can sense yourself without reference to your personal history, what I was really talking about, what I was really asking was, can you get a sense of your presence without thought? Ah. And there's enormous revelation here. This question, who am I? Does not have a real truthful answer on a conceptual level. It's not in thoughts or words. The true answer to who am I? Has no thought in it. It is a sense of presence or beingness, and you can only sense that, even if it's only a moment. So the stream of thinking subsides and what happens is you are completely present without your mind saying anything. You can perceive everything. You can see, you can hear. You're fully there and your mind is still. Still does not mean that you've gone to sleep. It's the opposite. You're actually more alert in that stillness than you would be if you were identified with this continuous stream of thinking. That's the stillness, the inherent stillness that actually every human has, that you don't need to work hard to attain stillness or think that if I follow the right course of action, it might take me 10 years and then I'll be able to have a still mind. No, it's already there. And if you are not totally miserable and unhappy every moment of your life, that means without perhaps you knowing It Anybody who is not extremely miserable all the time has a little bit of access, without even knowing it, to that stillness within. They don't know it. All they know is from time to time they feel a little bit good. They feel they don't know. For three seconds, they stop thinking. They might have some other explanation of why in that moment they felt good. Maybe they were looking at a dog in that moment because the dog wasn't thinking anything about them. Because the dog doesn't think. The dog is conscious, but not conceptual thinking. The dog does not have an opinion about you. And so when you were petting the dog for perhaps you suddenly felt good about petting the dog. Why? Because for a moment the dog freed you of the judgmental conceptual mind that otherwise would be very active. If you were petting a human, it would say something. Of course, you can't do that because think you're insane. You can't go up to a human mayor pet you. That would be nice if they did that to each other. But. But the humans have judgments about you. So whenever you go to a human, you know that he has certain thoughts about you. So the other human cannot free you from your thoughts. But the dog or the cat can for short moment free you from your thoughts. And in that moment, it feels good. That's why people love their pets so deeply. There's a reason, a deeper reason why they love. Because the pet frees them a little bit from their minds. And there are moments when you interact with your animal that there are. You can experience brief moments of thoughtless awareness. Two seconds, three seconds. But it's enough to keep you going. It's enough so that your life doesn't become totally miserable. And then you might have other moments. You might have moments when you engage in some physical activity. You swim or you climb a mountain. And then there are moments that your total presence is required by the activity so that there's not enough left for thinking. And again, you feel intensely alive. Oh, that was so good. Why was it so good? Well, it just. I love it. It's just so good. I don't know why it's good. Well, it's good because it freed you for a moment from the incessant stream of thinking. And there was some degree of awareness or presence arising, but you didn't even know that. So it's always that that dimension of consciousness is in every human. Now, I must admit, there are still millions of humans where it's so deeply hidden in them that they have no access to it. But there are Others who can actually who are beginning to awaken to this dimension within themselves. So now you don't have to wait for certain things to happen to briefly free you from your mind. You don't have to wait for the next encounter with a lovely dog in the street. Or you don't have to wait for some beautiful moment in nature when you just go, you take in the totality of a forest or the vastness of the sky and you go. Or at night, you look up into this clear sky, the vastness of space, the countless stars, which are suns, most of them, and the vast distances and the stillness of it all, and you go. It still can still your mind too. That was my first meditation when I was a teenager. I didn't even know what meditation. I didn't at that time. Nobody talked about meditation in the West. I looked up at the sky at night. We were living. When I was a teenager, we were living in Spain. So the sky was often in the summer, especially totally clear. And I would sit on the roof of the house and go, wow. What? I realized many years later that while I was doing that, there was no thought in my mind. The space, the outer space created in me that inner space or inner spaciousness, because. So that's another word for it, another pointer, the inner spaciousness. If you don't find that, and I say find or discover, I'm not saying achieve or attain, it's not an achievement or attainment because it's already there as the essence of who you are. But you have to discover that it is already there. If you don't find it, you are condemned for the rest of your life to live a very frustrated existence, because life will be just one damn thing after another, one damn thing. And it never leaves me alone. But what really doesn't leave you alone is your mind, which reacts to every little thing that happens and amplifies every little thing that happens. It's not so much what people call karma, is not so much what happens to them, it's how they respond or react to what happens. And when you are unconscious, you amplify. Every little challenge in your life becomes a big thing in your mind. Oh my God. And you go, it was only a little thing. But it gets amplified and personal conflicts arise all the time. Space, inner finding, your life, your so called life. You might have an opinion. The narrative in your mind that you call your life might tell you that your life was a failure. It might tell you your life was a great success. But in this case, you probably didn't Come here. Because if you were totally satisfied by your life, why would you ever look for anything beyond the material things and the mental things? But nobody can be satisfied for very long. So you've all, you have all tasted failure, so called. And some of you might think the whole thing didn't work out. I had such great plans when I was 18, I had great plans for my life, and then it didn't work out, but nothing worked out. My marriage didn't work out, and then the second one didn't work out either. And then I got a job, but then I lost it. And then I made some money, but then it made me unhappy because I worried so much and became so stressed out that I had to seek psychiatric help. And that didn't help. Oh dear. In other words, your mind is cluttered by stuff. Your mind is cluttered and you can't get out of the clutter. It's like a room full of clutter. And these days it's even more clutter because all the devices that people use clutter your mind even more. Every text message is more clutter because 99 out of 100 text messages are not important. They just clutter. Facebook again, there might be occasionally important things, but it can continuously bombard it. But you need to take it all in. And very rarely these days for people who are not awakening, it's actually getting worse. For people who are not awakening, you can see there's not a moment when they are in the past. Occasionally when you were somewhere waiting for something, there was nothing to do and you just had to sit there and maybe look around, but nobody does that anymore. When was the last time you saw somebody just sit there and look around? No, because you have to get out your phone. And of course, what does that phone do? It clutters your mind even more. If you didn't have your phone, there would be a chance of having some spaciousness. You could perhaps look at the sky and go, ah. And appreciate the beauty of it and the depth of it and the spaciousness of it. But no, there's a text message coming in. And what does it say? It says, what's up? And then of course, you. You have to reply, of course. So. And that when that goes, the naturally occurring spaciousness, I'm not even talking about consciously embracing spaciousness, just the naturally occurring spaciousness in a normal person's life. That rarely happens these days and that's a great dysfunction. And I don't know what effect that will have on the civilization within two or three generations. Now there Is fortunately, there is a segment of population that is awakening spiritually, perhaps to compensate for the dysfunction that many humans are forced to enact, reenact every day. So clutter. Declutter your mind is not a process that takes a long time to declutter your mind. You don't have to go, okay, I'm now taking out this thought. Now what's the next thought that I'm going to take out? Like, if you declutter your room, you have to say, what is it that I don't need? But you don't. To declutter your mind is an instant thing. It's an instant thing of withdrawing from thinking and becoming present. And you can do it. As I just mentioned one example, looking at the sky, because there you have spaciousness. The sky is spacious. And that is why Jesus used the analogy of the kingdom of heaven. Heaven means sky in most languages. Heaven and sky are the same word in French, in Spanish, in German, heaven and sky are the same word. So he's talking about the kingdom of the sky. And he said, that's the most important thing. Just find the kingdom of the heaven and everything else is work out in your life. That's what basically his teaching was. Now I offer a new translation. Instead of kingdom of heaven, I've already said sky, but there's an even better translation that I found, and that is spaciousness. Because the essence of the sky is vast, spaciousness, kingdom. My translation for kingdom is dimension. So the kingdom of heaven is the dimension of spaciousness. It is a dimension of consciousness in you. So the kingdom of heaven, again, when they asked him, where is the kingdom of heaven? Because they hadn't understood what he was talking about, where is it? When is it going to come? And he said, and this is, I believe, one of the things that is more or less literally true of what he said. Many other things are not literally true that were passed on and written down. But he said, the kingdom of heaven does not come with signs to be perceived. You cannot say, ah, it's over here, or, look, it's over there. But truly, I tell you, the kingdom of heaven is. Is within you. In modern translations, it says, in the midst of you. Both are true. The kingdom of heaven is within you. It is the dimension of spaciousness in you. And if you find that that solves not every single problem of your life, no, but it gives you access to a dimension in you from where all the problems of your life and the challenges of your life can be seen in their true perspective and are no longer no longer have the ability to draw you in completely and make your life miserable. Your ability to deal with the challenges of life, which are inevitable. Life is not easy for anybody. It's not even meant to be easy. It's not easy for any life form. Every life form is presented with life challenges. From insects to plants to every little. Every life form. Life is challenging. And human life is particularly challenging. The more evolved, the more problematic things get. The more you can start thinking, the more problematic life gets. So it does not mean, when you find the kingdom of heaven within as the dimension of spaciousness, that you are no longer challenged by life. No. But the way in which you respond to the challenges changes. You no longer amplify challenges. They are just there. And you either take action or you accept what is for the time being. In other words, the challenges of life. The problems of life no longer make you unhappy. And that's a huge evolutionary leap forward. So sometimes spiritual people who are spiritual seekers have a misconception that when they awaken, spiritually, become enlightened, whatever word you want to use, that then they will no longer experience challenges or problems. That's not true. Life continues. Every situation that you go into has a new set of challenges. You could become famous and live in Hollywood or whatever, and you would quickly find before you thought, when I attain this, I'll really be okay. I'll be wonderfully happy for the rest of my life. Please, God, just make me famous and I'll be happy for the rest of my life. I just need 10 million, $20 million. Make it 20. Let's. I just need that. And then I need to be recognized that I'm great by other people. I really need that also. But then I'll be really happy. It's not going to happen. Even if you get what you wanted, unhappiness will quickly resurface. This was confirmed to me. I've met a few people who got what they wanted. And they told me how unhappy they became after a while, after the elation of first having it. I'm the greatest. And then something happened to deeply challenge them. So the challenges of life remain. And that is a good thing. Because by being challenged when you are awakening spiritually, the problems, the challenges of life no longer pull you into unhappiness and unconsciousness and reactivity and complaining and seeing yourself as a victim. But they force you to be more intensely present. They bring out more spaciousness. When you get challenged by life, you go, oh, there it is, another challenge. And you look at it. Wow.