Break Free From The Contents Of Your Mind, with Eckhart Tolle

But the consciousness is not form. And what we perceive as space. Can we even say that space exists? Well, not really. It makes existence possible, but it doesn't exist as such, because space is not anything. It's a total mystery. We can look into outer space at night, clear sky, and then you look and there's the vastness of space. And what is awe inspiring when you look out at night and the sky is clear? Yes, it's incredible to see the thousands of stars that you can see with your naked eye. The faint luminous band of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which goes along there, exists in total, absolutely stillness. Those were my first meditations when I was 15, looking up. I didn't know it was a meditation because it stopped my mind briefly. The most awe inspiring thing is not so much the infinite, almost infinite number of celestial bodies. I mean, most of this, what we call stars are suns. With the exception of the few planets that are part of our solar system, most of the these so called stars are suns. And the luminous band of the Milky Way is millions of suns, creating just the luminosity. You can't distinguish individual suns. But that's not the most awe inspiring thing about when looking up into the most awe inspiring thing is the vastness and the absolute stillness of it. And the vastness of space. Oh, you can't even start thinking about it. It's incompossible to grasp. And yet is it? What is that? Nobody knows actually what it is. Space. It doesn't exist because exist means it manifests, it stands out. As I mentioned before, ex means out, exists to stand out. Space enables things to exist. The important thing is the inner space is just as vast as the outer space, but it does not have an extension in this dimension. And that is the inner space of consciousness. And perhaps the outer space is an externalization of what we call consciousness. It enables everything to be, is not subject to time. So when you sit in a room, let's go back to the room, you become aware of the content of the room. Then you become aware of the space of the room. That's the essence. If you were asking the room, let's imagine for a moment the room is a living entity. If you ask the room, can you describe yourself? Can you find out about what you are then? Well, I am the furniture. The content makes up the room and the ceiling and whatever the room contains. The room would describe itself through the content and through the boundaries. Ceiling, floor, walls, chairs, tables, lamps. And is that all you can ask the room? And then the room would say Yeah, I think so. I've looked at everything and that's who I am. That's what I am. And then you say, well, you might have overlooked something. And that's the space, which is the essence of the room. Otherwise there would be nothing, wouldn't be a room. So if the room became aware of its own essence as space, that would be an awakening. Now the analogy, of course, the room is you. And if I asked you to describe yourself, you would normally begin by describing yourself in terms of the content of your mind. All the content of your mind, memories, concepts, thoughts, emotions, your past, all the stuff that makes up your personality. That's all the content of your mind. And that's how people usually perceive themselves. They perceive themselves as the content. They. They are the content of their mind. And they are unaware of the essence of who they are, which is not contact, which is beyond content. That's the space of consciousness. And so this is like the room. And then you ask, haven't you overlooked something? You talked about yourself in terms of content. What? Who are you? And then you have to think, okay, I forgot something. The presence that makes it all possible. And that's an immediate realization. You can't understand it. You can only be it and your eyedrop. You cannot realize it except when there's a gap in the stream of thinking. Even if it's short, like now, thinking subsides for a moment, and it doesn't subside because you're falling asleep. That could happen too. But thinking subsides and alertness remains. And then the miracle happens inside you, which is the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. And that's connected to planetary consciousness. The next step is the transcendence of thinking. Transcendence means that you don't think anymore. It means you realize something that's beyond thinking. It includes thinking, but it's beyond it that's inseparable from who you are. It's vaster, much vaster than thinking. And then thinking still continues to fulfill an important function, but a different function from before. It's no longer self serving, self serving. Thinking is egoic thinking. It's no longer compulsive and it's no longer addictive. It no longer gives you the foundation for your sense of who you are. It's simply a wonderful tool for creating, a wonderful, extremely powerful tool for manifesting and creating and giving form to things, participating consciously in the act of creation that the universe is engaged in. So it's a wonderful thing. But unless you have transcended thinking, you are at the mercy of thinking. And in fact, even to say I think would be a lie if you haven't transcended thinking. Because if you say I think, it implies that there's some kind of volition. But there isn't. Because if you're completely unconscious, if there's zero awareness in you, thinking happens to you, you don't do it, it's being done to you. Thoughts appear in your mind and you can't. The types of thoughts that appear in your mind depend on the way your mind has been conditioned. So depending what part of the planet you come from, or what kind of background you had when you were growing up, that determines the type of your conditioning. Doesn't matter what the type of your conditioning is, the fundamental fact remains your thinking in the absence of awareness is totally conditioned and it is an involuntary process. And there are still millions of humans on the planet, billions probably, who are at the mercy of their thought processes, which are totally determined by the conditioning of their mind, their personal and cultural etc. Background where they grew up. And so they think, they do things, they think things and they think it's them, it's the thought processes inside them being at work. So they're not thinking, they are being thought by thought. Thought thinks you up as an entity, a kind of mind made entity.