Discover the Power of Stillness with Eckhart Tolle | Guided Meditation

So let's settle into the present moment. Access the stillness that's already within you, even though you might not have realized it. Even with people who have the most turbulent and chaotic minds, there is stillness underneath it. And to find that it is vital to find that stillness within, because otherwise you are at the mercy of your mind and you are lost in that continuous noise. So here it's helpful for you to, as you, I'm sure you know already, to become aware of the silent spaces between the words, rather than just pay attention to the words. In fact, be more interested, so to speak, in the silent spaces than the words. The silent space on the external level is when I stop speaking. So the sound is no longer produced. There's an absence of sound. And that's what we call silence. Maybe not complete silence here, because there are some background noises of perhaps you can hear birds and a noise. But when I stop speaking, there's no content. And if you're new to this, you might even ask, what is it that I pay attention to when I pay attention to silence? And the answer is nothing, really. Well, then the question arises, how can I pay attention to nothing? Well, you pay attention to that space of no content, and then something happens inside you simultaneously. You might notice that when you pay attention to just the fact that there is a silence, you can do it when you're alone in a room. You can do it in the middle of the night, you can do it out in nature. You can do it in a church, preferably when it's empty, or a temple. Anywhere where there is some silence, you become aware of it. Don't overlook the silence and don't always look for the noise. So what happens inside you when you become aware of that absence of noise? Thinking subsides and you become still inside. The moment you become aware of silence and pay attention to silence, you become still inside. The ceaseless stream of thinking subsides. And what's left is only that alert space. You may not be able to sustain it for very long by yourself. It doesn't matter as long as it's there. If it's only for a few seconds, it's good enough to start with. And here, perhaps you're able to sustain it, perhaps during the entire duration of our meditation. In other words, let go of thinking without falling asleep, and just be here, present as a presence, conscious presence. Now, the words I speak are so simple that you can't really think about them because there's nothing to figure out. So to understand what I'm saying, you don't need to add some more thought to it. So the best way of being here with me is to embrace the state of thoughtless awareness. No need to think. And you haven't disappeared. The essence of who you are is not only still here, the essence of who you are has emerged more fully now when you are still. And that essence of who you are is not content based. It is inner space, formless consciousness, what the Buddha called emptiness. But every term that you use to talk about it is limiting. It's emptiness, but there's far more to it than emptiness. It's consciousness that makes thinking possible, that makes sense perception possible, that makes feeling possible, that makes possible for you to be here as a person. Without consciousness, there is no person. But usually you're not aware of consciousness, you're only aware of what arises in consciousness. In other words, you are aware of the content, but not of the space without which the content could not be. So right now, as you become still inside, you can realize that stillness is your consciousness before anything arises in it. And when I say your consciousness, it's not absolutely true, but that's okay. At first you sense it as your consciousness, but ultimately it's not your consciousness, it's just consciousness, the one consciousness. And it's not produced by your physical brain, although there is clearly a correlation between your physical brain and consciousness. But I would suggest to you that the physical brain is more like a channel for consciousness than the producer or the generator of consciousness. In the same way that the radio does not generate the music and the words that you hear coming out of the radio, and yet the radio is necessary for this music, the words, the sounds to be produced. But the radio does not produce them, it gives them form, channels them. In the same way, your physical brain is a kind of receiver for consciousness and gives that formless consciousness a particular form. So that through that particular form, the formless consciousness, consciousness can appear in this dimension as you and as the world. So often when people at night look up at the stars, they get a feeling of insignificance. And you might think, compared to that vastness, I am nothing. Or you might think, compared to that vastness, I'm a microbe on the surface of this planet. Short lived, fleeting existence on a cosmic scale, the human life is just like a spark. It goes, just gone. And it's gone. And many other sparks, probably all very short lived, one spark after another. So, but that feeling, or that sense of insignificance, that's not all there is. And that's not the entire truth of it. In fact, it's not the truth of it at all. You may be insignificant as regards physical size or the duration of your life, but you are highly significant in the universe because through you, consciousness enters this dimension. And so through you, the universe becomes conscious of itself. Sam.