Eckhart Tolle explains how to perceive the world without the filter of thought. When you give full attention to an ordinary object without thinking about it, he says, you discover something miraculous in what's always been there.
At first you practice in non problematic situations. You practice being the presence, not having all these moments when you don't add thought. So you walk around looking at the lights, an object, your hand, flowers, a glass of water. And it's an amazing thing when you are trapped in thinking. The entire sense perceived world that continuously surrounds you is just a peripheral phenomenon because most of your attention is trapped in thought. So you're unaware of the miraculous nature of the sense perceived universe around you. And the moment you give it your complete attention without. And you can only do that without adding thought to your perception. Every little thing is alive and miraculous and beautiful. Perhaps this is what they try, I don't know. In so called conceptual art, when you go into an art gallery and somebody. And there you have an exhibit, tells you who the artist is and all you see is on. There's a. On the floor or on a table is an everyday object, a can of beans. And then it tells you the name of the artist. I believe that's called conceptual art. And you're lucky if it's a can of beans. It could be something worse. Many art galleries have these exhibits and of course some people go in and say, hmm, interesting. I wonder what he's trying to say. There's a message here, I can't quite get it. And some people are so knowledgeable about art they have a. They can write a long piece about this can of beans and why it's there and what the artist's intention is by putting it there. And you would have to ask the artist what the intention was, if it is an artist. But let's just see on the. If it means anything, if it's anything significant, then it would be drawing the viewer's attention to something ordinary so that the viewer becomes aware of the extraordinariness of an ordinary object. If it works like that, then I can accept it. It might have a purpose, but then I would not be able to write very much about except what I've just said. So it would really take your attention away from the movement of thought into thoughtless perception. So that would be conceptual art. Then I mentioned a couple of times this phenomenon that arose on YouTube of people, it's now thousands and thousands of people are doing it, of people who take an ordinary object and handle it and touch it and make noises with it. The most boring YouTube videos you can possibly imagine. So they might go and have something like this. Now the amazing thing is they got. Some of them get hundreds of thousands of views. So there is a longing they're not called spiritual, but the good ones have a spiritual dimension to them. There is a longing in the collective for that kind of thoughtless perception, because it does. By looking at those videos you either fall asleep and many people do, they use it in order to go to sleep. Or you enter that state of presence and you suddenly become aware that a simple object has an aliveness and a beauty that you. That you didn't know before. So when somebody goes, might drink and people watch that. And some of these are 30 minutes long. I watched some of them myself, but I watch them for anthropological reasons. Well, not really. I watch them because I'm looking for is. Is this, is there in the background something spiritual? And people don't even know it. The people who are watching it. There's a longing in humans to be free of their. Of the incessant noise of their minds. And those videos that have. They're called ASMR for some reason. Autonomous Sensor Meridian Response. Some people claim that produce tingles in their bodies, but many others just watch because they stop thinking while they watch. Most people who watch them probably fall below thought and a few, especially for the good videos probably rise up into presence. And you become aware that an ordinary thing can be extraordinary. It has an extraordinary presence. So if you haven't heard of it, look it up on YouTube. ASMR, because it's become so popular. There are many bad ones, but somehow there's a self selecting process at work. And if you look at the number of views, the better ones have like a hundred thousand views or more, with the exception of some produced by young ladies who reveal aspect of their body while they're doing it. So that could be misleading. They're not necessarily goats, but something that has arisen spontaneously. And there is a longing in humans to be. To be free of the noise of the voice in their head. And of course, most humans believe the only way they can be free is by falling below thought. I want to go to sleep, but I can't sleep. So the. Whether it's conceptual art or those, those videos, there is a truth there, and that is the. The world of ordinary things is also extraordinary. The multiplicity of this universe that surrounds us, the multiplicity of life forms, of things, of beings, is quite miraculous. And if we are continuously so absorbed in the thought processes that we are only peripherally aware of the aliveness of the world around us, then we are missing something really vital. And that's again, it's to do with being too absorbed in one's mind made sense of self in that. And occasionally they say, oh, look, it's a lovely flower. Oh, that's a nice sunset. Three seconds. But I have other problems to think about. More important things on my mind. I have a lot on my mind. Don't have time for sunsets. Don't have time for beauty. What are you talking about, beauty? I've got problems. So look, practice it outside or indoors. There are two ways of looking around. One is choosing an object. And briefly. Just wherever your gaze falls. Whatever. Wherever your gaze falls upon whatever it might be for a moment, you look. And then there's something else. You look at and there's something else. But as you look, there's a twofold awareness. One is the awareness of what you're looking at and you see it fully. The other is the awareness of the awareness without which you wouldn't be able to look. And that is your essential beingness. So the twofold nature of this act of perception. So I'm looking at. If I'm looking at you as a person, I'm looking. I'm aware of what I'm seeing. I'm also aware. I'm aware of how you look. I'm also aware of. Of myself as the awareness. And because I'm aware of myself as the awareness, I'm aware of more in yourself, in you, than the external appearance. I'm also aware of you as the conscious presence. That's the essence of who you are.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
