Eckhart Tolle on Sensing Presence in Others

Most people have brief moments of presence, but they don't know it. It's overlooked. So one could say the most important thing is always overlooked. And so once you know that and you become aware of this first moment, then it actually lasts longer. This is wonderful. For example, with human beings, you, another, you meet a human being, you look at him, her, whatever, and then you become aware that for the first two or three seconds you're not judging, you're just sensing through your own presence. You sense the presence of the other. And when you become aware of that, it can last much longer. You don't have to immediately compulsively judge the other. And that's a wonderful thing. It changes the way in which you relate to other human beings. If you can refrain from judging, the compulsion isn't there anymore because there's something else that's deeper and that brings about a connectedness between humans. Otherwise would not be there. Because the moment the mind starts judging, separation comes in a sense of separation. And the other, the other, the human being that's in front of you, becomes the other. Now that's very important because the other, if you are operating exclusively from a egoic state of consciousness, without any awareness of any transcendent dimension within yourself or the other, then the other, you depend on the other as an ego. In the absence of awareness, you depend on the other to be as other as possible. Because you define your own identity through the other. What it is not the. The. If you emphasize that the other is different from you as the otherness of the other, you emphasize it. That strengthens your own, the boundary around your own sense of identity as an egoic self. So the moment you can, as the ego, the. The moment you can criticize another. Gossip is often very well known phenomenon. When you gossip about other people, you criticize them in some way, in some way. They are defective in one way or another. Because what that does is it strengthens your egoic sense of self. The boundary becomes more rigid and you feel stronger in your sense of self because you have, you are, you are. The moment you judge implicitly you are superior to the person that you are judging. That's implied in judgment. You are obviously superior. It's not fully understood quite a conscious mind, but it's an unconscious egoic strategy to strengthen your ultimately fictitious sense of self. So that's a very, very common thing. And it can be done on an individual basis. It can also be done on a collective basis. Then you see that if you identify with a collective conceptual image of who you are which could be whatever. It could be political or. These days, very popular things are gender and race. So you identify very strongly with that. Then the other becomes. The ego needs to make the other as other as possible. It's a crazy process. It's. It happens because you are unconscious, which means you're not awake yet. That's when you're in the grip of these patterns, inherited, conditioned mind patterns. You're in the grip of them. They have you in their grip, and you don't even know it, because you don't. You're so identified with the mind patterns that you are the mind patterns. In other words, spiritually speaking, you are asleep. Who you truly are, the essence of who you are is not really there. Or very briefly, it has made me live little. Ah, then it's back into the sleep state. Spiritually speaking, the sleep state is total identification with a stream of thinking which continuously compares, classifies, judges, everything. So the veil. This is the veil of Maya. The veil through which you interpret reality. So you can notice. You reach a certain stage where you are able to, one could say, choose to step out of the stream of thinking. Like you are all already at that stage. Well, most of you are at that stage where you are able to consciously step out of the stream of thinking. And if you're not at that stage yet, perhaps this session here can help you to realize. To realize that you are able to step out. It doesn't matter for how long. Don't ask, well, how long are you going to sustain it? It doesn't matter how long. But the art of stepping out of thinking into presence, you, yes, you can have little things that help you to do that. If you are not yet able to just step out of presence. And you don't have to look like this. I'm just acting it out a bit. It's the way it refers to an inner state. You suddenly. So when you. When you step out of thinking as a choice, often the first thing that happens, you become more aware of your sense perceptions, what you see and hear and what you Maybe other sense perceptions. You could be sitting in your familiar room and suddenly look around the room as if it. As if you had just arrived there. Because if you are familiar with certain surroundings, you don't notice them anymore. They're just peripheral. But then you begin to notice again. And you see all the. All the otherwise familiar, familiar pieces of furniture and so on, and you look at them without judging, as if you seeing them for the first time. And that's a very strange and wonderful thing. To become present now. You become present in familiar surroundings. It's an interesting thing when familiar surroundings suddenly come back to life. And you can also become. Of course, when you travel, it sometimes is helpful because if you're in totally unfamiliar surroundings, potentially it could be an opportunity for perceiving things more clearly without the. Without thinking, absorbing all your. All your attention. And then you look at these unfamiliar surroundings here. But there are people, of course, who can't even do that because there's so much mental baggage that even when they go to other countries that are very different, they immediately interpret everything through the conditioning of their mind instead of openly experiencing it in a state of presence.