Eckhart Tolle teaches and leads a meditation on emptying the mind, using the analogy of a cluttered room to explain how consciousness works. The session was recorded live in Sao Paulo, Brazil and explores Zen, mindfulness, and presence.
It welcome to our live meditation. I'm in Sao Paulo, Brazil at the moment. I gave a talk here last night. It's seven o'clock in the evening here and the sun is going to set maybe quite soon. You may have heard the story about somebody coming to a Zen master and asking him to explain what Zen is all about. And the Zen master said, come and have a cup of tea. And he prepared the cup of tea and poured the hot water in the pot. And then he served tea to his guest who wanted to know about Zen. And he poured the tea into his cup and he didn't stop pouring until the cup was overflowing. And the guest thought that the Zen master might have been absent minded and said, stop, stop. The cup is overflowing, can't you see? And the Zen master said, like this cup, your mind is full of ideas, viewpoints, knowledge and all kinds of stuff. It's overflowing with stuff. How can I teach you Zen or how can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup? Now of course that means having an open mind, one could say, but how do you have an open mind? Your mind is already cluttered with knowledge, real knowledge, pseudo knowledge, most knowledges, perspectives. But how can you empty a mind of all knowledge? Is that even a good thing? Well, all that's needed is in this present moment, to become so aligned with this moment and accept it the way it is, so deeply that the mind comes to a stop. Cessation of thinking doesn't mean you lost your knowledge. You're still somewhere. You haven't lost your memory and yet you have all the space that contains all that memory. You've become aware of the space which is consciousness itself. So when you become aware of stillness, you become aware of the space of consciousness. The space of consciousness becomes aware of itself. It. And that's the deeper meaning of the now. Most people think that the now is what happens in the now. But the true meaning is that the now is the space in which it happens. That's why the now itself cannot change. It's consciousness itself and you are that. And of course it is just a word. There isn't really a word that can adequately describe that. They are just pointers. Pointer to the city. That Ray says that what it is is not the city. Or as the Buddhists say, the pointer to the. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We use space which isn't something that we seem to perceive in the external world to describe an inner something. Inner. So if you were a room and somebody asked you, who are you? It's a strange analogy, I know, but. So if you were this room or if the room had consciousness, the room would talk about itself. Who are you? Well, this is the wall and the ceiling and the floor. And we've finally changed the room. That seems to me what the room is. But it's so easy to forget what the essence of the room is. And that is the. So we can use that analogy to point to something within you. You are also filled with furniture. The ceiling, the floor, the walls. Maybe that could be your physical body and all your mental content would be the furniture in the room. And most people. People's mind is cluttered. So it's a room that's full of clutter, some useful things and many useless things. You may also notice if you are that room, that time comes when little cracks appear in the wall and ceiling as the room gets old.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
