Freedom from Thought and Excessive Thinking, with Eckhart Tolle

Beautiful sunshine, but the fog is rolling in slowly. That's beautiful too. And quite often along the coast here, you get fog and sunshine at the same time. So as the fog reaches the beach, it begins to dissolve. And then you have the sun filtering through the fog. Quite magical. So here we are. An interesting thing to observe while you are here especially. But the rest of your life also is where your attention is at any given time, or more precisely, in the present moment, which is all there is, where your attention is in the present moment and whether your attention is determined by all kinds of factors or whether you have some influence over where your attention goes. Now, you've all noticed and experienced when you're walking in the street or you're sitting somewhere and suddenly there's some noise behind you, or somebody shouts something, or you're in a restaurant sitting somewhere behind you, somebody drops a plate. And usually most people would go immediately. It's an automatic thing. And these days, of course, you have other. Not just plates breaking, which happens relatively rarely, but you have your phones demanding your attention. So you are having a wonderful conversation with a friend and then you suddenly hear ping, ping, ping. You are just talking about it really connecting. And suddenly your attention goes. And it's a text message or some other sound, which means it's an and that demands your attention. And people don't realize that they obey immediately. That little device, it's like a plate breaking, except this happens all the time, or people shouting behind you. So your attention is being pulled out continuously. When I first got my iPhone two years ago, then I got my first text messages, which looked quite miraculous. And then often I didn't reply until the next day or two days later. And then I was told this is not according to text message etiquette. Text message etiquette dictates that you reply immediately. So occasionally I do that now, but even now I don't always reply immediately. And I don't even look at it immediately. At first I did when I got the iPhone, and then I realized what it was doing. And then apart from all these external things, and of course the electronic devices, they increase the demands that the external world makes upon your attention. Before you had all these electronic devices, yes, it's even then the world would make demands continuously on your attention, but not as frequent as with all these devices. And so people don't realize they are kind of. They lose their freedom of choice. And something even more all pervasive that was already there before the electronic devices came is that certain thoughts in your mind also demanding Your complete attention. A little thought comes in about something that you can't do anything about now, but you have to think about it now. And the thought says, give me your attention. So what I'm talking about here is you begin to identify with every thought that arises. It has a pulling power, it pulls you in and it's an energy formation. Everything a thought is an energy form. Everything is not physical energy. It's probably halfway between physical and non physical. And the greatest scientists, no matter what they tell you, their ego may not allow them to admit it. But if they are really honest and their ego is not huge, they will admit to you. They don't. They have examined the brain for a long time, but they can't. They don't know what a thought is. You've looked at brain chemistry and examined it and examined it, but what is a thought that you still don't know. And so we don't need to know on that level here. You just experience what a thought is and how it pulls your attention in and you follow it up, if you follow it where it wants to take you, and it leads to another associated thought and another. And before you know it, you are dragged along by another mind stream out of the present moment into some conceptual reality, because that's what thought is. So you're drawn into some conceptual reality which includes a conceptual sense of self and me, an image of me, a narrative of me. And so that is then the reality that you inhabit most of the time. And so whether your attention is pulled by some external thing or an electronic gadget, or your thoughts, it goes to all kinds of places in your head and outside and ding. And what you actually can choose to direct your attention to something, rather than being at the mercy of all kinds of factors that determine where your attention is going to go. So you can choose. When you hear the bing of a text message or the bong of an email, you can choose to not give it your attention, but just remain still for three seconds. And then you have a choice. You can give it your attention or not give it your attention. At least now you have a choice. The same thing with when somebody is shouting behind you and obviously doesn't concern you, why automatically go. If you are really present, then you can hear the noise and you don't go there. It's not necessary, it's just somebody dropped a plate or whatever in a restaurant. Happens all the time. So you can choose to direct your attention. For example, right now, you can choose to direct your attention. Of course, it's in at the moment, it's in visual perception and auditory perception. In addition, you can choose to direct your attention into your right hand, which does not diminish your ability to listen and to listen and to see what's going on here. So you can have your attention in your right hand and feel the energy as I can feel it right now, can feel the energy in my right hand or the aliveness, which does not diminish my ability to speak or to see you. And I can feel the left hand also. So you can direct attention into your feet. You can direct attention to some object in this room, any sensory perception. You can choose to think a particular thought and then let go of the thought. What am I going to have for dinner? What are they going to serve for dinner tonight? Thought arises. I'm feeling a little bit peckish. What? And then you can choose to let go of that thought and not to follow it and return your attention to visual and auditory perception. And so you have a choice. When you realize that you have a choice, you don't need to. And to practice with the electronic gadgets, particularly because the consensus is that you don't have a choice. You have to immediately look and check and reply or whatever. Immediately. It used to be just telephones, but the telephones had a line attached to them so that they were in a particular place. They didn't follow you around. But even when they had telephones, people would interrupt any conversation just because the phone was ringing. And at that time, they didn't even have caller identification. So you had to pick it up no matter who. You had no idea who was going to call, but it was ringing. You had to pick up and give your attention to that call. Then the time came, fortunately, when there was caller IDs, at least you could look and see who is call, Do I want to talk to this person? So the choice in directing your attention, and that is really the beginning of meditation or any meditation practice, is to have some influence over where your attention goes. And usually in meditation, your attention is directed to a meditation object for a while. And some people get stuck there for 20 years or the rest of their lives. The attention may go to a mantra, which really is a certain thought or certain sounds that you repeat in your head, or you speak out aloud. And so it becomes the focus for your attention, and you choose to direct your attention there. Rather than useless thinking, your attention becomes focused. Or you can have an external object of your attention, the candle flame, a flower, whatever it is, and you keep your attention there for a few minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And when it wanders away and you notice it's gone away, you choose to redirect your attention to that, the object of your meditation. So it's a practice. It's like a physical exercise. The muscle of choice is strengthened by realizing you can practice. You have a choice. And then you recover. You do not have to follow every thought where it wants to take you. You can drop a thought, or you can recognize a thought as just another of those old thoughts, not interesting. And then it dissolves by its sa.