From Thinking to Presence: 5 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

Becoming aware of your own presence, becoming aware of yourself as presence, rather than being aware of yourself as a person with a history. When you sense your own presence, which is the presence of yourself as consciousness, you don't have a history. There's no history in presence. And what is history other than thought thinking? So our meditation, the essence of our meditation is the shift to go through that shift from thinking to presence. The usual human state is identification with thinking. And you only know yourself as a thought based entity or being. In other words, you're always aware of yourself as something or somebody. And you're aware of other things that arise in your consciousness, but you're never aware of awareness itself. In the normal state, you're never aware of yourself as awareness. Never is perhaps very slightly exaggerated. There may be moments when you are aware of yourself as presence, but in most cases, people who don't know what that is misinterpreted and it's confused with something else. You could be climbing a mountain and you stand at the mountaintop, but the sun is just setting. And the exertion of climbing and this moment of incredible beauty stops your mind. And then you go, wow. And you may think it's caused by the beauty, but the joy, the intense aliveness and the peace, the alive peace that you sense isn't really caused by the sunset or caused by your surroundings, even by the activity of climbing. But that which had obscured that awareness is suddenly removed to continue a stream of thinking. And then what is underneath is the vastness of formless consciousness that is suddenly there. And that gives you that sense of intense aliveness, peaceful, alive, presence. In India, Satchitananda it's called, which means being, consciousness, bliss. Another word for bliss would be joy, intense aliveness. Being, consciousness, bliss. Meaning sat chit ananda. Being sat chit ananda, being, consciousness, bliss. String it together as one word because it's a single thing or single no thing. You're aware of being, you're aware of consciousness, but not in a duality. When I talk about it becomes duality, says I am aware of consciousness, but that's not really how it is. Language operates within the realm of duality, but this is the realization of non duality. It's only when you talk about it, it becomes duality again. As if you were aware of something. No, you are aware of the awareness. The awareness becomes self aware, the consciousness becomes self aware. There's no object, there's only subject.