Guided Meditation for Deep Relaxation and Awareness | Eckhart Tolle

As you look at me or the image on the screen or look into my eyes, feel sense your own presence. So you pay attention to that presence, without which you would not be able to perceive anything. A prerequisite for all perception or experience is that presence. Another way of putting it there is a. You're giving attention to what appears in your consciousness at this moment. You're giving it attention. And that attention is your presence is awareness. And that's more important than me looking at this image on the screen. So while I'm looking, it almost seems that I'm looking at you. And in a way, I am. It took me a while, just a little. It took me some time to be able to speak into a camera rather than to a live person or a live audience, until I was able to sense the camera as a kind of wormhole, to use a science fiction term, through which I reach the consciousness that is you. Because it's essentially we are an expression of that one consciousness manifesting as the person that I am right now for a little while. The person that you are right now for a little while. A little while could be anything from. How much longer are you going to live? A few more weeks, months, 10 years, 50 years, 70 years? It's all a little while. There is an essence that underlies the entire universe, and that is sometimes, in spiritual language, called the One. The oneness sounds a little bit more abstract. The One is more direct, and the One is another term for God. So there isn't my consciousness and your consciousness. Only when we use language, it appears that there is such a thing When I say I reach your consciousness, but there's only the one consciousness appearing as this and that and that. I am that one consciousness. You are that one consciousness. Knowing yourself as that one consciousness is spiritual awakening is. If you know yourself continuously as that one consciousness, then in traditional terminology, that would be called enlightenment. It really is your natural state, potentially. It is the natural state for all humans potentially. And it is our destiny to know ourselves as the one consciousness, the one consciousness, in other words, knowing itself through you and me, becoming aware of itself, awakening in this dimension, coming more and more fully into this dimension from another dimension, which is timeless. In this dimension, there is time, paradoxically, or one can say the timeless one, expressing itself gradually, which means time expressing itself gradually, more and more in this universe, in this dimension. So the universe is becoming spiritualized, you could say. And from the perspective of time, that takes a long time. But it's all very simple from where you are, it does not take Time. This realization is the realization of the timeless. The timeless dimension in you. That is the spirit, to use an old term. There is something else to you that is the body, and there's also the mind. They are not separate from spirit. They are expressions, limited expressions of the formless. One spirit, one consciousness. And so we have the three terms. Mind, body, spirit. You know yourself as a body. You can touch the body. You can look at yourself in the mirror. You can like or dislike what you see when you look in the mirror. You can derive your identity or large part of your identity from what you see in the mirror. Positive or negative, good or bad. You may like what you see, you may dislike what you see. Either case, it's possible that you derive a large part of your identity from the body. If it looks good to you or better than others, then it's a happy identity. And if it doesn't, it's an unhappy identity. It's a very limited identity. Sense of self. Very limited sense of self. But for some people, it's the main thing that they are concerned about. And then comes the mind, so the body, physical form, that which can be seen. And the next level is that which cannot be seen, but which can be known. You know yourself primarily as a mind. The larger part of who you are is not visible. The entire psychological self, the conditioned entity, all the thought processes, all the emotions that go with the thoughts, all the emotions that arise, come and go. That's all the unseen. You, science, as it is at the moment, wants to reduce the unseen to that which can be seen or perceived. In other words, it wants to reduce everything to matter. It doesn't really recognize there's anything unseen. It says if you really look deep enough into matter, you eventually find everything there. You will find the chemicals that produce the emotions. You will find molecules that produce certain thoughts. You just. We just haven't found them yet. They say we still don't know what a thought is. But eventually we'll find that matter produces thought. It's a byproduct of. That's what science, mainstream science believes at the moment, that matter, that what we call consciousness is about byproduct of matter, accidental byproduct of matter. And that is a. I don't want to argue with that right now. But a time will come when we will realize that is an absurd misperception of who we are. And that the entire universe can be reduced to accidental formations of matter is also a misperception. But we can put that aside for our meditation purposes here and go to what we can verify directly within. And you can verify that there's a lot of stuff going on inside you. Thought processes that give you your sense of self. So the sense of self is derived then partly from the physical body. For some people it's a large part. For other people, it's a smaller part of their sense of self. The next step, you derive your sense of self from your mind and your emotions, thought activity, a mental image of who you are, the self. Talk in the head that you may be familiar with, the storytelling of the mind, that you may know me and my life, listen to my story. And that's where it stops for most people. Sense of self derived from the body plus the mind, which includes emotion, mental emotion. And that's about. That's what there is for most people. So you have body and mind, but where is the spirit? Now for most people, spirit is just a concept. They might, if you go to church or temple or wherever, you may hear about spirit, you may repeat words that refer to the spirit. But is that anything other for you than a thought in your head? Just another thought that's added? Or even one gigantic thought that controls all other thoughts, God, so forth. There are people in whom the mental concept of God has taken over their mind and has become the controlling thought. And through that controlling thought, they perceive everything else. They think that's spiritual. Of course, what that really is is what's sometimes called radical, fundamental, actually a form of insanity. One thought has taken over and controls all other thoughts. And that is a gigantic ego. And then you share that with other people who have the same dysfunction and you have this gigantic collective ego. It's a form of insanity, not uncommon. But anybody who is not yet aware of a spirit in their immediate experience partakes to some degree of. Of that dysfunction might not be as gigantic and as potentially violent as the dysfunction in the fundamentalist or the terrorist, but it is a dysfunction when you only know yourself as the physical body. And whatever your mind is telling you, you with all its conditioned patterns. But it's so easy to take one another step deeper into yourself and also know yourself as spirit. And that's so simple as the question I asked you at the beginning of our session today. As you look at me, can you sense that in you, which is looking? And I don't mean the physical eyes, I don't mean what you are looking at, but the energy behind the looking, the consciousness that makes the looking possible, and that is your simple presence.