Guided Meditation: The Power of Stillness with Eckhart Tolle | Exploring Joy, Love, and Creativity

I trust you're okay with stillness. To be okay with stillness, you have to access the stillness within you. Otherwise it gets uncomfortable. If you experience joy or moments of joy or beauty, aliveness, a sense of aliveness, a loving connection with another human being, or a loving connection with another life form, or if you have any creative idea in your life or anything creative comes to you, all those things that I just mentioned imply that you have some access already to the stillness inside you. Because all those things, the joy, the sense of aliveness, the lovingness towards others, the creative impulse, the creative idea, all that comes from that dimension in you. Now, many humans have some access to that dimension. That's why they feel it's good to be alive. And for most humans, that access gets for long periods of time covered up again by excessive mind activity, and then it resurfaces again. It's not recognized, usually directly, for what it is. It is recognized indirectly. So you may be aware that suddenly you feel a sense of joy and aliveness, or you look at another human being and you feel a deep sense of connection. So what happens there is that dimension arises. You don't recognize it directly. You recognize it as joy. You recognize it as a loving connection or loving kindness, or a creative impulse, or a sense of heightened aliveness, or the recognition of beauty. You look and ah, isn't that beautiful? And in the looking and the recognition of the beauty, you may not realize that what underlies that, that which makes it possible is that for a moment there was no thought activity in your mind. A space opened up, and that space, that is the stillness. And that is why you could recognize the beauty, or that is why you felt the connection with another human, or a simple aliveness arose within you. So it comes spontaneously to you. There are some humans, quite a few, who almost never experience that opening into the alive, stillness. And their lives are truly miserable. They may not even know that. They may not even know that their lives are miserable. They think it's normal to be continuously immersed in the thinking. Isn't everybody else? No. A deepening happens when you recognize that stillness directly. It may happen spontaneously in a situation. You're looking at a tree, and for a moment there's no thought. There's just the perception and the stillness in the background. So you begin to recognize it directly as the foundation for joy, for love, for also compassion, empathy with another. You can't arrive at empathy through conceptual thinking. You cannot sense the aliveness of another human being through conceptual thinking. But only thinking needs to subside for a moment. And then the sense of separation that's created by continuous thinking disappears in that moment. So I'm inviting you to enter the stillness. Another way of putting it. I'm inviting you to stop thinking without falling asleep. That's one way, but that's not the way here. And this is the next evolutionary level for humans. Rising above thinking, not abandoning thinking altogether, transcending thinking. Thinking can still operate much more powerfully, by the way, when it's rooted consciously in the stillness, it. Now, if you're still thinking, this becomes boring or uncomfortable. If it's not boring or uncomfortable, then you are in that state of freedom from thought. You may sense your presence, so to speak. The presence that you are the essence of. You sense it as a whole body realization, just a sense of presence throughout the body as you sit here. And that is a sense of heightened aliveness. And if you choose to look around, still sensing this heightened aliveness in your entire energy field, you then look around. You see that also whatever you are perceiving feels more alive. Even inanimate objects have a certain beingness. They are even a table, chair. Even there, there is some life. They are called inanimate, which means, I suppose, life. But if you looked more deeply into the molecular structure of the chair or the table, you would see intense aliveness and intense movement. So at this very moment, the universe, we could say appearing as you, experiences itself. Of course, that's the truth. You are not separate from the universe. It's an amazing thing, the universe appearing briefly as what we call a person, a cell within the totality. Experiencing itself both on the level of multiplicity of life forms, which is included everything through perceptions, but also on the deeper level. The universe experiencing itself as the unmanifested underlying life. The manifested is the world of form. The unmanifested is the formless one life, timeless. That which preceded the Big Bang that the physicists talk about. The timeless one that did not ceased to exist when the universe came into existence. But this timeless one that continues to be at the core of every life form. That which gave birth to the universe did not cease to exist by giving birth to the universe. Exist is the wrong word because it doesn't exist. Because exist means to stand out. Ex is out. Latin. To stand, exist means to stand out so that all life forms exist. But the one unmanifested life does not exist because it doesn't stand out. It is in. It is. You could say it's being, but not existence. No, everything that exists has being. Being is the core at the Core of each thing, the unmanifested, timeless one life. Don't think about this. I'm not using this so that you conceptually arrive at some conclusion, but for you to experience within yourself that this one timeless, unmanifested life that precedes the Big Bang is the very cause of who you are. And it's absolutely still and it's absolutely alive and it's absolutely empty and absolutely full. And it's you, it's I, the one I appearing as many I's and U's. Now you can only really become comfortable with the continuous flux of life forms that come and go and are born and die, are born and die. You can only really become comfortable with that when you are aware of the core of yourself as the timeless stillness. Otherwise the continuous birth and death around you is upsetting. The continuous gain and loss and birth and death and the continuous coming and going and change is no foothold it. And we have the two dimensions expressed beautifully in very ancient Greek philosophy. I may have mentioned before. Heraclitus. Heraclitus. Heraclitus says you cannot step into the same river twice because of this continuous flux. It's not different water. It's Pantare is the Greek. Everything flows. Everything is subject to continuous change in metamorphosis, everything around you. He said that's the basis of his philosophy. 500 BC. And then came another philosopher, Parmenides, I believe, who said, nothing ever changes, it's all an illusion. And he's right too. They are both right, of course. Heraclitus talks about the manifested world. Parmenides talks about the unmanifested one life. What the Buddha. I don't know whether the Buddha actually used that term, but I think he probably did, or whether it comes. It's a later sometimes hard to tell in Buddhism, the scriptures, whether they go as far back as the actual Buddha teaching. The unborn is a Buddhist term meaning that which is prior to existence, the timeless one, the unborn within you. So the wonderful thing is the heart of the universe, this vast, incomprehensible thing that you see the tiniest fraction of when you look at the stars at night. It's a tiny, tiny fraction of what's there. And even that's not just tiny because you only see a few thousand stars out of billions and billions and billions, but also tiny because of the limitations of what your senses can perceive. And the heart of it all, the core of it all, although on the outer level, you seem pretty insignificant. And me, we look pretty insignificant when we see the vastness of the universe. But there is something within you that transcends the world of form. And that is why the secret of the universe is in you. And obviously, you can't comprehend it conceptually, but there's a realization there. And it's only there that there's deep peace. That's the only place where you can find true peace.