This is a YouTube video titled "Guided to Presence: 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle" created in September 2022. The content is a guided meditation session led by Eckhart Tolle, focusing on achieving thoughtless awareness, presence, and inner spaciousness. The meditation explores concepts such as the merging of observer and observed, the nature of consciousness, and spiritual teachings referencing figures like Ramana Maharshi, Jesus, and Buddha. The session is a monologue aimed at guiding listeners into a meditative state rather than a conversation.
There's a common belief that when you meditate, your eyes need to be closed, but they don't need to be closed. It's wonderful to realize you can meditate with your eyes open, of course. What do I mean by meditate? Quite simply, being in thoughtless awareness. That's meditation. And as I speak and as you listen, you can be in thoughtless awareness. Just a presence. Why not? You don't have to be always a heavy person carrying the baggage of past and a mind full of stuff. There is another way of being in this world, and that's to be the presence. And this is all meditation. And even as I speak, you can be the presence because there's nothing to think about. What I'm saying is so simple that you cannot figure it out by thinking about it, because there's nothing to figure out. You can't work. What is he saying? He's saying exactly what he's saying. You can't say, oh, I'm trying to understand what he's saying. There's nothing to understand. Stepping out of thinking does not involve further understanding through thinking. That may be a little insulting, particularly to those of you who are highly educated and identify excessively with the content of your mind that thinking is not the highest faculty in a human being. And that is a revolutionary statement that not many people in the mainstream culture would agree with, because all they know themselves is as thinking entities. But once you discover that thinking is not the highest because you've touched something, a dimension in yourself that's beyond thinking, that is an evolutionary leap. Even if you fall back into thinking for a moment, you have leapt like the fast fish trying to leap out of the sea, because they say life first developed in the sea. And trying to crawl on land is you stopping thinking. And then it gets too difficult, then the fish runs back, gets back into the sea. But that analogy, of course, we need to forget now, because it's not going to take us several million years as it took to the fishes before they could start walking on land. If that whole story is true, who knows? It doesn't matter. So as you might have noticed, what I'm talking about is very simple, because I'm simply guiding you into presence. That's all. But more important than the words is what's behind and in between the words. And we could call that spaciousness, or we could call that stillness. Doesn't matter what you call it, but you become more aware of the spaciousness, then the words. And the spaciousness is within you. It's there the moment the stream of thinking subsides and there's only the presence left. If your mind still tends to interfere and take you out of presence, allow the body, your body, to participate in the meditation so that you become present with every cell of the body. Every cell of the body becomes present. Now, somebody might say, please explain what you mean by that. No, I won't. It's too simple for that. Just sense the aliveness in your body. Anywhere where you can feel it first is fine, the hands or the legs or the feet. And then the entire energy field that pervades the body becomes part of presence. And at first it seems that you, the consciousness, are observing the inner body feeling. But if you go into it more deeply, you realize that there's no longer a subject, object, relationship between you, the presence and the feeling of the inner body. You, the presence and the feeling of the inner body merge. And the totality of that becomes the state of presence. So it's no longer an observer and the observed. There's a merging of the observer and the observed. So it means the entire being becomes aware. And that's a lovely state, peaceful. And then it's fairly easy not to drift off into thinking tomorrow's breakfast or next week's problems or last year's disappointments and many other things. That thinking is concerned with my problematic life. Somebody, perhaps it was Carl Jung, I'm not sure, said, you cannot solve the problems of this world on the same level of consciousness that created the problems. So you can't solve your personal problems, which everybody has, unless you rise to a different state of consciousness, which is why we are here. And when you solve your personal problems that a sufficient number of humans do, that then that will affect the world problems. And that's how truly you can change the world. Or to put it more accurately, how that change can happen through you. It's not you, the doer, who is going to change the world, but it can happen through you. In the meantime, there's nothing wrong. In fact, it's wonderful to alleviate suffering where you see it in this world, where you feel called upon to help in your immediate environment or elsewhere. That's a wonderful thing to do. But the causal level of the world's problems lies in the collective consciousness or unconsciousness of the world. And that is the only place, consciousness, where deep and permanent change can happen. So that eventually you don't need to help other humans anymore. They don't need your help anymore. You can just commune joyfully with them. So you deal, of course, with the effects of Unconsciousness. In this world, there's a lot of suffering, physical and psychological. And your focal point, as. Even as you help others, your focal point needs to be this shift in consciousness. So the entire body is meditating, so to speak, is present as you sit here. And you can now perhaps easily verify the effectiveness of a meditation question. That was one of the favorite meditations of Ramana Maharshi, the Indian sage. And that was the simple question. Who am I? He said, just ask yourself that question and go deeply into it and then see what happens. Who am I? And a little hint. I don't know if he gave that hint. The answer is not in words. The answer is, let's see, if it comes to you, who am I? And you need to be, of course, alert. And still after the question has been asked so that you can find out, who am I? I'll give you another hint. You can't think about it. Then you get confused. And then you will say either you'll say, of course, I'm so and so, of course. Then you're certain, but you're well below the answer. Or you say, I don't know. I'm so confused. Now you're confusing me. That's because you're trying to find and answer through thinking, who am I? What remains is just an alertness, an alert space. That's consciousness. Let's call it your consciousness, but it's not yours. That's your consciousness minus the content, minus forms. Who am I? And if you had. If somebody were forcing you to give an answer in words, the truthful answer would be, I don't know. Because it is not through any word or concept that you can know who you are. So on the level of words or concepts, you have to say, I don't know. And yet there is undoubtedly a presence there that has no name and has no content and has no past and no future and no problems. Totally intangible, formless. This was what Jesus referred to as the kingdom of heaven. Heaven, the vastness of sky. Heaven and sky in some words are the same word. In some languages. He had to find some kind of word to describe the spaciousness of that inner state. So he called it the kingdom. In modern terminology, the dimension or the realm of vastness or spaciousness. But it's not the outer spaciousness, it's the inner. But of course, all words refer to outer things. The kingdom of heaven is within you. And that's why, as it has no content and no form, the Buddha called it emptiness. It.
