Eckhart Tolle guides a meditation on using mindfulness to overcome problems by accessing stillness beyond thought. He teaches that mental suffering comes from identifying with your thoughts rather than observing them, and that present moment awareness breaks the cycle of unconscious thinking.
No need to think right now. There's nothing to add to this moment by thinking about it. So all that thinking would do is obscure your awareness, your awareness of the present moment, which means obscure your awareness. If you have problems waiting for you, you can think about them when we finish. And even then I would suggest and recommend that you set aside brief periods when you think about your so called problems, if they are real. In other words, a real problem is a situation that you need to deal with either right now, in the moment when it arises, in which case it's not a problem, it's a challenge or something that tomorrow you may have to do, or next week or next month, and you may have to think about what you're going to do to the extent to which it's possible to plan and set aside a period of time when you do that, and then when that's done, come back into present moment awareness. So the worst fate is for your mind to be occupied continuously with past and future. And as you know, past and future exist in the mind. Remove the mind thought, there is no past or future. Past or future exists for you as thought. It's indispensable for dealing with the practical aspects of life, but it's a huge obstacle for going deeper within yourself, deeper into reality. A huge obstacle to finding that state of connectedness with a deeper reality. The huge obstacle to knowing who you are. So right now all you need to do, and there's no doing we just use the word. All you need to do is look at the image on the screen, listen to the words, which are all pointers, signposts. And as you look at the image on the screen and listen to the words, be aware also of yourself as the still space, the still presence, without which you would not be able to look at the image on the screen or listen to the words. It's only because there is that light of presence that receives the sense perception of seeing and hearing, that there can be seeing and hearing it. The moment you start thinking about past and future, the moment you start thinking, some of your consciousness incarnates into form, the incarnation. I believe carnation comes from flesh, carnal. The word incarnation is to become form, to become physical form, but it's not necessarily physical. You become a psychological form. Every thought is that so some of the consciousness incarnates into mental formations, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a good thing you're able to think. It's not a good thing to lose yourself in the thinking. Why is it not a good thing, because it makes your life miserable. And if you make your life miserable, you make other people's lives miserable without even knowing what you're doing. That's the essence of unconsciousness. The really unconscious people, which is still millions, billions on the planet, they don't know that they are making their lives miserable and other people's lives miserable. Or as somebody once put it, they know not what they do. And here you can learn to become comfortable with the beautiful, let's call it state. It's not a state, the beautiful state of not thinking. Become familiar with that experience. How lovely it is not having to think. Sa.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
