How Do You Experience Time? A 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

Welcome. Here we are again in the present moment. On the surface of life, time has passed since last time. But at a deeper level, it's still the one moment, the present. So usually our live meditation lasts around 40 minutes or so. That's the average time passes. So I can say we're going to be here for 40 minutes. And yet you don't really experience the 40 minutes. You only ever experience this moment. So time is memory and anticipation. And of course, it's necessary for this world to arise to even understand what I'm saying. You need the memory of what I've just said to complete a sentence or even a word. Even to utter a word takes time. I say time takes about 2 seconds or 1 second time. Just say the word. So you need to remember the beginning of the word to understand it. You need to remember beginning of a sentence that's already in memory or music. We need to remember the preceding sounds and then it forms a whole. And yet we actually experience this, just this moment. The secondary experience is your memory. So you bring together the immediate experience of this moment is only this with the secondary dimension of memory. And then while arises things make sense. Now there's a tendency for the secondary dimension of reality, which is memory, to obscure, distort the experience, the immediate experience, the aliveness of the present moment. And you can no longer perceive the present moment clearly. You see nothing as it is, you perceive nothing as it is. Because you are overwhelmed by the memory dimension. So in actual, in your daily life, in a person's daily life, it manifests as a narrative in their mind through which they interpret everything, all sense perceptions, reality. The narrative in their mind, which is memory, which is the conditioned mind, colors, distorts everything they perceive in the present. And that manifests in countless ways. It's the essence, for example, of what we call prejudice. You have a narrative in your mind about a certain group of people, a certain race, a certain political belief system, a certain religion, a certain social class, a certain gender, a certain culture, you have a narrative in your mind. And then whenever you meet a human being who belongs to that on the level of form, belongs to that race or that culture or agenda, or subscribe to that certain belief system, you cannot actually experience this human being as a human being. You see that passing through the narrative, and then you do it to yourself. You have a certain set of opinions, thoughts of who you are, and that becomes the foundation for your sense of identity. And perhaps you subscribe to a particular belief system, political, religious, whatever it may be. That's A collective identity. And then it gets combined with a personal sense of self. Some things it happened in your past. Or you interpret things in a certain way that happened in the past. Or maybe it never happened, or it's a distorted version of what happens. But all that becomes the narrative. Me as the victim, for example, is a very favorite one for the ego. Collective ego, personal ego. You can be a collective victim. You can be a personal victim. An enormously satisfying sense of identity. Dangerous. It could. There's this movement in the collective at the moment of emphasizing the victimhood of groups of people. And then so satisfied to the ego, you can make others wrong. You don't ever perceive who they are. You perceive them through the narrative. Of course, groups of people have been victimized in the past. Perhaps you, as a personal entity, has experienced victimization on a personal level through other unconscious humans. Whether it be your parents or at school, or discriminated against for personal reasons or whatever. Of course all this happens. There's a big difference between seeing that this is. This is what happened in the past. Deriving a sense of self from that, it's a huge trap. Because then the memory continuously obscures the presents in you, which is all your potential. Then the conditioned mind, your form, identity, is then what gives you your sense of self. There's always a sense of superiority in that sense, concealed, sometimes obvious, sometimes concealed. You can form identity. That is, you are better than most people in whatever way. Better looking, have more money, better social class, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more physically stronger. Many, many ways in which you can derive your identity from a sense of superiority. And even if it's a victim identity, which seems to be the opposite of believing that you are better than most, Is still a sense of superiority towards others. You are superior in your victimhood, morally superior. Dangerous trap. So you get. People get trapped in their conditioned mind. That becomes their personality. And then the most essential thing is missing from their lives. And that is the dimension of depth. I sometimes call it the transcendent dimension. With the personality. The conditioned mind that makes up the personality is transcended. Which means you become aware of something that is more essential, more real than the personality. Conditioned mind. Our meditation here, the purpose of it, is to make you aware of that dimension. You want to deepen it. You're already aware of it right now in the conceptual mind. May not even understand what I'm saying. All that happens is the arising of a sense of depth in you. And a space in the stream of thinking that otherwise is continuous space arises in the stream of thinking that you're conscious but not thinking. And you know that you're conscious. And yet there's no sense of self, no concept. You just, you know, it is possible that the mind may come in and say, oh, I. I'm not thinking. God, yes, that can happen. And then you acknowledge that. And then that thought goes. And then again, it's just a presence. Doesn't matter for how long, Just something arises that is inner spaciousness. But there's an alertness that goes with it. And that's also very peaceful. It's an alive sense of peace in you. It has nothing to do with what's going on in your life. You could realize that dimension. Whether you're in a prison cell or in a mansion or whether you're sitting on a bus or you're sitting in your Rolls Royce. It doesn't matter. It's the same thing. And then that is so liberating because then many things that before were so terribly important to have, to achieve, to keep, yes, they may still have some importance, but not absolute importance anymore. It now, the self, the form, identity, of course, is still there. You still have a physical body with certain characteristics. And you have a psychological self. There's still you as a psychological entity based on the past, of course, still there. And you acknowledge that it's there, and you even become comfortable with it, honoring it, but at the same time knowing directly, experientially that that is not who you essentially are. And one way of putting it is that means you are rooted in being. And yet you acknowledge and honor the human part of you, the human dimension, because you are a human being. Most people only know themselves as human. They don't know themselves as the being without which there could be no human. Human is form, being is essence. Human is the regular wave on the surface of the ocean. Being is the ocean. It.