How Do You Use the Mind to Cultivate Joy? | Eckhart Tolle Explains

If a form gives you what joy, it's not really the deepest, the true joy that is an intrinsic part of your self nature. It gives you pleasure, but pleasure exists in the realm of opposites. And what gives you pleasure will also give you pain, either because it leaves you or because it turns into its opposite. Every time you identify with a thought stream totally you have reincarnated into that thought stream. Your sense of self is completely in it. So you continuously reincarnate into arising phenomena. It could be external things, experiences, and you totally. It matters absolutely. And so one could say the deeper sense of coming to the end of reincarnation is to no longer reincarnate into identification with form, into seeking yourself or believing that yourself is in a form. And here we are speaking at the moment primarily of thought forms. So this compulsion to reincarnate always into the next thought stream, to be totally fascinated by it and always needing the more to make your reincarnation complete and never getting there, that's we are moving. That is being trapped in that normal state of consciousness. And that is still. The majority on the planet is still trapped in that. But very powerfully. Something else is arising now, and it's arising here. So the words, you give them attention, but they no longer have your total attention. There's some attention that you give to the words, but you also give attention to the underlying stillness even as you listen. And of course, the moment you do that, the unconditioned consciousness is there in you, and your mind becomes still without losing consciousness. You're fully aware. You're aware of the silence. But what really is that silence, or rather that stillness? The stillness is the unconditioned consciousness, awareness itself. And you are aware of that. Now, that sounds as if it were dualistic, but it's only because I'm using language. You are aware of awareness when you are aware of stillness. And the moment you pay attention to stillness, you've become still. And that might at first be like a phenomenon outside of you that you are attentive to. Oh, and you may notice there is a certain alertness that comes with that awareness of stillness. And you cannot be aware of stillness through thinking. Stillness does not exist for thought. Thought can come in subsequently and say, oh, that's stillness. How nice. Or it can say, oh, you see, you've lost it already. I had it. I had it only a moment ago. How can I get back to it? That was such a wonderful experience. And it's not really an experience, because it is. The stillness is always there. So during these days, here Learning what that means to be aware of that underlying dimension not only in these sessions. And then when you leave here, become totally absorbed again or reincarnate again totally into rising thought streams and sense perceptions, but carry that awareness, awareness of underlying awareness. I'm speaking of things that you can't speak of. That's why it's sometimes a little funny. You carry that with you not only here, although you can perhaps sense it more powerfully in these sessions. But then you walk out into, out there, into the gardens and the river, and there certain perceptions arise and you are aware of those perceptions. And some of them will be very beautiful and occasionally some may be ugly. This is the world. And you watch and you are underlying. The sense perception is a field of alert still presence in which the sense perception happens. And that means the compulsion to reincarnate into another thought stream is suddenly not there. You are happy not to reincarnate for a while into another thought stream. The true joy arises out of that state of presence. There is a very subtle joy in that which in some teachings been called happiness, but I wouldn't use that word. It might even be a wrong translation. That joy is in essence an intrinsic aspect of yourself. I sometimes call it the joy of being. And so it does not depend on what forms are rising at this moment. So you enjoy the play of forms, but the joy does not come from the forms. If the joy comes from the forms, it's not joy, it's pleasure. Pleasure is something you derive because a new form has come in and makes you feel good for a while and then it leaves you and makes you feel bad or the good turns into bad. So if a form gives you joy, it's not really the deepest, the true joy that is an intrinsic part of your self nature. It gives you pleasure. But pleasure exists in the realm of opposites. And what gives you pleasure will also give you pain, either because it leaves you or because it turns into its opposite. Such as in a relationship, marriage, divorce, pleasure, pain, or in business, gain, loss. And so Ramana Maharshi said, and of course that is a translation and it may not be absolutely correct translation. Happiness is your true nature. I would retranslate it. And perhaps in the original what he said is closer to that. Joy is your true nature. But don't look for joy. You would create some new object, mind, object. You don't need to look for it. No, simply do not reincarnate continuously. And it's so simple. These sessions are helpful and they are helpful beyond words. The words are helpful pointers but there's much more to these sessions than the words. And so be alert here to that dimension that is beyond the words, because that dimension is also beyond thought. And that is where we are going to know what that is. Which one could describe as consciousness free of thought. Wow. And this is the next step, one could say, in the evolution of human consciousness, which until now we've just come to the end of thought, which means humanity. Human consciousness being totally dominated, run by identified with thought. It started, as the myth tells us, in the Garden of Eden, which one could say is a symbolic representation of the arising of thought. They ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, evaluate, judge the arising of thought, loss of Eden. And I'm told the translation of that word Eden is place of joy. Thought arose and. Which was a great thing. And gradually, over many, many thousands of years, identification with thought came into self and thought became one. Mankind had to move through that. Now that state of consciousness has become more and more dysfunctional. Look at the history of the 20th century. Dreadful madness. So the dysfunction becomes apparent now because we are arriving at the end time. You may have seen people walking around, I don't know, they may not happen in India, but in the west with placards. The end is near, the end is nigh. We have arrived at the end. And perhaps they don't realize how right they are when they say we have arrived at the. Well, perhaps they should put a little another word in. We have arrived at the end of time. Because to be identified with thought totally is also to be governed by time, past and future. To live exclusively through memory and anticipation and all that that implies and a completely limited and false sense of identity. We are moving out of that. A new state of consciousness is emerging. This teaching would be pointless. Nobody would even hear it if it were not emerging already. So this form is no more than a midwife, a mid man, I don't know, simply to help along the birth process. And I'm not here to make it happen. That would be frustrating. Why aren't. And you are not here to make it happen in yourself. That would be equally frustrating. And you would come to the end of the six days or seven days here and say, I was looking for this great spiritual experience and somehow it didn't happen. I was looking and looking and looking. Because you were looking for something and you missed nothing. Oh, so you were looking to reincarnate into some experience and didn't get it. Or if you got it, maybe you got it and say oh, had such a great experience there. And then you're back wherever you live. And then a few weeks later, it's wearing off. Oh, I wish I could get that back. Where is it now? So great. And then you think, maybe I need to go back to India. Back to India. That's where it is. So the essence of this gathering is very simple, but also very subtle. It easily eludes you if you are too much in your mind. So not only here, but also out there. Be there as a field of alert presence, that which you sense here, the underlying field, and know what it means. The beauty of this, to be free of thought. But don't look for that state. It comes by itself. And in one moment you are free of a million years of conditioning as the unconditioned arises. Because if you had to undo the conditioned bit by bit, you would never see the end of it. There is so much. So the unconditioned arises as the state of consciousness that is free of thought, that all the great teachings not so directly point to some directly, some indirectly. When Ramana Maharshi was asked, how do we measure our progress on the spiritual path? How do we know if we are making progress? They asked him and he said, and some people don't like this. They say, no, no, he didn't really say that, but it's there. The degree of absence of thoughts is your measure of progress on the spiritual path. As simple as that. And then some people say, no, what he really meant was, who is talking, thought, trying to convince everybody else. That's not what he said. But be careful here not to make the state that is free of thinking into another future state to be achieved, because you can't achieve it in that way in the future, not as something to be added to you. It is an enormous. The greatest renunciation. And the only ultimately true renunciation is not so much the renunciation of worldly things, the renunciation of sexuality, the renunciation of possessions, the renunciation of certain kinds of food, whatever it may be. The ultimate renunciation is, and I'll say it, to renounce thought. And thought, it says, tries to convince you that in that renunciation you would become, you would revert to the state of the cabbage, the vegetable. And it says, this is not a desirable state. And that is true. You don't want being a cabbage is beautiful for the cabbage, but the cabbage lives at one with the totality. All vegetative life, all nature lives totally in state of oneness still. So it's totally right for the cabbage to be the cabbage. But it is not the destiny of humans to revert to the vegetative or animal stage. Although compared to humans, nature and animals are very, very sane compared to most of human life. There's enormous sanity there because they have not left. They haven't gone out into more and more highly differentiated form and form identification. They haven't left the source, they haven't gone that far from the source as humans have. And so, yes, there's great. Every animal is so rooted in being still compared to neurotic humans. Wow. Just look how animal moves and is itself, completely itself not trying to be something it is. But we are not going back there. The animal also is free of thought, although occasionally the beginnings of thought movements can be observed. In certain animals, we go beyond thought. One could say we are rising above thought, where we do not lose the ability to think, simply means we are no longer reduced by thinking. We are no longer trapped in thought. We can now use thought. Thought will operate when it's needed. It will be applied to a particular situation. But whenever even a situation that needs to be resolved, a challenge that arises, and it can only arise in the now, before thought arises, attention is given to it. And that attention is the state of thoughtless awareness, pure attention. You're looking at the totality of the situation in stillness, alert, alive, stillness. There is a looking in that looking. Enormous intelligence operates. And I am looking in a wider sense. It may not necessarily be through the eyes. Attention is giving to the situation, complete attention in stillness.