Eckhart Tolle guides you into stillness and presence through meditation. He teaches how to transcend fear and karma by accessing inner consciousness, moving beyond the noise of everyday life to find tranquility within.
The main thing for our meditation tonight is becoming still. Or rather noticing that the stillness is already in you, waiting to be discovered. So our session today probably is going to be a kind of transmission of stillness. For the transmission to be received, it requires you to have access to a little bit of stillness inside you. And that little bit of stillness can receive the transmission, recognize itself in the transmission, and then know itself more fully. If you can hear the ticking of the clock, that, of course, that signifies time. And underneath and in between the ticking of the clock is the stillness which signifies the timeless, timeless consciousness. That timeless consciousness is the essence of who you are. So as we sit here together, if it works for you, it means that the person is receding and presence is arising. And there's a shift suddenly in identity. Your sense of self is no longer derived from the silly person. Every person is more or less silly. With its judgments. And all the mind stuff and the expectations and the shoulds and the shouldn'ts and the complaints and the regrets and the constant focus on future or past. This resentments and grievances and anxieties and problems cause. And there is another dimension of consciousness in you that's far deeper than the person. The person is a surface movement of that consciousness. Fleeting, insubstantial, the ripples on the surface. And as the presence arises in you, you feel suddenly your connectedness with enormous power, energy, intelligence. And you're rooted in that. It is who you are, ultimately. And that's always there. And that is where fear ends. Fear can only exist on the surface, where the person lives. And the natural condition of the surface entity is fear, often disguised as other things. And the absence of fear really means that for the first time, you can actually feel the deep trust. Absence of fear means trust. So you can feel a deep trust in life. You are connected with your one, with something vast. And through you it emanates into this world, either directly, without your mind, like here. Now. This is an emanation of presence. But also it can flow into your mind and use your mind and inspire your thoughts and words and actions. Presence is felt or sensed with your entire body. Every cell of the body is alive with that presence.
It.
Can you be in that state of alert presence continuously? Well, probably not. But it can be there in the background of your life. Even while you are active, doing things, speaking, thinking. And yet you sense that spacious stillness in the background. In between two thoughts. And perhaps even while you're thinking. Then thinking happens in the foreground. And let spacious, aware presence is in the background. This, for Example is happening here now, when I speak, the mind is being used, and that's the foreground. And there is in the background this wonderful, vast, spacious stillness.
It.
Even though you may be able to enter the presence here, you may still find in certain situations, you lose it completely. That's okay. Afterwards, you realize you've lost it while you lose the presence. You don't know you're losing the presence. It just happens. A reaction takes over the habitual mind pattern, takes over the habitual mental emotional reaction. And some people have very deeply entrenched patterns in their mental emotional field. Those patterns are an aspect of what the east calls karma. And some people carry quite a heavy burden of karma. Usually karma is interpreted as the things that happen to you in your life, the situation you are born into, parents, things that happen to you, the country, the energy field in which you grow up, all your relationships, and so on and so on. That is an aspect of karma. But more fundamentally, karma is not what happens to you. But more fundamentally, karma is how you react to what happens to you, how you deal with situations and people and challenges. You can magnify the difficulties and the challenges through reactivity. So you have heavy karma. Or you may have so called good karma, in which case the conditioning of your mind is relatively okay. It will have its limitations. There may be some presence already, but the only thing that really transmutes karma is the arising of presence. And it will transmute even deeply entrenched karmic patterns, reactions that you don't seem to be able to get rid of that happen again and again. But it may take time for the timeless to burn up. Karma may take a little bit of time, not as much time as it took for karma for those patterns to form. Thousands and thousands of years. There's no reason why those dysfunctional patterns that make your life difficult cannot be transmuted or burned up through presence in this lifetime. But you have to want presence. You have to choose presence. You have to want to be free. You have to want peace within yourself and not think something is more important out there than the inner peace within me. And so the course in miracles says, I quote now I want the peace of God. To say these words means nothing. But to mean these words means everything. Nobody can mean these words and not be healed. End of quote. And those of you who have deeply entrenched heavy karmic patterns will be forced to go deeper into presence. Presence needs to be more acute.
To.
Burn up those patterns. So you are forced to go deeper into greater alertness. Otherwise the patterns will not become transmuted. Some harmless patterns may always remain. Every human has a certain form. There may be certain habit patterns that do not cause any problems. Then they may well survive in the light of presence. Destructive patterns. Destructive of yourself and others. Problem making patterns. Deeply negative patterns cannot survive in the light of presence. But you need to choose presence as much as possible. And I'm saying this to you because there is enough presence in you to be able to choose presence. Without any presence, you cannot choose it. So ultimately, it is presence that chooses presence.
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