How to Measure Your Spiritual Growth | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

How can we measure our spiritual progress? Well, one thing I mentioned earlier when we gave the example of arriving here and being told that no, we have no reservation for you. Such situations are interesting situations that can reflect back to you what your level of consciousness is, how you react or respond in such a situation. And life is full of situations like that. When something happens and you are, you're not being honored or somebody hasn't respected you or is not giving you enough attention and something goes drastically wrong. And what does that do to you? And how do you. How does it affect you that you can. Through self observation, you can. Sometimes the observation can only come in retrospectively. Sometimes in the moment, you get so taken over by some reaction that you don't even know what's going on. You're just on automatic. It's the ego having taken over. Then sometimes after it has subsided, you look back on the situation and you observe your reaction. Say, hmm, would have even better if somebody could have videoed you. That would be extremely helpful if you could arrange with a person close to you to pick up the iPhone and put it on video and film you when you're being unconscious. And then when you are more conscious, ask you, are you ready to look at yourself? But for the deepest answer to how can we measure our progress on the spiritual path? I would like to refer you to the answer given by Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi when he was asked the same question sometime in the 1950s. How can we measure progress, our progress on the spiritual path? And his answer, and that is the answer at the deepest level, is the degree of absence of thinking is the measure for progress on the spiritual path. That's clear enough. If that's too complicated an answer, I can probably simplify. It's how little you think shows you how far you are progressing or progressed on the spiritual path, or how much you think shows you how little progress you have made. That's a little drastic perhaps, but unfortunately it's true. So it's just. That's so simple, isn't it? Now again, many of you are already able to step out of thinking. And the thoughtless state, which is presence, which is awareness, arises in your life already, here and there, spontaneously. When you look at something new, there's a moment of, before you call it anything, a new person. You meet a new person. For the first five seconds, the mind hasn't had time to formulate an opinion about that person. There's a moment of spaciousness that sometimes in that moment when people can an intuitive Perception of the other person in the first moment. But then the mind comes in. And very often what the mind says is just an expression of its conditioning. And very often it's not the other person. You're saying something about yourself rather than the other person. You're projecting. In other words. So measure for progress on this world path, in other words, is the degree of stillness in your life, your inner space in daily life, not how long you can sit in meditation, but more importantly, the stillness in everyday life. Can your life be interspersed with stillness so that you no longer have the density of the mind and the emotions, but something else shining through the density? The light that is who you truly are shines through the density. That's spiritual. That's the spiritual dimension. As I mentioned before, at some point, there was a time when I woke up one morning and I felt at peace. After being a tortured individual and a strange thing at night, I woke up the next morning completely at peace. What's going on? And I didn't have an answer. Why. It took me about two years to realize why I was at peace and to realize that I had to. Actually, I was on a kind of spiritual search. I didn't know exactly what I was searching for. I went to see monks and all kinds of strange teachers and teachings. I just wanted to check them all out until one monk said to me that Zen monk said, well, Zen is all about not thinking. Oh. And I realized I was at peace. Because on that day, the first morning, I wasn't thinking that much anymore. But I didn't know I wasn't thinking that much. I experienced the state of not thinking as peace. So I hadn't been able to interpret it as that was not thinking. So you experience no thought as simply a very peaceful energy arising. But it could only arise because the density of the mind wasn't there anymore. There was some thinking, of course, but not the continuous density. Much less thinking. How much less? I don't know. A lot less. Much more than 50% more. Much more. 80, probably. So that's a spontaneous thing. Why that happened? Who knows? And later the understanding of it came two years later. And then gradually the teaching over the years developed. Now people ask me, well, to you it just happened. What are you expecting us to do about it? It's not happening to us spontaneously. But I know that from enormous amount of feedback I get from people that the teaching actually works. For many, many people, their life gets renewed because the old mind patterns are subsiding and the new consciousness is arising. So although it may not happen in one moment. That's fairly rare. It is for most of you, or all of you. It is the process. I call it the awakening process. When presence awakens, it's a new birth. You are newborn. If the so many words have been misused so much that I don't want to use them anymore, don't say newborn. It.