Inviting The Unconditioned | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

So our entire retreat is about deepening for most of you and discovering for some of you, the ability to. To live from a deeper state of consciousness. We would call it transcendent state of consciousness. Instead of the thinking state, where the person resides, the movement of thought that gives rise to the personality. The person what most people identify with as themselves. Me. Me and my story, me and my. My opinions. They are very important. My likes and dislikes, desires, fears, experiences, accumulated experiences. Knowledge, possessions, sufferings. Bad things people have done to me, bad things I did to other people. All those things that make up the personality. And that's fine. This is not going to disappear just like that. Just because you're in a retreat center, suddenly you're free of yourself? No, because, as you know, wherever you go, there you are. And you can leave behind many things. Your home, your usual environment, the people you live with, your work situation. But what you cannot easily leave behind is your mind. It travels with you, and then you're in a new place and you arrive, let's say, here, the retreat center. And if your mind is all there is to you, you will very quickly find a discrepancy, a gap, a conflict between the expectations of your mind and what you're encountering. You will also find old patterns quickly reassert themselves that you thought you had left behind. Reactive patterns, old repetitive thoughts, habits, mental habits. Complaining, for example, favorite one for the ego. Oh, I imagined the retreat center to be different. It wasn't supposed to be like that. First of all, it wasn't supposed to rain. And then it's too big. I'd imagine something more intimate. It's impersonal. I don't like it. Let's see what else I can find that's wrong with it. There are too many people. How can I be. How can I be on retreat with all these people? And they're all talking. Why are they all talking? And the food. That's not what I expected. And my place is not. It's too small. The bed isn't camp, the shower doesn't work properly. And I had expected to be at peace. And I'm not at peace. I suppose it wants to be a retreat. Why am I not at peace? Well, because. Yes, you are on the level of the person. And you can't expect much change there. You can rearrange the furniture a little bit. Must think positive. Must think positive. It's actually very nice here. It's nice. I like it here. I like it. I should be feeling peaceful. I should be feeling peaceful. So that's the thing that travels with you, your mind. I'm sure I haven't exhausted all the possible things that it can say to you. So if you remain stuck in that dimension while you are here, so it's not going to be a terribly satisfying experience. And you might even be longing to get back home. And then you might look on your smartphone on the weather forecast at home. It's so much better than here. So we are here in order to experience a deeper level to who we are, rather than we, you. You are here to experience a deeper level to who you are, deeper than the person and the personality, which is not going to go away completely. No, it's. It's there. But there is an unconditioned state of consciousness underneath all that, much vaster than the conditioned. The analogy applies that I often use. The unconditioned is the ocean. The conditioned is the ripples on the surface of the ocean. And that's you. You are the ripple. You're also the ocean. And to live more from the level of depth, the unconditioned consciousness is why we're here. So in order not to get trapped in the repetitive activity of your mind, we need to invite the unconditioned consciousness. You need to invite the unconditioned consciousness into your life at every moment. Use this opportunity here to do that. And we already did it when we started, just now, when I said, listen to the silence in the room. And you went, that is something that's deeper than the personality that emerged for a moment. When you went, your degree of attention rose a little and you went, now the strange thing is when you're listening to silence like now, there's nothing to listen to. So what are you listening to? And as I listen to the silence, I'm basically saying, listen to nothing because there's no sound except my voice. But when I'm not speaking, it just goes, unless your hearing is better than mine. And there is some sound that I can't hear, but I can't hear it. So listen to the silence. A seemingly very simple thing, a seemingly very insignificant thing. But all the things, all the practice that we do, our retreat here is really, it is only one version of. Of the same practice, which is the step from the thinking mode into the presence mode, or awareness mode, whatever you want to call it, the unconditioned consciousness. And experience yourself as not only the person, which is a thinking mode. Experience yourself as the depths of awareness. So you, the transcendent you, emerges more as you're here. So listen to the silence. And you go, and you're not really listening to anything because there's nothing to listen to. But something happened. It goes far beyond listening. That was only the entry point. We use the auditory perception as an entry point into a different state of consciousness. Now, the wonderful thing is, when you're listening to silence, when you're listening to sound, there's something there that you can be aware of, whatever sound you're listening to. A musical sound, a bird song, any sound, the rain, my voice. When you listen to a sound you listen to, you are conscious of something. That's the normal state. But when you're listening to no sound, what are you conscious of? You're not conscious of anything because there's nothing there. You are just conscious. And when you're just conscious, the historical you has, for a moment subsided. Because when you're just conscious and listening to the silence, you don't even remember your name. Nor do you remember your date of birth, nor do you remember whether your life up to this point has been a big success or a huge failure. It becomes irrelevant if you listen to the silence. It's irrelevant whether your life up to this point has been great or miserable. Well, for most of you, it's a mixture. For some of you, one predominates, the other predominates. But the moment you access that deeper consciousness, you are that deeper consciousness that becomes irrelevant for that moment, you are still there. But not the historical you. The historical you for a moment has subsided. And you go, so you're not listening to anything. You're not conscious of anything. You are just conscious. You're not aware of anything. You're just aware. So you are. The object has been removed when you listen to the silence, because silence is nothing there. And so another way of putting it, when you listen to silence, you can become easily aware that you are aware. Usually you have a ray of. Let's say a ray of sunlight is looking for stuff. And it goes, oh, there, there, and there and there and there. And then suddenly there's nothing to look at. And only then the ray of sunlight suddenly becomes aware of itself. And it may even become aware that it's connected to something vast, the sun in our analogy. And that's a moment of transcendence of the self. Kind of Buddhist terminology and. Or we could call it self realization of realizing the transcendent self. Rather than being stuck in the personal self. The transcendent self is what the Buddhists call, just to confuse you, what the Buddhists call the no self. There is no self. The Buddha says in some Indian teachers, yes, there is the great self, the transcendence of no, you are wrong. There is no self. I'm telling you, there is a self. They're talking about the same thing. This mind made sense of Self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.