Is Presence the Most Important Realization in Life? | Eckhart Tolle

Presence and stillness are really synonymous. Different words you can use to talk about it. Another word you could use is awareness. So let's look briefly at what presence is, both conceptually and experientially. Knowing something usually involves these two levels. So to know what presence is, it helps to understand it conceptually to some extent. But there's also a different way of knowing something. Not only presence, anything. Knowing it directly, without concepts. The example often given, I think it originated in India. Some. I don't know who, which spiritual teacher gave that example. So you can ask, do you know what honey is? Yes, I know what honey is. You could know a lot about honey. You can write a PhD about honey. And I'm sure people have done it. There's a lot to know about it. That's knowing through conceptualization. And then there's direct knowing, which is tasting the honey. Now it could be that you know honey only, only as a taste. So you might not know anything about it conceptually. And yet you might experience the taste of honey every day. And you have an intimate relationship with honey without knowing much about it. Maybe you don't even know that the bees produced it. That's already conceptual knowledge. So for many things, both are needed. But in our world we have placed excessive empire. This is on conceptual knowing. Cutting things up into little fragments, interpreting it through the veil of concepts, interpreting your entire reality. Every moment, every experience is immediately conceptually interpreted. And that's the mind. There's a place for that. We need it, but we should not be consumed by it, possessed by it. That's the danger. And this is where presence comes in. Presence is another way of being and way of knowing that is non conceptual. So if I talk about it conceptually, I could say presence is a dimension of consciousness that is accessible to a human being, although many humans don't even know that it exists or that it is possible. But quite a few humans occasionally experience moments of presence without knowing what it is. They may experience it as a moment of just inner peace or clarity, or an intense sense of aliveness, feeling totally at one with your, the present moment and your surroundings and other human beings. A sense of oneness. For most humans, when it comes, it doesn't stay for too long. And then you are back in the, what is really the ego state, which is you identify with conceptual self image, a narrative in your mind and the narrative you call me or my life, and you think that is your true identity, but it's not your true identity. It's a superficial kind of identity. There's a deep identity that connects you with something that far transcends who or what you are as a person. We don't necessarily to name it, but it connects you with something deep, profound, the source. And that is presence, awareness. And it's a state of consciousness or dimension of consciousness that all ancient spiritual teachings have pointed to, spoken about, using different words to talk about it. So people who have never tasted the honey of presence, they think all those different teachings from different spiritual traditions are totally different. They don't realize that they talk about the same thing, just using different terminology. So if you hadn't tasted honey, you could read different books about honey. And they use totally different words or different languages to talk about and say, oh, they're all totally different. No, they all point to the one thing that honey is so. So let's taste the honey then. We've spoken about it. Presence is when you're able to experience this moment without the. Without a screen of mental concepts and interpretations and judgments. Clarity of perception. That's the beginning of it. So they would mean. It implies that perhaps briefly, the stream of thinking that is usually behind your sense perceptions, continuously interpreting, calling it this or that, that stream of thinking temporarily subsides. There's a moment of not thinking. Maybe it's just a few seconds and. But you haven't fallen asleep at all. You're completely awake, but you're not thinking. So to even have a taste of that, even here and now, to be completely awake and alert. But there's a moment of a space of no thought, just awareness or presence. You can take everything in audit, visual, auditory perception, any of the senses. And there's a stillness around every. All sense perceptions or behind the sense perceptions, still presence. You can look at it, a tree, a plant, see it, even know it through presence. Not conceptually. You might not know what this plant is called, its concepts. And yet you can look at this plant and there's a background to the sense perception that's called stillness because you're not thinking. And then you. That enables you actually to go deeper to relate to things, seemingly external things without a sense of separation. You can sense, for example, you can sense the being of the plant. There's a stillness in it. Or trees. Natural things are helpful in this. Trees are very still. Plants are very still. Some trees have been there for hundreds of years and just always they can just give them some attention without concepts. And they almost. They don't speak to you, but they. There's almost a sense of communication or oneness. You can sense their being because you can sense your being. Being recognizes itself. That's presence. So it's a moment of no thought, of awareness. Thought subsides, awareness arises and replaces thought for a little while. Thought comes back when you need, probably come back even when you don't need it. It'll pull, push its way back into your mind until you become a bit more familiar with presence. And it stays there for longer. And after a while, even while you're using your mind, there's still a sense of presence in the background. As I'm speaking now, there's I'm using the mind. Or maybe even that's not the correct way of saying it. Not I as a person is using the mind. The deeper I, which is presence, is using the mind and talking about presence. The deep I I call the surface eye, is you as the person with a history, personal history, some good, some bad. Personal problems. Everybody has them, but there's a deeper I. The deep I. That's consciousness itself. That's presence. And so that is the most important realization in any person's life, in anybody's life. The discovery of that dimension within, within.