Life Mastery Meditation with Eckhart Tolle | A Special Meditation on The Nature of Consciousness

Welcome to our live meditation. Are you conscious at this moment? Of course you are conscious because you see me on the screen. You aware of the place where you are, the room indoors. You are aware of other things, my voice, other noises. Perhaps you know that you are conscious because you are aware of these things. If you were not conscious, you would not see me or hear my voice. So that is kind of secondary evidence that you are conscious, but it's not primary evidence. So secondary evidence. You're conscious of things. You're conscious of sense perceptions. You're conscious of thoughts or emotions. And those things together, sense perceptions, thoughts, other mental activities, mental images and emotions. Those things make up your life, a mixture of things. But those are the ingredients that make up what you call your sense perceptions, thoughts or mental images and feelings or emotions. Now, the way in which these are mixed differs from person to person. But those are the ingredients that make up what you call your life. So you must be conscious for these to arise. They appear in the light of consciousness or the space of consciousness. And then there's something else, this primary evidence. And that's what one may call spiritual awakening. When you no longer. You are no longer totally drawn into, identified with, reacting to sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions. And without primary evidence, which we could call spiritual awakening, you are actually unconscious, Spiritually speaking, consciousness only reveals itself to you in disguise, assuming a certain form as sense perceptions, thought, emotion. And that draws you in, gives you a sense of who you are, your sense of identity, which is derived from your life, your life situation. That gives you your sense of identity, which includes the past, the things you have experienced, which means perceived, thought, about, felt. And these leave traces. So in the present moment, you still remember these things, re experience them in your mind. That's fuel. But you're not really awake, spiritually speaking, unless or until you are not only conscious of those things that I mentioned, but you are also conscious that you are conscious. Conscious or aware of awareness, aware of yourself as awareness, aware of yourself as consciousness, aware of that formless dimension within yourself in which for a moment, thought, all thinking has subsided. And you can sense an underlying presence. Beingness, aliveness, alertness. These are all just pointers. Stillness. Right now, I'm not asking you to become still, but to realize that dimension of consciousness that we call stillness that's always already there underneath all the thinking. But you didn't know it. So stillness is actually a beautiful pointer. If you haven't read my little book Stillness Speaks, or haven't looked at it in a long time, go back to it. Read a page or two and see if it enables you to enter the dimension of stillness, to find that dimension of stillness within you. That's what the book is for. Not to give you more information, but it gives you pointers, sign poses. If I remember correctly, the first entry, the first sentence in the book is, you're never more essentially yourself than when you are still that feeling of being you, of identity that comes out of that stillness, that is the stillness that is more essentially who you are than your historical person. The identity that depends on your life situation and your past. So we have two, so to speak, identities. One is time based, thought based, and the other is formless. That consciousness to be aware of that is the aim of meditation. And here we are not even using any techniques, I'm just giving you pointers. But also I'm conveying to you the reality of consciousness itself. That's what the stills is, the stillness. That is also primordial intelligence. So the mastery of life consists in being able to operate on the level of form, thinking and doing. And at the same time not losing touch with the awareness, the stillness. At first it appears as two things that you consciously during the day. Become aware of yourself as awareness. Become aware of the little spaces between thoughts. Develop the ability to relinquish thinking, if only for a few seconds, either by choice or by realizing that sometimes thinking subsides naturally. For example, when you look at something beautiful in nature, or the sky, or the sunset, or the ocean or the river, the sound of the rain, the sound of the wind, there's an appreciation of what you perceive. You give it your fullest attention. And there's a little space in which the perception happens without any conceptualization. In other words, the mind does not comment on it in the first moment of perceiving it. When you feel an inner connectedness with what you're perceiving, you just look or you just listen. The realization of beauty arises in that moment of non conceptual thinking. And when that arises naturally, as it sometimes does, it doesn't even necessarily have to be. When you look at something beautiful, it could happen any moment. Although natural things are more conducive to that state of consciousness than you become. You suddenly become aware of why this moment feels so alive, so good, so peaceful. Because you are in touch with the dimension of consciousness itself. Not just the form that consciousness has, but consciousness itself is an underlying, alert stillness. In that sense, nature can reconnect you with the deeper dimension of yourself, sometimes called the essence identity, as opposed to the form identity. So the Mastery of life is moving in the two dimensions, so to speak. Not losing yourself in the form identity with. Millions and millions of people all over the world are doing that without knowing it. Completely absorbed in their mind, sense perceptions. But it all basically happens in their mind, of course, completely identified with that. That's the unconscious. The strange thing is, it almost seems like a paradox. Although there are moments when beauty become aware of beauty. That are portals into the unconditioned pure consciousness awareness that you are. That is true. But as far as your life situation is concerned. The strange thing is it's often when things are not going well on the level of form. That you're more likely to discover the dimension of essence in yourself. The formless, the stillness. And by not going well, I mean when there's a disruption of your normal life pattern of your normal life. Through accident, illness, loss, some disruption. So if on the level of form, things don't go well anymore, you can become very unhappy. It's usually the case. But there's also the possibility of that. It increases your motivation to go deeper. But you don't have to wait for that here. Because as you begin to awaken spiritually, you consciously choose to go to that dimension. To discover that dimension in yourself. So you don't have to wait for things to break down. It.