Meeting in the Present Moment: A 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

Let's come into the present moment. Accept what is. Whether it's sunny or snowing or raining or bright or dark, hot or cold, it is as it is. And entering the meditative state, which is the state of presence. All you have to do is not even a doing, is to become aware of yourself right now. Now, there are different levels to that awareness. So what does it mean, becoming aware of yourself, and what are the levels of awareness? Well, first you're aware of your body, the external body. That's yourself, one level of yourself. But then you notice you may already have an opinion about your body, like it or dislike it. And that's already the next level of awareness, which is awareness of your thoughts. So you have certain thoughts that tell you something about your body. So there's already an interpretation which is in the mind. And that level of thought very often complicates what essentially is very simple. Out here in external reality, it interprets it, objects it likes or dislikes. It says, I want, I should, you should, you should not have, I should not have it, and many other things. An entire sense of identity builds up around your thought patterns, habitual thoughts, reactions and so on. Leading to another level of awareness, which is the emotional level, which is linked to the level of thinking. There's an enormous difference whether you are aware of your thoughts and emotions. Or whether the thoughts and emotions just appear and take you over so completely. And that's all there is of you. So to become self aware, first of all means to become aware of, yes, yourself as the physical body of yourself as habitual or whatever thinking emotions. And that's already a great gain. To become aware of those things rather than to completely be those things. And then at the deepest level, you are aware of your own awareness. You're aware of yourself as a presence with no particular form. And that really is the essence of meditation. You can be aware of yourself as I speak and as you listen. Be aware of yourself as the presence. That makes the visual and auditory perception possible. There is a presence there. You may be dreaming up this whole thing. And yet, even if you're dreaming right now, what's happening right now, there is still what there has to be a consciousness, a presence in which the dream in the light of which the dream appears. It doesn't really make any difference whether it's all a dream or whether it's all real or something in between. What matters is that you are aware of the essence of yourself. Otherwise, you mistake many things that are not the essence of yourself, which is who you really are. You mistake those things for who you are, and then you're totally in the grip of whatever rises in your mind, in your mental and emotional field. Of course, that's what ego means. To be totally in the grip, totally identified with whatever arises in your mental emotional field. That's the ego, a misperception of who you are that needs to defend itself and enhance itself and protect itself continuously, reaffirm its identity through continuous thinking. Very often dysfunctional, very often unpleasant and negative. And yet you're stuck with it, defending your mental positions all the time, fighting for your life, your psychological survival. Survival of the ego entity, which is made out of thought. And just being wrong in an argument is a terrible defeat. It's an injury to your sense of self. So living like that we can call unconscious. Not knowing who you are, we could even say it's being deluded. And it leads to an enormous amount of problems that are generated by the egoic entity. An enormous amount of misery and unhappiness, drama. It's all unnecessary. Life is challenging enough as it is without adding all that unnecessary reactivity to it. Every challenge that life presents you with, and it does that, you get challenged through situations and through people. You get challenged the moment you are born. And not only humans. Every life form gets challenged. And survival of the physical form is always precarious. But you amplify the life challenges enormously through unconscious thinking and reactivity. A small challenge becomes a huge thing, and it creates additional. The way in which you respond or react to a situation determines subsequent events. So if you amplify through your reactivity, you amplify a challenge that leads to further challenges. So one small thing can then grow and proliferate into something big. So your degree of awareness, you can easily measure it. Get a sense of where you are at by becoming aware how you react to everyday situations, especially challenging ones. Small challenges. Mostly it's small challenges, occasionally a big one. Small short doesn't mean challenge means something doesn't go the way you would have expected or wanted it to go. Somebody doesn't do what you expected him or her to do or say, should have said, omitted this or that. You're waiting too long on the phone trying to talk to your bank. All little challenges. People are not people who are supposed to do work for you, don't do it the way they should be doing it. They're unreliable. Hundreds of little things continuously arise. So the question is, can you deal with the situation in a way that is free of reactivity so you remain peaceful and can still deal with it if there's something to do. Sometimes there's nothing to do with just easing. There's nothing you can do about it. Any reactivity or complaining mentally or out aloud is unnecessary baggage that you carry around. So as you know, continuously fine people don't do or say what you're supposed they are supposed to do and say according to your mind. And then the complaining starts in your mind and then it goes. Might become verbal complaining. All that is unconscious living awareness becomes obscure, cured the moment you get challenged. That can happen to people who are meditators too, and meditate for half an hour a day or whatever. And yet the moment you get challenged by life, awareness completely is completely obscured. So the question is, in daily life, not just here, but this is a kind of training ground for daily life, where do you sense your identity? Who you are? Where do you sense that? Do you sense that on the level of thinking and opinions, likes and dislikes and memories and expectations, as most people still do? Or do you sense a deeper identity, a deeper sense of who you are? Do you deeper than anything that arises in the field of thought, a presence. That presence is not threatened by all those things that the ego self is threatened by. So the practice, the spiritual practice, is really a continuous one. And the greatest practice is daily life. The greatest spiritual practice is not when you sit in meditation. One could almost say it's a preparation for your spiritual spiritual practice.