Perceiving Without Labels | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Something you can practice here and for the rest of your life is to perceive things, look and listen, sometimes even smell or touch or taste without any mental label. This is an ideal environment to do it in, in nature. But you can do it anywhere. And it's not even a doing. We call it doing. Just you look at something or even just looking around. So either a specific thing or you take in the totality of what's there, either in the room or out in nature, the sky, the trees. Or you look at one thing and you don't. You're still. While you look. And that's very important practice. And then you listen. Various sounds arise most of the time and you just. Then always two things are there. There's that which arises in your sense, perception, listening, seeing. And there is the space of consciousness in which it arises. You can also call it the light of consciousness, in which it is perceived, without which there would be no perception. And whenever you do that, you are not a person. In that moment, you are not a person. You are one. What comes to the forefront is the transcendent dimension to who you are, the consciousness. And so you can sense yourself as the consciousness, which is the space for whatever is being perceived. And it's a. There's. One can almost a kind of joy in that, an aliveness, a beingness. You're really. You can sense your own identity beyond who you are, beyond the person, by just perceiving something and then at the same time sensing your own presence, which isn't your own, but let's call it your own, the presence. And that is a passive thing. It seems seemingly it's taking in what's there. The next step is to practice being in that transcendent state of consciousness while things are going on around you. More challenging, being in the state while you are engaged in some activity. Start with simple activities. And again, the background is the presence. You're doing whatever it is you need to do for certain activities. Of course you need to think. And the thinker will start up. That's fine. When you speak, there is thinking. But you can. If you are. While you speak, you can still be connected to the transcendent. Then you don't speak from the level of the personality. Then you speak from the more intelligent level of consciousness, the unconditioned consciousness. Very different kind of speaking. When you speak from the personality, whatever you say is coloured and determined by the conditioning of your mind as the person. There's another way of speaking, even if it's a simple conversation, you're speaking from A truer, deeper level of who you are. And those words have a certain quality. You might not be saying necessarily anything significant, but those words have a certain aliveness and quality that is different from what comes from the personality level. So at any given time, there's. There's two dimensions to who you are. One could say for the time being, let's put it like that. There's the personal level and there's the transcendent. You, and usually the transcendent in your normal daily life will be in the background. If you can sense that in the background, then you can deal with the stuff you need to deal with in the foreground. Your life to this and this and this, even thinking, is in the foreground of your life. Think, I have to think about this. And yet at the same time, you sense yourself as the presence. So that the depth within you. There's a stillness. There can be a stillness even while you're speaking. There's a stillness in the background. And when you've come to the end of a sentence, you might notice, you might get. There's a gap and you're not thinking between the end of one sentence and the beginning of a new sentence. And so more and more, the transcendent self emerges more into your life, comes in more. And the conditioned self does not disappear completely, but the conditioned self becomes more, less dense. The density of the personality that many people are in the grip of, that there's a heaviness to it. I can sometimes see how people carry this burden of a personality without any, not the slightest glimpse of anything beyond. And it's a terrible burden to carry. The only sense of self they have is that conditioned sense of self. And it's a. There's a heaviness to it and a density. As the transcendent emerges more, the personality level becomes more lighter and more, one could say, transparent almost. So the light shines through more. The analogy you could use is a lampshade. When there's only the personality. The lampshade is so heavy, there's only a little bit of light shining through. But the layers of the lampshade are so thick that only very little comes through. And whatever comes through is totally formed by the lampshade. And then the shade gets a bit more transparent and there's more light coming through. The same person is still there, the same lampshade, but there's more. There's a transparency to something deeper. And that's the only way you become more authentic. You become more truly yourself. The deeper, unconditioned Self, which the Buddha calls the no self. And if in spiritual terminology you could call Buddha, nature is arising, Christ consciousness is arising, whatever you want to call it. So you cannot love your neighbour as yourself, as somebody once said, he said, love your neighbour as yourself. But he didn't give that as a commandment because he would have known that that's impossible for the personality. They missed a little bit when they wrote down what he was saying. He said the kingdom of heaven bit goes together with the loving your neighbor as yourself. So when you find that dimension within yourself, that is the kingdom of heaven, which in modern terms I would translate as the dimension of kingdom is dimension. Heaven is in many languages is the same word as sky in French, in Spanish, in German, heaven and sky are the same word. So Jesus uses this thing, the sky, the vast expanse of the sky, as the closest word he can get to describing the inner space, the inner spaciousness. Sky has no form. Sky, we have a word for sky, but sky doesn't actually exist. There is no sky. There just seems to be a sky. Because what you're seeing as the blue, if it's blue, it's just the light against the background of space to darkness of space behind us, creates that illusion that there is something there. But if you travel upwards, you will never reach the sky. You may reach the clouds and then you go to the clouds and then there's more sky and finally it's gone. Where was the sky? There is no sky, so it has no form. So he used the best word he could find was heaven or sky. The kingdom of heaven, the dimension of formlessness which is within you, he said, and that's the most important thing in your life. To find that, that's priority number one. And then as you find that, then you love your neighbor as yourself, because you recognize the same formless essence in you is the same formless essence in the so called other. And then you love your neighbor as yourself. But no matter how hard you try, you can't really. Real empathy, real loving kindness, real benevolence, real goodwill towards another. It's not really. You cannot sustain for very long if there's only the personality level. You have a resemblance of that, but it's usually the ego playing a particular role. 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.