Start to Shift Your Consciousness | Eckhart Tolle

When I was writing the Power of Now, I wrote. I don't know why I wrote that. It just came to me one day. I wrote, there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. And the editor saw it and said, you can't say that because you don't. How can you know that people are going to argue with that? So it was taken out. And some years later, I read an article by a scientist and said, now scientists believe that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. Humanity is. This species is at a critical stage now. There is a possibility of a shift into a deeper state, or a higher state, if you want to call it that, of transcending conceptual thinking, going beyond. You can still think, but no longer trapped in thinking. This is where humanity has to go. And as you transcend conceptual thinking, you regain what was lost eons, eons ago. You regain your sense of connectedness with being. You feel deep down you're connected with something vast. And it's not different from who you are. When we put it into language, it sounds as if that was something different from who you are. You're connected with being, with a sense of simple beingness. Being comes from the word to be, to be the most primordial thing. And everything in nature is an expression of that underlying beingness, including the physical body, this body, this body. All that we perceive in this world is existence. It exists. This body exists. This body exists. Underlying existence is being. Being is the formless, timeless dimension within yourself. It's very much like the black hole at the center of the galaxy. When I was writing the Power of Now, I wrote. I don't know why I wrote that. It just came to me one day. I wrote, there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. And the editor saw it and said, you can't say that, because how can you know that people are going to argue with that? So it was taken out. And some years later, I read an article by a scientist and said, now scientists believe that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. And so why did I know that? I knew that because I could feel the black hole inside myself. The spacious, formless one life, the origin. And I know that the human being is a microcosm. It's just one. You can understand the whole universe by understanding yourself. You are just a microscopic version of that. So that's the. We are regaining. By no longer being lost in the conceptualizing mind, we regain something that was lost a long, long time ago. Very much like the prodigal son in the New Testament. Your origin, not your origin. You can say it's not really your origin in time. It's not saying, okay, my origin was 6 billion years ago. That's where I started. When the Big Bang happened, that was the beginning of me. That's true, of course, that was the beginning. But it's not so much that the origin is in the distant past, or not even in the near past. The origin is timeless. The origin of your being, it is still there, this primordial nothingness. Nothingness before the Big Bang is still in you. Now. Nature can help you rediscover that if you approach it not with the conceptualizing mind, but you approach nature and perceive nature in a state of alert, attention, spaciousness. And that's a wonderful, wonderful first. We could call it a practice, but then it's no longer a practice. It becomes a natural way of being, first in nature and then even in the man made world. But we need to first of all be able to. We are going into it now. Do it in the forest or on the beach, or in the field, wherever it is. Before you can be in that state, in the shopping mall where everything is not so being. You can't really find being that easily. You have to be rooted very deeply in yourself to find being in the shopping mall. Because everything is surface phenomena. Buy me, do this, do this, eat a hamburger. Look here, look here. And then after 20 minutes in Chauvignon, you're totally exhausted because all the energy is flowing out of your eyes into phenomena. And music is in the background. Not the most profound music, just. And yet you could be walking in the forest for three hours and not feel exhausted. In fact feel invigorated. Isn't that strange? So the shopping mall takes it out of you and the forest or whatever, or the beach or the desert puts it back. There's something there that's very, very different. And, but not for everybody. There needs to be the openness and the alertness so that all the seemingly insignificant things in nature, you are alert to that. And that, for example, you're looking at, you're walking a tree, a slight movement of leaves in the breeze, perhaps a sound associated with it. Your senses are alert, not strained. There's no tension. You don't go, no, just alert. And in that alertness, of course, there's no thought anymore. Because if you were thinking, you would not be alert. Thought is not alert, it's a lower state. Alertness is a higher state than thought, higher consciousness than thought. But good thoughts which means creative thoughts, original thoughts, original insights can only come out of the alertness. You need to have the alertness. And then sometimes thought becomes fruitful and original and creative out of that. But if you never touch the alertness, then thought is repetitive. Old records, CDs, not records anymore, and not CDs anymore, old iPods or whatever. So nature, then you have to approach nature with that alertness, attentiveness, like a little child, as if you had come there for the first time into that place. Let's say maybe you drive somewhere or maybe it's close to where you live. You get out of the car or out of your door, or for most people, even wherever you live, there will be something natural. When you step out of your house somewhere, even if you live downtown, there may be a little tree somewhere not acknowledged by most people. Almost everybody walks past it without looking because they have more important things to think about. But you, for a moment, you acknowledge that. Not by saying, oh, I should be acknowledging the tree, you just acknowledge. You give it attention. And in that moment you notice little things about it that before, you didn't notice how the quivering leaves, how the light shines through the. The branches or the leaves, how the light interacts with the tree. And you notice all these things without having to call it anything. It's just a noticing. And this is a practice. You can practice that as a choice because you choose to relate to nature in a different way. And when you do that, then nature gives you something back. What it gives you back is some of that energy of connectedness with the source that the tree is still in. This energy comes back to the tree, gives you that back. It says, have some of this. I have more than enough. And you get. So it helps you to feel that connectedness, but you are also helping the tree. I'm saying that intuitively the tree hasn't spoken to me like that. Maybe some trees speak to some people, but not have. Well, Prince Charles years ago said he was. He talked to the plants. And that's of course, a wonderful thing. And I think he not only. He meant. He not only talked to the plants. I think he meant he gives them his full attention. And ever since, the newspapers have been making fun of him because they don't understand. It's just the mind doesn't want to understand that. So you're giving it attention. It's not just that, the tree, and I'm only using tree as an example. It could be a tree, it could be a flower, it could be an entire forest. Because the attention that you give, you can give to either a single natural phenomenon or being like a tree or flower, or even a blade of grass or a little plant, whatever it may be. You can also give attention to a more inclusive energy field, like an entire valley. That is, it has its own energy field, its own spirit, almost, one could say, or a forest as you walk. So there are two modalities, one could say, of being there. In, let's say, it's a forest, you can notice single things like trees or plants, and for a moment you give them attention. There's a looking in alertness, and then you look at something else. And there's no choice really involved in not saying, okay, what can I look at now? It happens naturally. Your eyes, you look at this, and then suddenly you look at something else. And then you look. You take in the totality of what's there, just a general. Without always necessarily focusing on one thing, you take in the totality, and that is there's an expression in Zen which is translated as a choiceless awareness. An expression that also, I believe, Krishnamurti used choiceless awareness of. So you take in the. The totality of what is around you, and then nature, the entire energy field and what's around you then connects with you, and you connect with it. So it gives you some of that connectedness with the source that nature never lost, almost transmits itself to you, but it's a reciprocal process. What you give nature is the awareness of itself. Because we need to remember that nature, it's not that you are separate from nature. You haven't been put into nature, you have come out of nature. You are nature also. You are nature that is in the process of becoming conscious of itself. And so what you then give back to the tree or the flower or the forest is awareness of itself. It recognizes. Because this flower, I would say it does not know it is beautiful, it just is. The flower is. Its beauty is there. It comes from the source. And now, when any human perceives this flower as a true act of perception, not conceptualizing it or judging it, something responds from within, something is touched within. There's such beauty there. But even to call it beauty, you don't need that. There's something there, something within response, almost a recognition. And when you perceive in such a way, you realize that you and it are not separate. The illusion of separation, which is created by the thinking mind, disappears. And there is a sense of oneness when you are not calling it anything, this pure, spacious perception. Immediately you there's not me and the flower. There's a continuum. The flower arises within the field of consciousness, it comes out of that.