Step Back from Thought with This 20 Minute Meditation - Eckhart Tolle

Welcome to another live meditation. It we are not doing a meditation, it's not a doing, but we're becoming aware of the being behind all doing. That's the presence of you are that I'm not asking you to become still, but simply to discover that underneath all the thinking, you are already still. So we could call this also a kind of retreat, a stepping back. Retreat, I suppose means something like step, stepping back, stepping back from the stream of thinking. And there's then the essence of who you are, the presence which has no form, the presence that is prior to thinking, to thought, but without which there couldn't be any thought. And so we are here to allow thinking to subside and then find out what's left when thinking subsides. And of course you can't put a name right really to what's left when thinking subsides. But you haven't gone to sleep. Normally when thinking subsides, for people who are not yet awakened or awakening, the thinking subsides. That means they go to sleep or they are completely spaced out because they've taken some kind of substance. But here it's different. The most wonderful discovery is you don't have to think all the time. And there's a power that's greater than thinking and that's the presence. So on the one hand, there is you as the person that consists of thinking, plus the emotions that go with thinking, feelings, emotions, sense perceptions interpreted through thinking. That's you as the person. That's the person that's most people's only reality. And here you discover, well, most of you already have discovered it or it becomes obscured. Periodically you discover there is another dimension to who you are that is deeper than thinking and sense belief, perceptions and emotions, and that is called liberation. It liberates you from bondage to sensory perception, to thinking and to the emotional ups and downs. I say bondage because that really is how it is. When you are identified with form, which is what it is, sense perceptions, forms that arise, sensory formations, sounds, images and so on. Thinking identified with every thought that arises, emotions identified with every emotion that comes. That's bondage. You are in the grip of all these things that come and go. And then you discover that there is another dimension that doesn't come and go, although your awareness of it may come and go. And that is the presence. We could also call it, I sometimes call it the space around the things that come and go, the space behind the space around. And that is essentially who you are, the timeless being, the consciousness. So there is a kind of detachment that comes with that awareness. Detachment means you're not attached anymore. So you contemplate the world and the things that come into your field of consciousness, that arise visually and all the other senses. And you're not attached. And you don't compulsively judge it anymore as it arises. That really creates the attachment. And that's why in Shakespeare, in one of his plays, it says there isn't. There's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And that's the attachment to whatever arises every moment. Sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions. And as you become aware of yourself as the underlying presence, A kind of spaciousness is certainly there inside you. Not only when you sit like now. It's easier to sense, to feel that as we are here. But also when you start talking to someone. You say what you have to say. And then it becomes second nature to you that you are then, in addition to what you have to say, the thoughts, the words that come out of your mouth. There's still an awareness of that space around all the things. It's very hard to put this into words because it has no form. So then you are both the speaker and the thinker. And more fundamentally, you are also the space out of which the thinking arises and the words. So that's why I sometimes say there's a space around everything suddenly, and you are. That gives you a sense of life, is you're no longer in the grip of everything that comes and goes. This is detachment. One could say there's a sense of spaciousness around everything that arises in your life. Without that, you are trapped. And you are in the grip of all your old conditioning which runs your mind. The old conditioning that determines your emotional mental reactions. And of course, basically, you are asleep. Then thinking you are awake, it's a dream, often not a very pleasant dream. Or the pleasant moments are few and far between. So another way of putting this is that, you know, there's something called lucid dreaming, which is when you're having a dream at night, you're in bed, and in the middle of the dream, you suddenly become aware that you're dreaming. That's quite a lovely thing to realize. Oh, this is a dream. And then you look around and you experience in a totally different way with detachment, you're still interested. You say, wow, this is amazing. It's a dream. So it's called lucid dreaming. Sometimes happens to people just accidentally and others. Some people actually try to cultivate that which you can do before going to sleep. You can bring awareness. Say, I'm going to be conscious in my dreams. But much more important than that is to have lucid living, because without lucid living, everyday living is a kind of dream. So it is similar then, this lucid living is similar to lucid dreaming because there comes an awareness into your life that wasn't there before or was obscured. And from there your experience of life, your life experience becomes much more pleasant and interesting. Just like in a dream when you become aware, oh, this is a dream, and suddenly whatever happens in that dream is not that frightening anymore because you know it's a dream. You could actually look at something that scared you before because you know it's a dream and you look, whoa, that monster doesn't look that bad. It's actually quite interesting. And of course, in a dream, if you look at a monster in a dream that before frightened you, that you couldn't bear to look at very often, it becomes transformed into a benign presence. That's even a mythological motive. If you give it your attention, a transformation happens. It's only if you try not to look. You don't give it your attention, it is threatening. So that happens in a dream. If you give it your attention, which you can now do because you know it's a dream. And then you can look at whatever is there in the dream. And in the act of looking, it's not just a passive thing. That's amazing. The looking at the dream images is not just a passive thing. The act of looking, giving conscious attention transforms that which you are looking at. And really, and ultimately that also applies to lucid living. It's not just that internally, there's a transformation in the way in which you perceive the world and in the way in which thinking happens. Transformation because of that added dimension of spaciousness or depth. It's also, your life experience also changes. It's not just how you perceive it changes. For example, when you interact with another human being on whatever level, whatever kind of relationship it is, if you are there not only as the person saying what you have to say, your opinions, what needs to be done, your viewpoints, there's not only that, there's also the space. You as the person and you as the space. And when you bring in that dimension of spaciousness, presence, depth that is there in the background or around whatever it is that you say you feel. So how does it look in practice? You're talking to somebody, whatever you need to talk about, discuss. And at the same time you can still feel, let's put it like this, you can still feel a presence of spaciousness in the background as yourself, a space around what it is that you're saying. There's still an awareness of awareness around the thoughts and the words. It.