Stop Filling Your Life with Noise: Embrace the Silence Within | Eckhart Tolle

As promised, I checked the news this morning so that you don't have to do it, and I didn't find anything extraordinary. But as I was reading, I got inspired to share with you the first, although it's not extraordinary to share with you the first news item today as a spiritual practice. And for this reason I brought this device. The good thing about saves trees, which otherwise would be used for newsprint. So what I'll share with you is a very brief news item which was at the top. If I read it to you in the normal way, it would take 30 seconds to read. But I'll read it to you in a different way so that it can become a spiritual practice. Listening to it can become a spiritual practice, and that is with lots of spaces between the words and the spaces between the words in sentences while they happen. I'd ask you, as part of your spiritual practice, to pay attention to the silence in this room. Because the silence in this room is ultimately, one could say, what makes the sounds possible. If there were not silence in this room, there could be no sounds. And as you know, I mentioned yesterday, and you probably know it already, both conceptually and from your own experience, that when you pay attention to external silence, immediately there's inner stillness. So that's one way of accessing inner stillness, is to notice when it's there, to notice external silence around you. Once you are able to connect with inner stillness, you no longer need silent conditions around you, although you might welcome them when you encounter them. It's lovely, but you could be still in the midst of traffic and a shopping mall and a noisy restaurant, because most restaurants these days are noisy. I don't know if it's the same here. It's hard to find a restaurant without loud music, because people are identified with the mental noise, actually become very uncomfortable with silence. And so you have, in some places in North America, elevators. Some of them even have music playing. And some elevators not only have music, they have a TV screen too. So while you're ascending or descending, you're not condemned to having to suffer this dreadful silence for a few seconds. You can continue to clutter your mind by watching the screen and continue in your state of habitual hypnosis. So to be able to listen to something and then be aware of that dimension, the underlying dimension. Ultimately, of course, it's consciousness, the formless dimension, so that you don't get totally drawn into or hypnotized by the world, the mind. And by doing that, you bring sanity into this world. Now, the news item I'm going to read is. It could be regarded as funny. It could be regarded as potentially terribly, terribly serious. It's a mixture. But no matter what perspective you have on it, whether it's funny or potentially terribly, terribly serious, it is important that you connect with the transcendent dimension. Otherwise you contribute to the lostness, if that's a word, the lostness of the world. The world is lost. Humans are lost, lost in their minds, lost in crazy, compulsive, habitual mind patterns, collective mind patterns. So even if it's serious, it's very important to be aware of the transcendent dimension. And even if it affected you, it's particularly important to be connected with that. And then you no longer. You become free of fear by being connected to the stillness within, which is more than that. We just is one of the words we can use to talk about it. So be as interested in the words that I read, be as interested in the silence, noticing, listening to, being aware of the silence in this room, which ultimately is the stillness within you. Because only with the stillness within you can you be aware of outer silence. So be as interested in, so to speak. It's not the right word because silence is not interesting. It's deeper than interesting. Only things that you can dissect and think about are interesting. So the news item may be interesting. The underlying silence is not interesting. There's a vast depth to it, but it's as uninteresting as the most spectacular sunrise or sunset. You go, wow. But nobody says, oh, that's such an interesting sunset. Let's think about it. What can be so interesting? This sunset, Isn't it? No, you don't. Because when you respond to beauty, some vast beauty out in nature, you don't approach it with a thinking mind. Because the moment when you really are overwhelmed by some grand spectacle in nature, your mind stops and awareness remains and you go.