Stop Overthinking, Start Awakening | Eckhart Tolle on The Path from Thinking to Awakening (Part 2)

Cultivating the state of not thinking when you don't actually need to think, so that when you do need to think, your thinking is actually more effective, more powerful, more intelligent, when you are connected with the deeper realm of not thinking, which is the unconditioned consciousness. So in daily life, you cultivate as much as possible, just finding brief moments of no thought throughout your daily life. You could associate it with the breath, I call it. The briefest one is one conscious breath, as I call it, which is you breathe in, you breathe out. And while you breathe in and out, just one in breath, one out breath. And while you do that, you're just very much aware of the air flowing into the body. The air flowing out of the body, conscious one conscious breath means you're not thinking during that brief moment. And that's very significant when you're not thinking without losing consciousness, in fact, being more alert than when you are thinking, that is finding a new dimension of consciousness within yourself. And it's the perhaps, well, not perhaps, it is. If I had to single out the most significant thing, the most significant achievement, so to speak, for a human being in this lifetime, it would be the ability to step out of thinking, or to put it differently, the ability to rise above thinking. Another way of putting it is that spiritual awakening, spiritual awakening has nothing to do with seeing spirits or angels or talking to God, or having past life experiences. All these things are wonderful, but they are not wonderful necessarily. Spiritual awakening. They could be associated with spiritual awakening, but they are not in themselves. Spiritual awakening, spiritual awakening is the realization of a new dimension of consciousness in you that perhaps not perhaps had already been there before, but occasionally, spontaneously arising occasionally, but had been always overlooked by you. Yes, but you had experienced moments of joy, moments of heightened aliveness, moments of inner peace, but you probably had not associated those moments with not thinking. And yet, if you look more deeply into how these moments of heightened aliveness, joy, inner peace happened, and if you looked more closely, you would realize there was little or no thinking while you were experiencing those moments. Being astonished at something going, ah, wow, isn't that beautiful? Few seconds of no thought. So thinking is a wonderful thing if you are not possessed by it. If you are able to use thinking, it's a beautiful, amazing tool for creation. But if thinking becomes the basis for your sense of identity, in other words, the narrative in your mind of who you are, the story of me, then thinking becomes a kind of prison. Or to use a different analogy, thinking becomes then almost like something that possesses you and you don't even know it. And when you make the statement, I think I am thinking, it's not quite accurate. It would be more accurate to say, thinking is happening to me. If you can't stop it, that means it must be happening to you. If you don't even want to stop, it must be because you are almost addicted to it. You think, he would die without it. So if you can't stop thinking, then you are not thinking. Thinking is happening to you. Or you could say you are being thought. You are not thinking. Oh, by the way, while I speak to you, and many of you know this, but it's easy to forget too, since this is a kind of meditation session, although not a conventional one, While I am speaking to you, be aware of the silent gaps between sentences, between words. Be aware, notice them, Be aware of them. Because the meditation part of our session together here is in the silent gaps. The rest is just the words that point us towards the silent gaps, that point us towards stillness. When you become aware of the silent gaps while I speak, brief, like now and now and now, while you notice the silent gaps, acknowledge them. You may also notice that you are not thinking while you notice the gaps. And that's meditation.