The Buddha’s Silent Sermon | Eckhart Tolle

The story goes that he was the only one that understood that sermon of the Buddha, the one who smiled. I could have held this flower up and stopped speaking, and that would have the Buddha's silent sermon. 2600 years ago, people still remember it. He sat there and he was going to speak, and then suddenly he saw this flower and he took this flower and looked at it. For how long? Nobody knows, but it must have gone on for a long time, and everybody got restless. That's called the Buddha's silent sermon. And then after half an hour or one hour, we don't know, because they didn't have clocks. Then one of the. Because they were all monks at that time, other people didn't have access to anything, to spiritual teachings. I talk about that in the New US at the beginning, one of the monks, all the other monks looked puzzled. What's he trying to do? What's he saying? And one monk suddenly started to smile. And the story goes that he was the only one that understood that sermon, the Buddha, the one who smiled. And this smile was, according to the story or the legend or the scriptures, the smile was passed on from generation to generation of teacher, pupil. So he became a teacher, that monk. And they say he passed on the smile, which really means the realization to the next and the next, in the next. And after six or seven or whatever generations, it became the origin of Zen. That's how the story goes. So what is it then that he smiled about? Well, let's not conceptualize it. I think you will realize it for yourself as we progress here. Not are we then returning when we go into nature? Are we then returning to the level that trees live at, or flowers or minerals or birds? Whatever it is, is it an act of return to a primordial stage of being? Not quite. We join whatever natural thing it is that we are perceiving. We join it in the state of no thought. But when we go there, we have gone through thought already. We rise above thought. The flower exists below thought. So, and then we meet in the dimension of no thought. But at a very deep level, we don't. We do not become the flower or the cabbage. Well, if you had a choice, you'd probably rather be a flower than a cabbage. But cabbage is beautiful too. We are not regressing. Cabbage is fine for the cabbage, but not for us. The cabbage is totally at ease with itself. One with the source, doesn't inhabit a world of problems, doesn't generate conflict. The cabbage is rooted in being, so is the tree, so is the flower. And even the dog, while most of them, and the cat, except those who have lived for too long with neurotic humans, they are rooted in being. There isn't. There is. And this is why people love dogs and cats. They don't. It's not. There's actually a deep reason, a deep meaning to that because they can sense that the dog or the cat is more deeply rooted in being, is more at rest within him or herself than the human. The human has gone out very far from the source into further and further differentiation. Everything originates from the one source of all life, the unmanifested, formless, timeless one source. Everything then comes out of that source. And humans are a product, a very differentiated product, gone out a long way from the source. A little bit like the prodigal son in the New Testament who leaves the father's home and squanders his wealth and becomes destitute. He's left the source. He's gone so far out that he becomes destitute. He doesn't remember his origins anymore. So the dog, and even less so the flower or the tree, they haven't gone out that far, so to speak, from the source. There's still more of a connection with their origin. And this is also why they are not fearful of death. They don't think about, oh, I'm going to die. And when an animal dies, an animal is very accepting. It surrenders into that. It doesn't make a problem out of living, and it doesn't make a problem out of dying. It doesn't live on the level of problem making, which is a level. When you lose your sense of connectedness with the source, and this is because you identified with a thinking mind, then a world of problems arises. You create a world of. That's what you manifest then, and that's what you end up with on this planet, on this beautiful planet, which is paradise. You end up with layers and layers of complexity and increasing problems. Oh, my God, it's all getting so complicated. It's just survival is getting complicated, very complicated. So really now, when we talk about nature exists closer to the source. We have gone out very far. And for us, it's not a return to the original level where the animal lives or the tree lives. It's a transcendence where you regain awareness of the source of being with full consciousness rather than as a natural state. And you don't really know. The dog doesn't know that the dog is one with being. He just is one with being. The tree doesn't know. If you tell the tree, are you, one with being. If the tree could understand you. Of course it doesn't have conceptual, one with being. Don't know. So there is a But if you look at nature, everything exists in its. It's so much so at rest within itself. It has so much integrity. Everything natural has such integrity. Integrity. The word originally means being one with yourself, not having split yourself into two or three. For example, when you say me and my life, the tree doesn't say me and my life, my difficult life. The tree is life, an expression of life. The human says, I have a hard life. And the hard life that the human says he or she has is a mental construct. Because it has no real reality except as a movement of thought. Because the only real life that you have is at this moment, ever, always. This is your life. Now I'm sitting here breathing, perceiving this aware presence. This is life. This is your life. The rest is memories or anticipation through thinking. So the dog doesn't have a life. The dog is an unproblematic expression of life. So it's everything in nature. It is life manifesting the one timeless, sacred, the one deep down, the one formless life becoming form as millions of life forms coming out of, they say with a big bang, it all started. Who knows? So before the big bang, there was nothing. Nobody understands that, because you can't understand nothing. No thing, no form, no time. Out of that void, which is also the fullness of infinite potential, came the forms more and more differentiated over millions and millions of years. And then finally it becomes the human mind, the most differentiated, as far as we can see. There may be others even more mad. So somewhere else in the universe, continuously thinking and analyzing and evaluating. And so then the entity that has to carry that mind is completely out of touch with the source. You're not cut off from the original source, the original oneness. You just don't know it's there. And so that's it. That's the state of being lost. Lost in your mind, lost in the world. Split yourself in two or three. Having a life that you don't like. Me and my life. Me and my story. My sad story. And then life gets. Life is perceived no longer as a joyful expression of the underlying oneness, but becomes a burden, gets heavier and heavier. And so this has happened to humanity. Humanity is. This species is at a critical stage now. There's a possibility of a shift into a deeper state, or 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. And including the physical body. This body. This body, all that we perceive in this world is existence. Exists. 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 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. 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 so. And I know that the human being is a microcosm. It's just what 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. And 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 happens. 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. It.