Eckhart Tolle guides you into stillness and presence, moving past thought to find what's underneath. The meditation focuses on accessing inner calm and a deeper sense of aliveness through direct experience rather than ideas.
I'm glad you could make it. I trust you're okay with stillness. To be okay with stillness, you have to access the stillness within you. Otherwise it gets uncomfortable.
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If you experience joy or moments of joy or beauty, aliveness, a sense of aliveness, a loving connection with another human being, or a loving connection with another life form, or if you have any creative idea in your life or anything creative comes to you, all those things that I just mentioned imply that you have some access already to the stillness inside you. Because all those things, the joy, the sense of aliveness, the lovingness towards others, the creative impulse, the creative idea, all that comes from that dimension in you. Now, many humans have some access to that dimension. That's why they feel it's good to be alive. And for most humans, that access gets for long periods of time covered up again by excessive mind activity. And then it resurfaces again. It's not recognized, usually directly, for what it is. It is recognized indirectly. So you may be aware that suddenly you feel a sense of joy and aliveness, or you look at another human being and you feel a deep sense of connection. So what happens there is that dimension arises. You don't recognize it directly. You recognize it as joy. You recognize it as a loving connection or loving kindness, or a creative impulse, or a sense of heightened aliveness, or the recognition of beauty. You look and ah, isn't that beautiful? And in the looking and the recognition of the beauty, you may not realize that what underlies that, that which makes it possible, is that for a moment there was no thought activity in your mind. A space opened up, and that space, that is the stillness. And that is why you could recognize the beauty, or that is why you felt the connection with another human or the simple aliveness arose within you. So it comes spontaneously to you. There are some humans, quite a few, who almost never experience that opening into the alive stillness. And their lives are truly miserable. They may not even know that. They may not even know that their lives are miserable. They think it's normal to be continuously immersed in the thinking. Isn't everybody else? Now, a deepening happens when you recognize that stillness directly. It may happen spontaneously in a situation. You're looking at a tree and for a moment there's no thought. There's just the perception and the stillness in the background. So you begin to recognize it directly as the foundation for joy, for love, for also compassion, empathy with another. You can't arrive at empathy through conceptual thinking. You cannot sense the aliveness of another human being through conceptual thinking. But Only thinking needs to subside for a moment. And then the sense of separation that's created by continuous thinking disappears in that moment. So I'm inviting you to enter the stillness. Another way of putting it. I'm inviting you to stop thinking without falling asleep. That's one way, but that's not the way here.
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And this is the next evolutionary level for humans, rising above thinking, not abandoning thinking altogether, transcending thinking. Thinking can still operate much more powerfully, by the way, when it's rooted consciously in the stillness.
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Now, if you're still thinking, this becomes boring or uncomfortable. If it's not boring or uncomfortable, then you are in that state of freedom from thought. You may sense your presence, so to speak, the presence that you are the essence of. You sense it as a whole body realization, just a sense of presence throughout the body as you sit here. And that is a sense of heightened aliveness. And if you choose to look around, still sensing this heightened aliveness in your entire energy field, if you then look around, you see that also whatever you are perceiving feels more alive. Even inanimate objects have a certain beingness. They are even a table, chair, even there, there is some life. They are called inanimate, which means, I suppose, lifeless. But if you looked more deeply into the molecular structure of the chair or the table, you would see intense aliveness and intense movement. So at this very moment, the universe, we could say appearing as you, experiences itself. Of course, that's the truth. You are not separate from the universe. It's an amazing thing, the universe appearing briefly as what we call a person, a cell within the totality, experiencing itself.
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Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
