The Deepest Spiritual Practice | Eckhart Tolle

You're just directing your attention to sense perceptions rather than thinking. So there's a shift from being absorbed in interpreting sense perceptions and just noticing the sense perceptions. I cannot predict what your reaction or response will be to this gathering. In it could be a wonderful beginning of discovery of a deeper state of consciousness. Or it could be that you are finding this gathering and this talk incredibly boring or irritating. What is he talking about? I can't stand it anymore. And then the mind goes on. Help is coming. Thank you. So this is all about what we might call the awakening of consciousness. So just. I'll be coming back to it again and again, this terminology. But just to summarize what that means for those of you who are new to it. Is when you discover in yourself the ability to know what's happening in your inner space. Either on the level of emotion, on the level of mind. So that you're beginning to find there is an observing presence there. The observing presence can observe whatever happens in your mind. The movement of thought. Instead of being totally drawn into it, totally identified with it. That is the awakening, the disidentification from thought plus emotion. The disidentification from thought. So that's what it's all about. We can approach it from many different angles and directions. But the core of this is. Is always that. So as a little exercise in awareness or presence, let's do this. I call it do, but it's not really a doing. Becoming aware of sense perceptions. Because that is part of your experience of the present moment. Sense perceptions, visual, auditory, are the main sense perceptions. But the others may come in too. So there's the totality of this room. There's a man sitting on a chair. You see him on the chair, you see him on the screen. Stage, people. So you take that in the voice. You're becoming aware of that. You're giving it attention without any strain or effort. You're just directing your attention to sense perceptions rather than thinking. So there's a shift from being absorbed in interpreting sense perceptions and just noticing the sense perceptions. Huge shift. And that's already an enormously wonderful and empowering and important spiritual teaching. To become aware of sense perceptions, sensory perceptions, and remove the interpretation of the sensory perceptions. Very fundamental, deep spiritual practice. It. Some may sound a little strange, but to be aware of something. You could either direct your sense perception towards a particular noise that you hear in the background. Whatever it may be a bird singing or the engine noise of cars or whatever. Or visually a flower or tree or the sky. Or the totality of whatever Surrounds you and take in the various sense perceptions and just be with it. Be alert there. Build an alert presence for the sense perception. Like now the. There's no need to interpret. So what can you add to it? You let go of the. Sometimes one should say compulsive need to immediately find some kind of interpretation for it. Naming it, continuous naming. Every moment has to be immediately classified and personalized and named in some way. I like it, I don't like it. Or this question is not quite right. And a lot of the naming is of a negative kind. You might notice when you name, there's a difficult person around. Or you observe an unconscious person behaving in an unconscious way. Because what else can an unconscious person do? You can't ask them to behave in a conscious way. So you're looking at an unconscious behavior and say awful person. And then you let go of that. It's easier with trees and flowers and with people. Of course with people it's a more advanced stage. But I'm just pointing it out already because you have ample opportunity in this world, in your life to practice with people continuously. You may have noticed people are not easy. They're difficult. And some. Some are quite crazy. But we'll go to that. There are moments of craziness and relative sanity. And then they got crazy again. That's another story. You might remember your ex husband or wife. So sense perception. Bringing just awareness to sense perception. Like now you can do it in your room. You sit in your room alone and look around the room. Let go of the mind wanting to say something. You don't need it. So instead of naming, there's just an awareness behind the sense perception. That's a spiritual practice. You can do it anywhere. I recommended that you do it whenever you're waiting for something to happen. Even a simple thing like waiting for the elevator to come, or while you're riding in the elevator, or you're waiting at the traffic light, or you're waiting for on the phone, you're waiting for your bank to speak to a human being. Half an hour, an hour. That may be too much for this spiritual practice to start with. So whenever you're waiting, and you might be surprised how much, how many times of your day you are waiting for something. Now most of the time. Unfortunately, these days, when humans are waiting for something, even at the elevator or in the lineup to in the supermarket, whatever it may be, airport or There's a lot of waiting at airports these days, wherever they are. Unfortunately, most humans immediately get hold of this device, even I have one. Here it is. They can't wait. They cannot give themselves even half a minute without needing to fill this half a minute with something. Now, before they invented this, it was a little bit more difficult. You had to fill it with something. You had to think of something. Or you became restless waiting the elevator still not coming. It's only been 20 seconds. But now, of course, you have this. You can immediately go because everybody else is doing it too. So you have to do it too. So you pull this out. There's nothing in particular happening, but everybody's doing it. So you do it too. And you're adding to the clutter of your mind. And you're adding to the unawareness of the present moment. And even worse, it is when you're out, let's say you're out in nature. And then even there, you're on a bench, you're sitting on the beach or somewhere, wherever it may be, on the going up, even there. Some people cannot let go of this because this is an extension of the thinking mind. The thinking mind was already a huge challenge and a problem for thousands of years. And it grew and grew and grew. And then the thinking mind was so clever that it came up with an extension of itself in the form of this. And now it's even more challenging because it amplifies the thinking mind. It amplifies and adds to the clutter of your mind. Clutter meaning useless thinking. Just going around in circles, ruminating. And at night, even when you can't sleep. And a lot of the thinking is not pleasant for most people. You don't think for very long about a wonderful sunset that you saw last night or two days ago that was such a wonderful sunset. You can't do a lot of thinking. The mind needs something else. It needs a difficult person to think about. Somebody who was rude to you last week. And you cannot let go of the mind memory of that and what you should have said to him, but you didn't. But now you can do it in your mind. Or what may happen tomorrow or the next week. You have to think about that now because otherwise it will all fall apart if I don't think about this now. And people don't realize that they live with a burden of unconscious thinking. I'm not talking about useful thinking. When there's something to apply your mind to this problem that needs to be solved. And what can we do? What can I do about it? Let's look at this. And that and that. The mind is a very wonderful thing. When it's not when you are not the slave of your mind. So a lot of that thinking is actually destructive and unpleasant. People don't realize that the burden they carry in their minds, the burden of, for many people, an unhappy story they carry in their minds. And they think about it. And what is that unhappy narrative they carry in their mind? What do they call it? They call it my life. Oh, my life. So why did it go wrong so many times there? And that shouldn't have happened. I had imagined it when I was 17 and 18. I imagined something really very different, but that didn't happen. And then, of course, there are good things too. For many people, it's the narrative of my life is a mixed bag of good and bad. But for many others, my life is very problematic. And I cannot stop thinking about it. And the story I have to tell myself, this story of me and my life. And anybody who wants to listen, I'll tell them the story too, of me and my life. Are you ready to listen to my life? Okay. And then I'll tell you mine. Okay? That is the narrative. The narrative in your mind that you confuse with who you are, which is all your memories, accumulated memories. Not necessarily objectively true. Some maybe. But many of the memories are colored by faulty interpretations of what people did or said or did. You can verify this if you have siblings and you're grown up. And then you talk about events that happened in your childhood when we were six years old. You talk to your brother or your sister. Do you remember this event when I was six and you were eight or us seven? Do you remember what happened? And then your sibling says, no, that's not what happened. This is what happened. Completely different. But each one thinks that's exactly how it is. And in some cases it may well be. But whatever it is, it's a memory in your mind. You replayed an old movie. It replays itself, and often involving people. What somebody did to you, undoubtedly they did do that to you, and they shouldn't have done it. This is very true. Many people have had relatively unconscious parents. They did their best, but nobody can act beyond their level of consciousness. I realized it was a wonderful liberation when I realized I was ready. Later in my life, I realized that my parents could not have acted differently because that would have been beyond their level of consciousness at that particular time.