The Dimension Beyond Thinking | Eckhart Tolle on The Space Beyond Thought (Part 1)

Thinking is not the highest faculty in a human being. And that is a revolutionary statement that not many people in the mainstream culture would agree with. Because all they know themselves is as thinking entities. But once you discover that thinking is not the highest because you've touched something, a dimension in yourself that's beyond thinking, that is an evolutionary leap. Even if you fall back into thinking, for a moment you've leapt like the first fish trying to leap out of the sea. Because they say life has developed in the sea. And trying to crawl on land is you stopping thinking. And then it gets too difficult. Then the fish runs back, gets back into the sea. But that analogy, of course, we need to forget now. Because it's not going to take us several million years as it took to the fishes before they could start walking on land. If that whole story is true, who knows? Doesn't matter. So, as you might have noticed, what I'm talking about is very simple. Because I'm simply guiding you into presence. That's all. But more important than the words is what's behind and in between the words. And we could call that spaciousness, or we could call that stillness. Doesn't matter what you call it, but you become more aware of the spaciousness. Then the words. And the spaciousness is within you. It's there the moment the stream of thinking subsides. And there's only the presence left. If your mind still tends to interfere and take you out of presence, Allow the body, your body, to participate in the meditation. So that you become present with every cell of the body. Every cell of the body becomes present. Now, somebody might say, please explain what you mean by that. No, I won't. It's too simple for that. Just sense the aliveness in your body. Anywhere where you can feel it first is fine. The hands or the legs or the feet. And then the entire energy field that pervades the body becomes part of presence. And at first it seems that you, the consciousness, are observing the inner body feeling. But if you go into it more deeply, you realize that there's no longer a subject, object relationship between you, the presence and the feeling of the inner body. You, the presence and the feeling of the inner body merge. And the totality of that becomes the state of presence. So it's no longer an observer and the observed. There's a merging of the observer and the observed. So it means the entire being becomes aware. And that's a lovely state, peaceful. And then it's fairly easy not to drift off into thinking. Tomorrow's breakfast or next week's problems or last year's disappointments and many other things. That thinking is concerned with my problematic life. Somebody, perhaps it was Carl Jol, I'm not sure, said you cannot solve the problems of this world on the same level of consciousness that created the problems. So you can't solve your personal problems, which everybody has, unless you rise to a different state of consciousness, which is why we are here. And when you solve your personal problems that a sufficient number of humans do, that then that will affect the world problems. And that's how truly you can change the world. Or to put it more accurately, how that change can happen through you. It's not you, the doer, who is going to change the world, but it can happen through you. In the meantime, there's nothing wrong. In fact, it's wonderful to alleviate suffering where you see it in this world, where you feel called upon to help in your immediate environment or elsewhere. That's a wonderful thing to do. But the causal level of the world's problems lies in the collective consciousness or unconsciousness of the world. And that is the only place, consciousness, where deep and permanent change can happen. So that eventually you don't need to help other humans anymore. They don't need your help anymore. You can just commune joyfully with them. So you deal, of course, with the effects of unconsciousness. In this world, there's a lot of suffering, physical and psychological. And your focal point as even as you help others, your focal point needs to be this shift in consciousness. It.