The Dream of Life and Success, with Eckhart Tolle

Becoming aware. Right. For example, now, becoming aware that you are conscious right now, that's a strange thing. There's no content to that. There's simply presence. And for that to happen, and I'm finally getting to it, that is, there needs to be the cessation of thought. And so this is my invitation to you. You do not need to think continuously in your daily life. It's if your mind tells you that if you do not think and do not worry, then your life is going to collapse. That is not true. It's a lie. But your mind might either explicitly or implicitly say that I need to really think about my life. Thinking has its place. It's a wonderful tool. It can be used for manifesting, it can be used for creating. It's a tool. But if it takes you over, if you're identified with a tool, then it comes to possess you. And that's a terrible limitation. So the. The new state of consciousness is a mixture of thought and spaciousness so that you can go about your daily life walking from point A to point B in that state of simple aware, presence. Let's do it now. I call it do. But not doing involved. Simply become aware of yourself as you sit here, just as I am aware of myself as a conscious presence. This is a very strange thing. It's not. You can't say, oh, you cannot become an object to yourself. It in this, everything else is an object that arises in your consciousness, an object of consciousness. But knowing yourself, you cannot be an object in your own consciousness. So you cannot know yourself in a subject object relationship. At the deepest level, you can only know yourself as the eternal subject. The There is a space of stillness in that moment of being, of knowing yourself as the essence identity. There is an alive sense of stillness and presence. Like, let's separate, let's just say my two hands. This is thought. You're thinking. And then you go and here's a space of no thought, just awareness. You can't define what that is. You can't think about it. You can only be it. Stillness is one word we could use to point to it. Stillness has nothing to do whether there is noise outside or not. Inner stillness is the cessation of thinking without loss of consciousness. And that is realizing yourself as the unconditioned consciousness. Because everything else is conditioned by the past. But that is the unconditioned in you. That is your essence identity. You cannot by exercising willpower. That is not the way to go to stop yourself from thinking. I'm not even saying stop Thinking as an active practice, but simply become so alert that thinking stops by itself. One way you can do it is by becoming aware of sense perceptions, acutely aware of sense perceptions. I give the example in the Power of now of a cat watching the mouse hole. And the cat watching the mouse hole is in that state of absolute attention. And the cat goes, now you don't have to stare like that, but that is the state of. That is this state of awareness. Consciousness. That's the only thing in your life that you cannot question, that the only thing that is absolutely and undoubtedly real. Everything else you can question, for example, whether our gathering here is a dream or not, you don't really know. It could be that you are dreaming, that you are sitting here and there's a man talking on a chair suggesting to you that you might be dreaming. You cannot, as many philosophers have pointed out, you cannot know for sure that this life that you are experiencing is not a kind of dream. And from one certain, one perspective, it is a kind of dream. Look at. I like to sometimes look at old photographs, May taken in 1900, early days of photography, 1920, whenever of street scenes or gatherings. And you look, you can go to second hand shops and they sell sometimes old photographs. You can buy one for a penny or two. You have no idea who these people are, nor has anybody else an idea who these people are, but they are running around the city street excited about this or that. And then there's another gathering. See people sitting around a table eating and laughing in this old photo. And where is that now? It has evaporated like a dream. Nobody even remembers who they are. And that is the same with anything that you experience here. It quickly evaporates. So there is a dream like quality to human existence, any existence. So you could say, okay, maybe it's all a dream. That may well be. But one thing you cannot doubt that is that you are conscious. Because if you're not conscious, there couldn't be a dream. A dream can only arise in the light of consciousness. So the one thing, whether or not this is a dream or not becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters if it is a dream, is whether you can realize what the essence of the dream is. Consciousness. And you can only realize that directly here and now as this. Oh, Descartes, of course, the French philosopher said, I think, therefore I am. If he had waited a little bit longer before saying anything, he could have come to the point of cessation of thinking and then he could have made the more profound I am conscious, therefore I am Thinking is only an expression of consciousness, a surface expression of consciousness. So this realization of, we could call inner stillness, of spaciousness, of presence, of. Well, there's a term that's very popular these days, and that's a good thing. It's called mindfulness, which I use almost never, except when I explain why I don't use it. I don't use it because it seems to imply that your mind is full, but it's not what mindfulness is. It really should be called mind emptiness. The entire practice of. For example. People find certain esoteric spiritual practices very strange and hard to understand. Zen is one of those people. So what does it all mean? What's Zen all about? Cessation of thinking without loss of consciousness. That's what the Zen masters are trying to show you. Non conceptually, as the Zen master became famous because when he was asked, please explain the meaning of Zen, all he would do is raise his finger and look at you. Is that it? Yeah. And I was in the. I've been in the monastery for 15 years for that. Yes. Sometimes it takes a long time before realizing that it doesn't take time to know who you are. That's a paradox. So I'm not saying don't go to a Zen monastery. Perhaps you have to. It may take time to realize that it does not take time, but it doesn't have to take time. It's here and now. I'm saying this to especially the spiritual seekers among you who have made it your life purpose to seek whatever it is, the ultimate spiritual experience or transformation. And the very seeking has become, without you knowing it, the greatest obstacle to spiritual realization. Because by being in the seeking mode for some spiritual realization or awakening, you are in the same, basically the same state of consciousness that everybody else is in, except they are seeking through material possessions, achievement, relationships, this or that they're seeking there. What's the next thing that I can. It's a mind structure, the seeking mode. And spiritual seekers adopt that they see themselves as more spiritual than the one who is seeking after the latest model of that particular car or. Or seeking a life partner who enhances their sense of self. The trophy husband, the trophy wife, the beautiful arm, hang and seeking and never being satisfied. Because if you're in the seeking mode, you never reach the satisfaction. You get stuck in the seeking mode. So to the spiritual seekers, I would suggest that you stop thinking and come into this present moment and find out whether it is possible for you to stop thinking. Sarah.