Eckhart Tolle argues that pure attention or presence is the greatest gift you can offer another person. When you transcend your personal conditioning and root yourself in the timeless present, your attention becomes an energetic outflow that connects people and functions as a form of love.
When you go beyond your conditioning, you reach a place where you give the greatest gift to other humans that you can give. And that is the gift of. There's a story that you may have heard. There's a man sitting in a. In a small town, in a cafe, an old man. And a man approaches him and says, oh, are you a native here? You live here? Yes. And the man says, I'm thinking of moving here. Do you think it's a good place to live? And what are the people like here? And the old man says, well, what were the people like where you used to live? And the man says, well, or they were dreadful. They are dishonest, deceitful, full of envy and malice. I can't stand that place anymore. I have to get out. Okay. Then the old man says, it's very much the same here. And the next day, the old man sits again in the cafe and somebody else turns up. Coincidence. And says, my wife and I are thinking of moving here because we like this town. What are the people like? And the man says, well, what are the people like where you come from? And he says, oh, they're great. They're helpful, kind. Couldn't be nicer people. And the old man says, it's very much the same here. And of course, the old man is right. You create according to your conditioning. Your conditioning, to a large extent, determines the way in which you experience other people and reality. And when you go beyond your conditioning, you reach a place where you give the greatest gift to other humans that you can give. And that is the gift of your pure attention. When you look at somebody and you give them attention, that is a. There's an outflow of energy towards them. Just look. And attention means you're not pure. Attention is. You're not labeling anymore. It's not. You're just looking, perceiving. And there's an outflow. Perhaps they are talking to you. There's an outflow. Attention is energy. Or you give attention to a child. Many parents can't do that because they're continuously saying to the child, do this, don't do that. Now we must do that. Get ready for this. There's always something. There's never pure attention. Or rarely, there's always something to sort out and to make better. Of course, those things have their place. Brush your teeth. Of course they need to brush their teeth. But if that's the only reality of do this, do that, come to. There's never that spaciousness which is attention. Giving it to the other. And the child can feel that if you give a child, you just look at the child and you listen to the child or look. It's a beautiful thing. There's a flow, and then something comes back to you from the other. Because ultimately, attention is a form. We could almost say a form of love in a deeper sense. There's a giving, an outflow. Of course, it's not your personal. It's not something of your personal belonging that you give. Attention comes through you. It doesn't come from you. It comes through you, from the divine, the one consciousness. And you become an opening for that. And then the way in which you experience reality changes dramatically. A wonderful shift happens. Situations are no longer. The life in general is no longer perceived as hostile. It becomes helpful through that. And this. And again, when you look at a tree or you listen to the sounds, that's the outflow of attention. And that attention, of course, is just a word. It's a mysterious, ultimately unnamable energy that is goes. It has no form. And you can become an opening for that. And then it begins to live through you, that essence and express itself through you. In what form it expresses itself varies from person to person, but it begins to. It could just be that you become more. You stay where you are and become more kind and loving. And not because you're thinking, I need to be kind and loving. That doesn't work. You can try very hard. Love your neighbor as yourself. Okay, I'll try. Except that guy. And that one. When you feel that you are, something is living through you without being obstructed anymore. It was living through you before also, but only a trickle. It's a little bit like. Let's imagine you are a ripple on the surface of the ocean. And the ripple for a moment, which is a lifetime for the ripple forgets that it is part of the ocean. And it's only an expression, a brief expression of the totality in this particular form. And the ripple thinks I'm a ripple. That's my life. That's my ripple life. My. My life. The ripple thinks that its life is its own. It doesn't know it is the ocean. And then, of course, the ripple becomes unhappy. It doesn't realize that it is the ocean. But once the ripple realizes the ocean. And now we have to let go of this analogy because then something happens to the ripple that would not happen to a normal ripple. That's why we're letting go. It becomes a beautiful formation suddenly. Oh, and now the ocean is expressing itself fully through that. So use every moment here. And when I say every moment. It's not entirely correct. There is not no such thing as every moment. There's only this moment. Well, I have never met any other moment. I can't find any other. It's always been this moment. So in language, one says every moment or many moments. But ultimately there's no such thing. There's only the appearance of many moments. Because there's always something different that arises, that changes all the time. In the space of consciousness, Things arise and subside and arise and subside. Thoughts, emotions, perceptions, experiences come and go. And so when you only see the surface. Then you think everything that arises. This is one moment that arises. And one moment that arises. In the next moment, that. But, of course, it's not really like that. Because it all arises in the present moment, which is eternal. And the present moment, the deeper meaning of it, of course. Is that the present moment is consciousness itself. That's what the real meaning of the power of now is. What the now is. It's not what happens. The now, in its deeper sense is not what happens. It's the space in which everything happens. And that space is eternal. In other words, timeless. And that space is you in your essence. Oh, but if this is not, of course, something to believe in. But to sense that spaciousness in you. As that which underlies all perceptions and all thinking. So the shift in consciousness. Or the evolutionary leap in consciousness. Is from being exclusively identified with form, the me, the thought forms of me. To being rooted in the dimension of the formless. So this is why I sometimes say. Although, again, don't believe. Don't take these words as absolutely true. They're only temporary pointers. One could almost say there are two halves to who you are. And most humans only know one half, which is the form. Their physical form and their psychological form. The ideas they have about themselves, the stories and so on. The one half is your form, identity. The other half, which most humans don't know themselves as. Is the more essential. The essence of identity that is formless, that you cannot know. The other half you can know. But the formless essence, identity, you cannot know it. Because it is the essence through which everything is known. This is why it's sometimes called the I. The eternal I am Sam.
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