The Journey to Spiritual Awakening: Beyond Thinking | Eckhart Tolle

When you go out into nature and you see something extraordinarily beautiful, like a sunset, and it's a moment of intense aliveness, and you feel that was such a beautiful moment. Why? Because that freed you from the incessant stream of thinking. I don't know if you're familiar with the famous Zen story that the. I mean, everybody knows a bit about Zen. Well, for many people, Zen means simplicity of interior design or whatever. But that's not what Zen is. It was not created by an interior designer. There was a story about a man comes to the Zen master, and he's a university professor who has studied all the Zen scriptures and all the other Buddhist scriptures. And so he comes to the famous master, and the master, sit down, please. And the professor says, well, I've studied it all, but I want to hear from you also what really Zen is. Can you explain the essence to me? And. And the master was making tea. So the master was. There was the cup, the professor's cup. And the master took a teapot and started pouring tea into his cup. And he didn't stop pouring. And then the tea overflowed, and the professor was looking, saying, stop, stop. Can't you see the cup is overflowing? And the master said, well, just like this overflowing cup, you are full of your opinions, viewpoints, knowledge and speculations. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup? That was his main lesson. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup? So the cup here stands for the full cup. The cup that's overflowing with stuff refers to the clutter of your mind, the incessant thought stream of your mind, the accumulated clutter, the incessant, repetitive thought stream. And that and the personality that I talk about, the personal identity and the thought stream are really go together. So you are familiar with that. Now, the difference between you and a unawakened person is that you know that there is a voice in your head. There are still millions of people out there who don't know that there's a voice in their head that never stops speaking because they are so identified with the voice that they have become it. There is no separation. There is no awareness. There is no presence. Their entire consciousness is trapped in thought. And that is the state of being trapped in your personality. So every thought that comes into your head immediately grabs you and possesses you, and you're so identified with it that you believe in every thought that comes into your head. And that's how it is. The simplest thing, the simplest Thing, you don't see it clearly. You see it through the thinking veil of thinking, which is conditioned by your past, your culture, your upbringing, the country you grew up in. The culture, the society, the family, the. Your personal circumstances, your collective circumstances determines the type of thinking that has you in its grip. That varies from person to person and culture to culture. But the basic mechanism behind it is the same. They are all in the grip of the unobserved mind that is invested with the sense of self. Every thought has a sense of self in it. This is what the word identify means. You identify with every thought that comes into your head, and you believe in every thought that comes into your head. This is the case. If there's no awareness whatsoever, then that is your fate. Then awareness is the dormant faculty, presence, awareness, whatever you want to call it, that's the dormant faculty in you. It's still dormant. And as long as it's completely dormant, you are totally in the grip of your conditioned personality and your conditioned mind. You are basically possessed. It thinks through you, it acts through you. It is an energy field that has you in its grip, and you don't even know it because you think you are it. And for many, the beginning of spiritual awakening is to realize that there is this stream of continuous commentary in their minds. And that is the thing. Oh, that's interesting. That's a thought, of course. But before the thought that's interesting, there's the recognition. It's the voice in the head. And the recognition is not the voice in the head, although you might say it after the recognition. But in the moment of recognizing, there's a voice in the head that's not a thought, the recognition of thought is not a thought. The recognition of thought comes through awareness or presence. And awareness of presence is the higher consciousness, the arising new consciousness. Wow. So that is really the meaning of spiritual awakening. By the way, in this first half of our gathering, I will be talking more about it. In the second half, we will do more experiential. But even while I talk about it here, I would hope that if it works for you, there's already also an experiential realization of what it is I'm talking about. So there's the voice, there's the voice in the head. And people say things like, I think, they don't think, because thinking is not a voluntary action for them. So it's a delusion to even say I think. You don't think you are being thought by thought. You are created by thought. That energy field. Amazing. So the Master said How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup? Now, that's a huge demand. If I'm full of clutter, mental clutter, how am I going to empty my cup? I would be immediately enlightened if I could empty my cup. But the teaching points to something. It points to this, the word empty. And that's interesting. That is an important word in Buddhism, and I don't think it's a good translation. Who first came up with it? I don't know. In the 19th century, the Europeans started to translate ancient texts from Sanskrit, and one person came up with a translation, probably of the Sanskrit terms sunyata, and translated it as emptiness. That doesn't sound so nice. It sounds like something missing or something like that. So I have an alternative translation for the Buddhist term emptiness, so that empty is an important word. So remember, the Zen master said, how can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup? Empty, emptiness. My alternative translation for that is spaciousness. Spaciousness is a dimension of consciousness in you. And that is what we could call the spiritual dimension of consciousness. The deeper or the higher consciousness. Just words doesn't matter. And that is in every human, it's there. Many don't know that it's there because the clutter is so dense that they have no realization of the underlying spaciousness. And that is why I say, in millions of humans, that is still a dormant faculty, so to speak. So the most important realization in your life, much more important than what you have achieved on the level of the world, whether your life, in worldly terms, is regarded as a huge success or a dismal failure, or for most of you, probably something in between, that's normal. Sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. And you move from gaining, losing, high and low, up and down. That's the identity for most. So the clutter of your mind is there. But there are moments in your life when you become aware of something spacious underneath it. But you may not call it that. You may not call it anything. It may arise, for example, and, oh, I forgot. In many humans who may never have heard of anything spiritual, they're still out there. They don't know that a little bit of that is in them, but they don't know it. Little glances come occasionally into their lives of that dimension. It's not enough to actually say that the spiritual dimension has awakened in them, but little flashes come up now and then into their lives, and that is enough. Those little flashes from that dimension come into their lives, and that is enough to keep many people sane. And those Flashes can come, you might think, when you go out into nature and you see something extraordinarily beautiful like a sunset. For a moment you go, ah, all the vastness of the ocean or the sky or the elements, the wind, the storm. And for a moment you go. And it's a moment of intense aliveness. And you feel. And then you may remember that moment a little later that was such a beautiful moment. Why was it? Yes, maybe what you perceived was beautiful, but you felt something in that moment. You felt a heightened sense of aliveness and a deep peace and connectedness with being, so to speak. You see? Why? Because that moment of sense perception, of something vast or beautiful, freed you for a moment from the incessant stream of thinking. So the incessant stream of thinking, let's say you see this vast, this incredible sunset or whatever, and for a moment you give it your complete attention. And for a moment you're not thinking about yourself, your problems, your problematic life history or your even more problematic future. Actually, you're not thinking about anything. For a moment, the stream of thinking subsides and it goes. And that is, without knowing it, you have a little flash has come up from that dimension, and then the next moment it may come up a few days later again. When you look into the eyes of a baby one year old, maybe just in the street or in a cafe, and baby looks at you, and the baby is one year old, and the eyes are like the baby's and you know instinctively that the baby is not thinking about you, because thinking hasn't started yet, the words have not accumulated yet, the thoughts haven't started yet. And yet there's a consciousness there. And you can see very clearly there's an intense consciousness that looking through those eyes at you without judging you in any way. And in that moment, for just a few seconds, you feel so good. And you. Why do you feel so good? Because at that moment, the baby liberated you from your stream of thinking. And again a little bit of spaciousness opened up inside you. And so for those few seconds when you looked into the eyes of the baby, you were not thinking and the baby wasn't thinking. So through the baby, you are able to be in that dimension and it felt so good. Spontaneously, they can arise. They're not recognized by people as ultimately spiritual, but they are. And so many people. There are millions of people who experience those things briefly, but that's enough to give you a sense still of life is worth living. And then there are others who are so burdened by their minds they cannot even communicate with a baby. They cannot even perceive the beauty of nature anymore because their mind is so noisy that they never. There's a total veil. So they don't look at the baby like they look at the baby. Oh, that's a nice baby. They don't really see the baby immediately. It's labeled Sam.