The Key to Conscious Creativity | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

You and Krishnamurti both talk about the importance of choiceless awareness, directly confronting what is without judgment. You also talk about the primacy of presence as the way to transcend thought, the improper use of which is the cause of our suffering. Another teaching respected by many, celebrates thought and desire as being responsible for our evolution and the expansion of the universe. While both teachings have much in common, this appears to be an important point of departure that I cannot reconcile. Can you help clarify? Is that the same Jeff who asked the previous question? Anyway, doesn't matter. It's only one consciousness. So. So there seems to be basically two teachings, he says, and many people have asked similar questions. One is accept. What is choiceless awareness, Presence. The other one is using thought to create, to manifest, to transform. Are they separate? Can they be reconciled? As I mentioned the other day, the two represent the two movements of the universe. One is into creation, multiplicity, increasing complexity of life forms. It experience itself as that it loves to create. That's for sure. Because if you look around, even on this planet alone, how many life forms there are all perceiving the universe in a different way, or saying the universe, the one consciousness, perceiving itself through all these different forms in different ways. You could call it a dream, you could call it reality. It doesn't matter. These are just words. And then the universe also wants to know its own source. And that's the return movement as fast as the outward movement. And then there's the return movement. This might correspond to the Big Bang, what scientists call the which the universe came out of nothing. Nobody knows what that is. It started from nothing, and suddenly it expanded and went into creativity. And life forms began to multiply over billions of years. And then the story goes, some scientists say, and even in ancient Hindu mythology and others, there's a story that eventually it will come together again and return to the One. In that case, it would be like the in breath and the out breath of God, the entire universe. God breathes out and. And then it all returns back to the source for some reason that we could not even fathom. And even if we even just start thinking about it, what might the reason be? We would never find it through the conceptual mind. But that seems to correspond to what we do because we have a heart that also goes. And we also breathe in and breathe out. And we also wake up in the morning and do all our activities. And at nighttime we go, and then we go. Now everything is reflected on every level. You are a microcosm of the entire universe. So if you observe yourself to observe how the heart works, how the breathing operates, how the sleep and wakefulness, dreamless sleep, dream state, the so called wakeful state, which is not that wakeful for most people. But here we have similar. There may be that certainly is a similar pattern everywhere. So I'm talking about this because this is how the two movements are reconciled. The universe needs both. It needs the creativity, it needs also the stillness. And for humans, it's not enough to go unconsciously to the source. It's our destiny because it's the destiny of the universe to consciously unite with source, Source consciousness. And that's why we are here. So your life needs to be a balance, a dance between creating and not getting lost in your creations. What is the motivation for creation if you are already accepting of the present moment, if you feel completely at one with the isness of the present moment. There are two reasons why you take action here. One may be as a response to a situation that requires action. So certain situations, somebody may need help. You can sit at ease contemplating nature and suddenly there's a human being who says, ah, help me. Do you sit there and say, no, I'm at ease in the present moment. You respond to whatever the situation the present moment requires you to do. You respond from within. I was in the lucky position. When I was a teenager we lived in. I lived with my dad in Spain for a few years and in he had gone to Spain to drop out and lead an alternative life. And then he ran out of money. And then when I was there, we had so little money, we had not even a fridge. I mean, almost everybody had a fridge, but there in the hot summer in Spain, no fridge, no radio, no television. Of course I didn't even think of it. So basically just the minimum. And I wasn't dreadfully unhappy because of that. To some extent I accepted it because I was still young enough. Children find it perhaps easier to accept situations that go into. But normally, if I lived in a place like that now I have no friends, only basic things to live with. Things get. I can't buy anything in advance. I have to go shopping every day because everything goes off immediately. I'd rather move than be here. You can be. You can accept that. This is where I am right now. It can still be fine. But you would start looking, oh, I'd like to live somewhere else. You see, this situation has certain can have a preference. And why not have a. Everybody has a preference. Some Buddhists might talk to you about or some masters say, I have no preference whatsoever. But they Live in an ashram. So they'd rather be in an ashram than be on Wall street and work there. So there must be some preference. So this is. One thing is dealing with responding to situation and having preferences and then taking action. Another one is bringing about something entirely new into this world. And that comes when you are able to become still enough so that you know what the universe or the one consciousness wants you to do. If it wants you to do something. It may take a while before you know that. I lived for years doing relatively little except doing occasional counseling sessions, sometimes only two a week. And the years passed and I was just continuously, just in presence on my bicycle, chopping wood, carrying water. And the years passed and I spent hours in thoughtless awareness in London, sitting on Hampstead Heath. Three hours later I go home, having a little salad and then having a counseling session at 5. Could live on one person a day, one counseling session a day. And I wondered, my mind wondered sometimes there must be something else that I'm supposed to do. And there was even slight moments of what am I doing here? But there was nothing else to do. Be present, just be. Go back to Hampstead Heath, sit there again. But there were long periods also of incredibly blissful states that people noticed. Even people who are not tuned into spirituality particularly say, I can feel something. What is that? There were great states, emanation of peace. But I wasn't doing anything. There was just that emanation. Sometimes waiters or waitresses occasionally went to little restaurants. They felt something, but still nothing. The universe still wasn't telling me what I was supposed to do. And I believe the decisive change came. Perhaps I should have thought of that earlier. There was a. I was in. I had moved out of London to Somerset and lived in Glastonbury, the spiritual Mecca that attracts all kinds of weird people, including myself. And just outside, there's a village just a few miles out of Glasgow. I would sometimes go there and there's an ancient. Like the English villages, they have their ancient church, sometimes a thousand years old, a few houses around it. There was an oak tree. I would go to an ancient oak tree in the middle of the field. Magnificent. And I had a wonderful relationship with that tree. But that church, that was always empty. I went into that church and one day I went in and suddenly I had this impulse, say I want acceleration now. I want. I knew there was something for me to do, but I clearly demanded acceleration of my life purpose. And then I went home again. And for maybe three months, two or three months, nothing happened. I'd forgotten about it already. And then one day it came. It came when I woke up. And suddenly I knew. As a thought and a deeper knowing. I have to move to the west coast of North America. Why? I don't know. It wasn't just one day, it stayed. The next day it was still there. The next week it was still there. The week is still there. And then finally I had to leave. Could not leave. If I had not left, I would have died. So that was the first step in writing the Power of Now. Because I needed to be in the energy field of the west coast for some reason to write it. And that's how the book started. When a few weeks after arriving on the west coast, it started. And then the acceleration came more and more. But after the Power of Now came out, and then it became so much that I almost wanted to put the brake on. But it was the. The power just grew and grew. But it. It came because for years I went so deep within that eventually the outer movement into creation, the outward creation reflected the depth of years of going within into just into stillness and deep into stillness. So the outward creation reflected the inward movement. It was just. It was as powerful out there as it was power, the power that was in the inward movement. So you too will find that the more you align yourself with the essence, the stillness within the unconditioned consciousness, the more the power will. There might be a time gap, but hopefully not as many years as in my case. There may be a time gap. The power that is within you, that you sense when you become aware of yourself, as the consciousness then flows through you. And that is what creates through you, not the little ego anymore. So you don't create because you think, when I achieve this or that I'm going to be happy and fulfilled, know that the happiness and the happiness, something deeper than happiness, the fulfillment is already here. Now. The true creation cannot come out of a neediness. That's egoic creation. It doesn't make you happy, it'll make you unhappy. Whatever you create eventually either will not satisfy you or make you unhappy. That comes out of a neediness. The egoic creation believes I need to attract something to me. I need to attract this, I need to attract that into my life. The non egoic creation, that consciousness uses you as an instrument, uses this form as an instrument, comes out of the inner fullness. So the creation comes from within to without. It creates the outward from within, rather than needing to attract something from the outside. Although in language you might sometimes express it that way, you might say I attract it this or that person into my life, but really, it's the other way around. You can only create out of this fullness that you sense when you're in touch with presence. So if you discover within yourself that a lot of the time you're in a state of lack of insufficiency, of not enough, and you feel that the answer to the remedy is to be active in this world and achieve and do as much as possible, then you'll probably find that ultimately that is not the answer to your state of lack. In order to transcend, to go beyond your state of lack of neediness, of not enough spiritual practice and spiritual realization is necessary. Focus the realization of being. It's only there that you can go beyond that state of lack, which is ego. Go within and discover who or what you are beyond the person. It.