The Most Important Spiritual Practice | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

This ability to look at things or listen to things with other senses, smell, taste, touch, as the awareness rather than the interpreting mind. Practice that in your daily life. It's a primordial spiritual practice. If that's your only spiritual practice, it would be quite enough. So innocent. Perception requires awareness. It requires an alertness in the background of your perception. Without the alertness, thinking will always overpower you. The alertness keeps thinking at bay. You remember the story I wrote about in the New Earth? It's an ancient Zen story where the disciple and the Zen master are walking on a long journey through the mountains, and then they stop for a little picnic. And then the disciple, who is still having problems understanding what Zen is all about, he's only been there for 10 years. He asks the master, I don't quite get it yet. How do I enter Zen? Meaning how do I enter the state of consciousness that is Zen? How do I. And the master looks at him and says, can you hear the sound of that mountain stream? And the disciples, no, I can't hear it. The master has just see if you can listen. See if you can hear it. And this is the point of the master to the disciple, to become more alert. The master associates the alertness with the auditory perception there. So the alertness flows into the auditory perception. And as the master tells him, you have to listen more carefully to hear that mountain stream. And then the disciple, at that moment, the alertness, the awareness in the disciple rises and he goes. And of course, at that very moment, while he's in that intense listening, he's no longer thinking or trying to figure out what Zen is all about. He's just. And then he can hear, in the far distance is a tiny mountain stream that makes a sound, and suddenly he can hear it. And he says, yes, I can hear it. And the master, that's it. Enter Zen from there. Oh, this is a practical. To show by means of practical example what that means, that alertness. Jesus talks about it too. He said, be so awake as if you were. He gives the parable of a servant waiting for the master. He doesn't know when the master comes. He may come in very silently. So you have to be alert. Don't go to sleep. Be alert and wait for the master. So the servant is sitting in that house, the dog, maybe. In my version of the story, the servant is on the upper floor, and the master is going. Could come in any moment. And he's fairly. The master is very quiet. So you go. So the servant basically would be in continuous presence. Otherwise he Might miss the master again. It's an example to show what that state of consciousness is. Again using the analogy with associating awareness with the auditory perception. You can associate it with other perceptions too, or with all perception, or with no perception. And there is no stress or strain in that alertness. There isn't a willfulness behind it. That's not it. You can't hold your breath and make yourself be more alert. I still can't hear the mountain stream. You have to. It's a relaxed alertness. That is one if you. I'll sometimes use the expression vibrational frequency. And there is a truth behind it. Whether or not it's scientific, I don't care. By the way, I can sense when because I also experience fluctuations. There's always an. A certain alertness in the background. But sometimes there's an increase in alertness and sometimes it's just. It recedes. It's in the background, the awareness and then the awareness. The light gets like a dimmer switch. It goes and then it goes. It's still there according to the situation now. The so called enlightened state, which is the destiny of each human to reach, although many won't reach it in this lifetime. But that's okay. That would mean there's a continuous background awareness. Indian continuous. And you, many of you already have it sporadically and there may be some of you who already have it continuously in the back. And the only reason why you're here, because it's enjoyable. But there's no point in asking, oh, when is it going to be continuous for me, Irrelevant question. The only true question is is it there now? That's the only place where it can be now. Whether it's going to be there 10 minutes from now, who knows? Is it going to be there next week when I get home? Who knows? But when you get home, it's now. So the only relevant question is am I aware now? And if you even remember to ask that question, which is a powerful pointer to awareness, very easily you can step from the question, which is still a thought. I call it a pointer. Certain thoughts are pointers that point beyond thought. So am I aware now? It's a powerful pointer. And after that you. Yes, that can immediately bring you to that heightened alertness. Am I allowed? I'm aware now. Let me just check. And that checking creates a rise in the vibrational frequency. You can feel that and you can observe. You can learn to observe in people. It's not judgmental. It's a simple fact. You can look at a person. And to some extent, you can see what degree of awareness is there. There are many humans who might never have heard of any spiritual teaching who have some awareness in their life. They don't know what it is, but it's there. I can very often. I don't like to be stopped and recognized in the street all the time, but it does happen a lot. And when it happens, it's lovely. So it's a paradox. I try to wear sometimes sunglasses into a baseball cap. A funny incident. I was in a supermarket and I was wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap and just looking at the shelves, and a man came up to me and said, hi, Ekat. May I shake your hands? Do people recognize you a lot? Now I am saying this is quite not infrequently. I know. A few seconds, I look at a person a few seconds before they recognize me, I recognize them. I've never seen them before, but I recognize them. I know there is a fairly strong presence there. And then I know, oh, this person is going. And this is not a thought, it's just a realization. This person is going to recognize me. And most of the time I'm right.