The Most Powerful Spiritual Practice for Daily Life | Eckhart Tolle

I'm sometimes asked, and I think I even wrote it somewhere, what is the most effective spiritual practice in daily life? Or if I only had one spiritual practice, what would it be? What would be the most highly recommended spiritual practice? And I would say observe your breath. That would. If you spend a lot of time that in your spare moments and so on, that would bring about an enormous influx of presence into your life. And so that's very quite simple. Another thing that happens as you follow the breath with your attention. It's. Your attention moves out of the mind into the body. Body. And as the breath enters the body, you also become aware, almost inevitably, of the inner energy field of the body. I hope that. Well, I don't hope anything, but it would be great if, as I talk about this, you could feel or what it is that I'm talking about. So if I'm talking about, verify in this moment what it is that I'm talking about when I say, when I talk about follow your breath, then follow your breath. You can still listen and be aware of your breathing at the same time. It's quite pleasant. And then you can sense as the breath moves in, there's also a sense of aliveness in your body. Hard to describe. You feel that the body is alive. It might start with the area here because it's. The breath moves. And if you follow the breath with your attention, your attention may move a little deeper than the actual breath. It may move into the abdomen. So you become aware of an energy field down here. And so the abdomen falls and rises as you breathe in. It rises and then it shrinks. And you feel at first, a very subtle feeling of energy that pervades the inner. This is called the inner body, inner body awareness. And there's an energy field that then is not just here, but it pervades your arms and legs. It's everywhere. You can feel that the body is actually alive. You feel the life of the body from the inside. So what is that? It is the animating presence in the body. It is that the organizing principle that in a miraculous way keeps the body alive every moment, coordinating countless, highly complicated functions of the body. All the organs, the chemical laboratories, the unbelievable complexity. There's an intelligence behind it that temporarily organizes the molecules and atoms. In that way, you are not doing it. It's happening. So you connect with that intelligence. It becomes conscious. And you feel then you're not only aware of your breathing, you're also aware of the entire inner body. And it's not really the body, it's something that's beyond the body. It's a portal into something deeper. But let's call it inner body. It's invisible. And so breath awareness can lead you into and become combined with inner body awareness. And that's a beautiful, very powerful meditation that can take you out of any turmoil situation, even if you. Several times you lose yourself in the mind again. You bring it back to the breath and body. And as you sit here and listen to me, you may be able to be aware not only of auditory perception, which is the words you're hearing, but at the same time you're aware of the inner body. So what is that? It is the presence that pervades the entire body. Presence isn't just a head phenomenon. Presence is experienced with the entire body. And then as it becomes more deeper and more intense presence, you begin to feel also that you are surrounded by a presence. That's a strange thing. And that the space that is around you. We mentioned space briefly yesterday. The space that is around you is something very, very mysterious, very mysterious. And you can sense that there is. This is a mystical thing. I'm saying. No, you don't need to believe it. You can sense that that space that's all around you is there. There's something to it that you cannot define. It's not just nothing. Well, it is nothing in the sense that it is no thing. It is not a thing. It is not an object, but it's not just nothing. There is a presence all around you. And so don't want to talk about it too much. It becomes too mystical for many people. But I'm suggesting this as to experience first of all the aliveness of the inner. The presence that pervades the inner body, that is the inner body. And then you can sense that the world around you also is becoming more alive, especially the space around you. There is an alive presence in which you live that surrounds you. And that presence is both within and without. And when you sit in your room or hear now, you sense this invisible presence around you. Or was it Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American, I would say spiritual teacher, 19th century. He said, we live in the lap of immense intelligence. Great, great teacher. By the way, if you want to highly recommend Emerson, we live in the lab of intelligence, immense intelligence. We are surrounded by this intense, this vast intelligence. And if you know that there's a difference between just not knowing it and living completely unconsciously as a little. Or misperceiving yourself as an entity, a separate entity, here's me and there's the rest of the universe. No, you don't end here. You are extended into the vastness of the universe in this dimension of space. So because there's outer space and there's inner space, and first we become aware of that inner space. When thinking subsides, you become aware of that spaciousness within consciousness. Without the content of consciousness, just the space, you could describe it. It's like a room. And you remove all the objects in the room and all that remains is the space. That is the equivalent of when you come to a cessation of thinking, but you're not falling asleep at all. To stop thinking here means to rise above thinking. We are not talking about falling below thinking. Falling below thinking. You do that every night when you go to sleep or when you hear. When you're suffering from serious jet lag, you begin to fall below thinking. Or when you drink alcohol, the tendency is for you to take you below thinking. Or any most other substances. I haven't tried all the. I've tried very few substances. You cannot pronounce judgment on all substances. But some substances take you below thinking. It can be very comfortable for a while. At least you're not being tortured by your mind for a while. And so you puff away. So good, feel so good. What are your problems? I don't remember what my problems are. And it's also funny, sometimes falling block could be mistaken for a state of enlightenment. But then this is not the way we are going. We're not regressing. Although there is a desire for in every human being to become free of the self. An unconscious desire in every human being to become free of the self. The Buddha calls the self the egoic entity. The problem making heavy person, personality, that heaviness. I want to be free of that. There's so much suffering that goes with it. Want to be free. And so the drug taking these days is enormous in youngsters. A terrible epidemic of drug taking. This and because the truth is not being taught, vital knowledge is. We live in a society, in a civilization, the entire global civilization, almost totally ignorant of what really matters. We have knowledge, a lot of knowledge, but absolutely no knowing. Totally ignorant of what matters and has lost touch with the. With the Source God, if you like, if you don't. As always, people misunderstand what that is. So presence within and without.