The Ocean Within You: Eckhart Tolle's Simple Guide to Pure Awareness

So it's the most magnificent thing if you can become aware here and now, or anywhere. It's always here and now. Become aware. We can put it like this now, another little signpost. You become aware that you are aware. Right now, you are aware that you are conscious. That's for sure. Because if you were not. And to say that you are conscious is already a falsification. This happens because we're using language. Language requires a subject and an object in a sentence structure. So even to say I am conscious creates already a duality between you and conscious, as if consciousness were an addition to you. It would actually be more accurate to say I am consciousness, I am consciousness, and I am this consciousness. I use the analogy of the ripple and the ocean. That consciousness transcends totally who you are as a person with a personal identity, the form identity. It is totally transcendent, but it is not separate. You are the little thing that comes out of the totality, out of the vastness of universal consciousness produces a little ripple. And the ripple is my name is so and so, and I was born son and such, and I've achieved this, and I failed at that. But that consciousness has come out of the universal consciousness. It is an aspect of the universal consciousness that is experiencing itself as it put for a very short time period, as a human being. A human being. I love that expression which we have to use in the English language. Because the English language doesn't have a word that contains both man and woman. The German language has a word mens, which is both because it is woman and man. One term combines men and women. English language doesn't have that. So you have to say human being even. Well, some people say, well, there's still the word man in the human, but let's forget about that. You have a human being. You are a human being. Meaning, this is how I interpret. It's very, very helpful. The human is your form. Identity who you are as this person, and the being is your essence identity, the transcendent dimension that connects you with the totality of all life. That you are connected with the totality of consciousness. That is in this analogy of ripple and ocean. The being is the ocean, the human is the ripple. So you are a human being and you need to live in both dimensions. If you lose yourself in the human dimension, only you are lost. This is why in some traditions you say you need salvation, you need to become more Buddha, you need to come to the end of suffering. Because if you live only as a human on the surface level of reality, with Your personal history and that unhappy story of me. You are lost, basically. You are like a Where do I go now? What do I do now? And you're always never going there. Always. There it is. No, no, go this way. No, here. The human and then the being. The being is consciousness itself. The being transcends the human, but contains the human like the ocean in the ripple. So you need to become, then invite the state of pure beingness or presence into your life as much as possible. And this is right now, for example. Are you aware that you are conscious right now? What could be more obvious and ultimately easy to realize that this beingness is the fundamental thing about you is you are an expression of consciousness. And there's no concepts in it. It's only by relinquishing concepts can you realize that deeper essence. And then you can look at things. And this is a wonderful spiritual practice. Perceive things by looking or listening or touching whatever you perceive things. Develop the ability to perceive things without automatically mentally labeling them. Perceive. Just look at a tree and let go of the label what it is, and look at it. And when you look at it, then there's. In the background, there is an awareness. Or we can call that awareness stillness. There's another signpost pointing to the same place or no place. There's a stillness. But you need a certain alertness. Otherwise you lose the stillness immediately to the momentum of the noisy mind. So there's an alert stillness. And in that alert stillness, you can look, I recommend first to do natural things that don't stimulate thought so much. You can look at a flower. You can look at a tree. You can look at the sky, the vastness, the spaciousness of the sky. Without labeling it just now, what happens. And you can do it here. You're sitting here, your sense perceptions. You see me, you hear the words. And you're also aware of the totality of this room. That's the surface level of this moment, is your sense perceptions. And undoubtedly, that's already a wonderful thing. If you can step out of the conceptualizing mind and become aware of sense perceptions. You could call that come to your senses. In order to come to your senses, you have to step out of the stream of thinking. Because otherwise the stream of thinking will absorb your entire consciousness. So you step out of the stream of thinking. It helps to feel the inner aliveness in your body, the inner body, as I call it. You've probably already practiced it or read about it in the books. To feel the aliveness that pervades the entire body, which is deeper than the physical body. There's an energy that pervades every cell of the body. And this intelligence, with an aspect of the one consciousness. Is the organizing principle behind all the functioning of the body. And you can sense that can provide an anchor for being present. And once you can feel the body and you look around, you do it now, as I speak about it, feel the inner body, the aliveness. And then you look around. And you will be able to look. And it's a wonderful thing. You enjoy it so much you'll be able to look around without needing to label it. If you need to label it will be there. But not compulsively label or interpret everything. Just let it be as the song goes. Let it be as it is. Then you come into the awareness of being you are. And it's a beautiful way of perceiving the world when you are not mentally interpreting it. And then that is the level of form. And then you become aware of yourself as the one who is perceiving. But not of yourself as the historical person. Because if you were perceiving through the historical person, you would be labeling things mentally. No, you become aware of yourself as the underlying consciousness in which the perception happens. The light of consciousness in which the perception happens. So you're aware of two dimensions. The dimension of form and the dimension of formless consciousness. The kingdom of heaven, the dimension of spaciousness, the emptiness, the spaciousness. The essence of all life. And it's not yours, it's not anybody's. It's the one. And now, as if you're thinking in terms of. Well, how does that fit in with God? You haven't mentioned God. Well, that's true. I haven't mentioned God because the term God has been misunderstood a lot over the millennia. Not by everybody, but by most. God. You cannot. Obviously, you cannot understand God. It would be. It's just absurd to even make any statement because it's totally. I mean, language consists of just a few sounds. Just a few sounds that are made by the vocal cords and air pressure. So you have the vowels A, E, I, O, U, A, O, O, O. And then you add a few air pressure sounds. Are you expecting to understand the secret of the universe through the combination of a few. Or just. I mean. And you're asking God to explain God, But I'll carry on talking anyway. Sam.