The State of Presence: Eckhart Tolle's Guide to Conscious Living

It is likely that you have encountered presence. And you do from time to time or perhaps quite often encounter presence without recognizing it for what it is. It could just be a moment when you feel at ease. You feel a sense of well being, sense of peaceful aliveness. Not because you have desensitized yourself, not because you've taken some substances, not because you're about to fall asleep, not because there's a lowering of your consciousness. No, it's a heightened consciousness. Thinking, of course, is a manifestation of consciousness. Emotions are manifestation of consciousness. Sense perceptions could not exist without consciousness. So we are talking about, when we use presence, talking about the essence of what you are, which is consciousness, the light of consciousness. One could say this vast consciousness that is universal consciousness, it's not only within you, it is also without. It is the, one could say, the intelligence that underlies all phenomenal manifestations in the universe. There's a hidden, concealed, hidden, vast intelligence that gives rise to the evolution of all life forms. Impossible for us to understand it, but we can sense it within ourselves as the essence of our being. So the easiest way to point to presence is to say that you counter it when you stop thinking for a moment without losing consciousness. Stop thinking means the continuous voice in the head that usually comments on what's going on around you or comments on all kinds of things, imaginary scenarios and so on. The conditioned voice in the head that you live with. Everybody lives with that voice in their head that talks all the time inside. Or if it talks aloud at you, then you're considered crazy. People say, there's people walking in the streets talking out loud. And you say, oh, they are mentally insane. But the only difference between a normal human being and those people that you call mentally insane is that those you do not go mentally insane. They're still doing the same thing. They're just not talking out aloud. It's happening in their head. It's a continuous stream of thinking. And that creates the. The ego, the egoic sense of self. If an ultimately fictitious identity that you are infinitely more than the entity create by the movement of thought and the emotions that reflect the movement of thought, there's infinitely more to you than what you conventionally call the person. Person is the conditioned entity, a form that consciousness has taken. And most humans, unless they are awakening already spiritually, which is what we are talking about, the arising of presence is spiritual awakening. Unless you are awakening and many of you are awakening even if you don't, don't have words for it. Many of you are here because you're Awakening. Otherwise it would. This session would be totally meaningless to you. There may be a few to whom it is totally meaningless. What is this guy talking about? So you must have had a glimpse of what it is that I'm talking about. And if you haven't, perhaps you can have it now. And that glimpse is the possibility of arriving at the briefly, at first, the cessation of thinking. The voice in the head stops and yet consciousness remains. And you can look around or look at. You look at this image on the screen, or look around the room, take everything in, but you're not thinking about it. You just. It's just sensory perception. And what is behind the sensory perception? Presence. Another word for it is awareness. So there's an awareness that is perceiving at this moment. And that awareness is silent, but it's awake. And that awareness is the deeper dimension to who or what you are. That's no longer the person that you usually think of. When you say I. There's a deeper I, a deeper sense of being that transcends the personal sense of identity. So you can sense there's an awareness in you, a consciousness. And that consciousness is perceiving. It doesn't need to interpret it. It knows at a very deep level, but not conceptually. You can look around your room or wherever you are. You know that there's furniture or whatever there is, but you don't call it anything, you just allow it to be. So there is, instead of a person perceiving things, which is when you are always interpreting, commenting and labeling. Mentally, instead of a person, you're now perceiving not as a person. You're perceiving as an awareness. So there's a shift from personal sense of self shift to a deeper level. You could call it deeper or higher, doesn't matter. To a deeper level of consciousness, where you are not a person, you are that which is prior to the person. And that's awareness, presence. And that's amazing. You can then be aware of that awareness. You can sense this presence that you are in addition to whatever you're perceiving. It's in the background of your sense perception, the background of your life. It's a spacious, vast presence that connects you to something that we cannot really define or talk about. It's deep and it's infinite. It's the soul. It's not just the depth of your being. It connects you to the very soul of the universe. The ancients, ancient Romans and Greeks had this wonderful term, anima mundi, Latin for the soul of the world. There is such a thing as a world soul, and that is your. Your soul presence, the consciousness that you are is a ray or a spark of that, inseparable from the soul of the totality. So it's a liberation from the ego itself. Liberation on the self. This is. And then life becomes more harmonious. When you begin to invite that consciousness into your life, that presence, your life begins to flow with greater ease, more harmoniously. Not that you're not challenged anymore. Challenges continue, but all the challenges do. Once you begin to awaken to presence challenges, then deepen your presence. And in fact, you need the difficulties in your life to deepen your presence. As you begin to awaken, any challenge will deepen your presence. In the early stages, it could also happen that challenges take you completely out of presence. When you encounter difficult situations or people can take you totally out of presence. But gradually, as you become a bit more established, rooted in that presence, the opposite happens. Challenges don't make you unconscious, they make you more conscious. So in a nutshell, presence is awareness without thought. And then thinking becomes a more helpful tool rather than something that torments you. For many people, they are thinking. Mind torments them continuously. They have an unhappy sense of self. They talk to themselves using unhappy words. They talk about other people using unhappy words, good concepts. And they confuse what the voice in the head with actual reality out there. They can't tell the difference between what is and the way in which they interpret what is. Which is the conditioning of the mind. When you come to an alignment with what is, which is always now, life becomes easier. Not free of challenges, but much easier. And challenges don't produce unhappiness anymore. That's a big thing. And the difficulties of your life don't make you unhappy anymore. Amazing. Sa.