Transcend Suffering | A Guided Meditation by Eckhart Tolle

So thinking can happen against that background of awareness, speaking can happen, but it's also possible for the complete cessation of mind activity to happen. And happen is not the right word to be there, but you may notice it in the gaps between words or sentences. You can be aware, so acutely aware that thinking does not arise anymore. You have risen above thinking or transcendent, transcended thinking. A state of consciousness higher than thinking in which thinking can operate, doesn't have to transcend, means gone beyond, it's not eliminated. You are able to use your mind when needed, but you have the choice. And this is the radical step into a new state of consciousness. You have the choice not to think. That's an amazing thing. And not everyone here tonight is able to have that choice yet, but many of you are. And we are here to strengthen that ability to rise above thinking. When you rise above thinking, you also rise above the person or the personality, which of course can still operate and does operate in everyday life. But another dimension is present, another dimension to who you are. And if you even want to use the word enlightenment, what it means is that in addition to the personality, the person, a deeper dimension is present. Whether you call it deeper or higher doesn't matter. A deeper or higher dimension of consciousness that is more essentially you then thinking, more essentially you than your personal history. And in that, all the other things that for most of your life you had been identified with as yourself, such as the physical body, whether you are a man or a woman, your background, your upbringing, your achievements, your failures, your knowledge, your abilities, your likes, your dislikes, your opinions, all these other things that in the so called normal state of consciousness give people their sense of who they are. All those things are recognized as not self. Of course, if you know a little bit about Buddhism or a lot about Buddhism, you recognize in this the teaching of the Buddha. In the Pali scriptures the word is anatta, not self or no self. It's a recognition that all the things that had given you your sense of self are ultimately illusory and are not yourself. I have a little bit of a cough, but that's okay. So your sense of self is no longer in all those things, although they still exist for you on the level of the person. And that's a big relief because you're no longer looking for yourself where you can't be found. You're no longer looking to strengthen yourself by strengthening an illusory construct with the inevitable frustration and suffering that it leads to and with the inevitable misinterpretation of of other people, of yourself, of situations. Because if you live through an illusory construct of your mind, whatever you perceive, whatever situation you are in, your relationships with people will reflect that illusion and that illusory construction. The egoic self, the mind made self, creates an enormous amount of unhappiness in your life, or as the Buddha called it, suffering, dukkha, which can also be translated as misery or unsatisfactoriness. And in that illusory state, when you derive your sense of self from this illusory construct, you don't realize that most of your suffering is created by your state of consciousness. And you think the cause of your suffering. And suffering is a generic term. It's any form of unhappiness, upset, discontent, frustration, anger, despondency, irritation. You think that all your unhappiness, in whatever form, is caused by factors outside of you, other people, situations, events, things that happen or fail to happen when they should be happening, according to your mind, things that people do or fail to do, according to your mind, situations or places that are found unsatisfying when they should satisfy you, according to your mind. So you can observe this at work. Even when slight upsets arise in your life, where do they come from? Or bigger upsides. And then you can, if you're aware enough in that moment, and I recommend that you use any form of upset as a simple signal that more awareness is required, that you need to become present. And then you discover that in most cases the upset is caused by your mind and a misinterpretation of situations and people and so on. The mind creates a gap between the isness of things which it cannot accept. So there's a gap between what is and what should be. And then you start complaining about situations and people, and you become anxious or angry or frustrated. It's tedious to live like that. And people live like that all their life, and all that is dukkha, misery, suffering, unsatisfactoriness, unhappiness. But the egoic mind doesn't even recognize it as such. To the egoic mind, it's enjoying itself. The egoic mind enjoys unhappy states. It strengthens itself through unhappy states. So the egoic mind, a lot of the time, doesn't even recognize suffering as suffering. It believes implicitly, it's a good thing that you are angry now with that person about that situation. You have a right to be angry. These people shouldn't behave like that. The situation shouldn't be as it is. He shouldn't have said that. He should have said that. Or you can apply to yourself. I should have. In other words, normal existence is like that. There's a line in the course in miracles. It I am never upset for the reason I think.