Transcending the Illusion of Time for Spiritual Growth | Eckhart Tolle

Time is ultimately not helpful as far as your awakening is concerned. Time is not helpful. In fact, it's a hindrance in your awakening. Okay, so no time is required for awakening. Okay, now let me. The mind says, let me try to figure this out. That doesn't make sense. Meaning I've been meditating for nothing all these years. Meditation. If it works as it should, ultimately the purpose is, the aim is to be present while you meditate, not to seek some future condition. This is a fundamental mistake that meditators make is they imagine a future condition that they want to arrive at or achieve. And they think if I just practice more and harder, I will eventually achieve that awakened state. And that belief is actually a hindrance. So because then you are doing a meditation. And if you're doing a meditation, you miss the one thing that is the awakened state. And we could call that being, the realization of being. There needs to be a cessation of doing and of doing in order to realize being. You have the two dimensions in your life. Doing that requires time and being that requires no time. Now, most humans are unaware of being. They are lost in doing. And the primordial doing is thinking. And then you miss the now which is inseparable from being. So I invite you as we speak, or I speak, all the speaking happens. I don't know who is speaking, something is speaking. And invite you here and now to become aware of being here and now. Now, how does some of you may just as I say these words, which are only pointers, like signposts, as I say these words, some of you may be able to sense their own beingness. You sense that you are. And if you have no idea what I am talking about yet you are still trying to understand it mentally. Let me take you then gradually into being. Let's become aware of this moment. And the first thing you become aware of in this moment is sense perceptions. Visual, auditory, and then some of the others do tactile and so on. But the most predominant sense perceptions are the visual and the auditory. You hear and you see. So this is the. You're becoming aware of the present moment, which taken the form of sensory perception here and now. And you look around the room or you see this person, so called person, sitting on a chair and you can take in the totality of the room. The question that arises is are you able to take in the totality of your sense perceptions at this moment without any mental commentary. Just be like a, maybe like a one year old child hasn't learned the language yet and just Looks in wonder and amazement at the world. You don't have to look like that. I'm just. So you look around at the innocent perception without. Is it possible for you? Only you can answer that for yourself. But not through words, through just knowing. Are you able to be here in this moment? Allow your sense perceptions to be there, being aware of all these things without commenting mentally, without interpretation. Just let it be. Like the Beatles song Let it Be. There's a shift in consciousness that's already happened. Because when you interpret your sense perceptions, that's the conditioning of your mind. It's a person perceiving things when you don't interpret. There's still a knowing there, but not conceptual. There's a deeper knowing, but the person isn't there. Really, at that moment when you are not commenting, not interpreting, not imposing some kind of interpretation on the world, then the person that was there before when you were commenting has been replaced by awareness or presence. So there was a person. But then the person comes to an end temporarily, and they simply who or what is perceiving this room? When you are not commenting according to the conditioning of your past, who or what is perceiving this awareness itself? So something has receded the person and something else has arisen to replace it, so to speak. Awareness. That awareness is very still. Stillness is sometimes in spiritual discourse. Stillness is another important term. It's just another pointer. It's stillness. And that stillness is not a sleepy stillness. It's an alert stillness. And so a shift has taken place from being a conditioned entity, conditioned by the past. And now the shift has happened and suddenly just you are that space of awareness. And so the next step in presence. You're not just, yes, you are aware of your sense perceptions and you're not labelling, but you're also aware of the awareness itself through which you are able to be aware of sense perceptions. You're aware of your. Let's say words are very limited, but we have to use them. You're aware of the being of yourself, the presence that makes sense perceptions possible, the presence of consciousness that makes sense perceptions possible. And you can sense that not as a subject object relationship, although when we talk about sounds like a subject object relationship, because language operates in that way. Language has a subject, an object. Or as you use language, you say, I am aware of awareness. That creates a duality that's not really there when you talk about it. There's an I that is aware of awareness. So there's two of you, but there isn't. It's only when you start talking about it, it's. You become aware of yourself as awareness itself. Awareness becomes the self aware, whatever you want to call it. But that is an amazing thing that you are able to enter even if it's just for brief moments. For brief moments you can become free of the person. Oh my God. That heaviness, that burden that people carry around that they are so identified with that they are that heaviness. And that's why many persons their identity is intimately bound up with this burden of problems that I have to figure out how to solve my life problems. So for many people, their identities, I am a problem to be solved that seeking a solution. And then you go to a therapist. However, if the therapist is present, that makes it huge difference. I don't know. I'm sure there are some therapists here and some of you are probably doing fantastic work because you are able to, even though the yorkshop client or patient is talking, perhaps you are able to be present while you listen instead of interpreting everything. But be the consciousness. And then perhaps some awakening can happen if you embody presence. So the little, the big secret. It's not a secret, but it seems to be a secret. To be aware that you are conscious. To be aware of yourself as consciousness, as awareness, as presence. To sense the beingness of you, which is not the you, the limited you. It's actually the beingness of the universe in you.