Two Powerful Spiritual Practices | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

I suggest that you bring a certain spiritual practice, if you even want to call it that. It's not really anything separate from normal everyday existence. I suggest you bring that little spiritual practice into your normal life, and that is invite these brief periods of no thought into ordinary human life, into your normal everyday existence. This could be a simple thing like whenever you look up at the sky, the sky is a beautiful thing. I love the sky. I've taken hundreds and hundreds of photos of the sky on my iPhone. Most of the photos I have on my iPhone are the sky. And whenever you look at the sky, and you don't need to become a sky gazer, no, just a brief, a few seconds out of the window or outside. And for that moment, are you able to look without the addition of thought, without adding thought to the sense perception? So all you have, not the sky, may be completely clear, it may be completely clouded, or there may be clouds floating around, it doesn't matter. You take it in, whatever it is, and there's a moment of looking, 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds. In that moment of looking, there's no commentary. It doesn't say, oh, it's going to rain or not, another dreary day, or, oh, I wonder if it's going to stay like that for the rest of the day, none of that. But this can only happen if there's an alertness there. Then there needs to be an alertness that keeps thought at bay. And this is not willpower, it's simply an alert presence. It goes, one could say, a raising of your frequency, and it goes. And then you look and there's a. The background to the sense perception is no longer you as the person, but you as awareness or consciousness. You are looking as consciousness, you're not looking as a person. The moment you comment on what you're seeing, you interpret what you're seeing, you become the person. So, and I'm only giving one example, you can make it a habit several times during the day to look at the sky in that way in which you don't add thought. Another practice, I suggest a tree. And even if you live in London, the lovely thing about London is there are lots of trees around, and not only in the parks, but many streets also have trees. And so look at a tree every day, or whenever you see a tree, give it five seconds, give it 10 seconds, and see if you can look at that as presence rather than as a person. Just that sense perception and presence. And then you can do it here and now. You can either be aware of something specific and aware of awareness. Those are always the two. You're looking at the sky, and you're aware of who is looking or what is looking. The two dimensions. As you're sitting here, you're aware of the room. You're aware of the voice, you're aware of the lights. You're not whatever it is. What in addition can you be aware of in order to be the presence? You're aware of yourself as the awareness. And you don't need thought for that. Thought would interfere with that. So take in this. Here's the room, here's the person sitting on a chair. There's a screen there. And take in the totality of this room without adding thought to it. And that's beautiful. You don't need to interpret it and just it's still there. You know what it is without calling it anything. And then it deepens. The strange thing is when you don't add thought when it's not needed, sometimes you need thought when you don't add thought when it's not needed. There is a depth even to your sense perceptions. So when you look at the sky, it's more than just the sky. When you look at a tree, you don't reduce this mystery that ultimately the tree is, because who knows what the tree is? But by calling it tree, you don't know what it is. You just attach a label to a mystery that applies to virtually anything or to anything. When you call it something and oh, no, that's what it is. You don't know. It's a convenient label, but it covers up the mystery. It covers up the depth of aliveness that is in everything. As Krishnamurti said once, the moment you teach a child the name of the bird, the child will never see the bird again. Now, this does not mean that you should refrain from teaching the child. The child needs the words. It wants to know the words. It says, what's that? Oh, that's a. That's a sparrow. Sparrow. Okay, okay. What's that? But you see how the moment you give the label, you. It obscures the depth that's there behind the label. And it's only when you then can relinquish the label, then there is a greater depth to what you see, even to sense perceptions. There is an aliveness in the flower that some people can only get a glimpse of. This kind of perception, when they take something and they go, wow. Or they look at the sky and say, wow. Isn't that amazing? They took the little substance, but what that little substance did it momentarily made sense. Perceptions so strong there was no room for thought anymore. So there was just the experiencing of it. And that can be a liberating thing for certain people who are totally continuously immersed in the voice in the head. But it's not a long term solution, the little substance. So this is an amazing practice. It is also when, if you want to get in touch with the level where intuition rises, where a fresh creative idea arises, where any kind of creativity arises and may to do with whatever work you do, any creative contribution. If there's something, a problem to be solved and nobody has the answer, if you are able in all those situations to step out of thought instead of thinking, they need to think harder to find the solution. And then you go and you can't even sleep at night anymore. And you go, what's going on? Or many people look, look at their own lives as one big problem that can, they can try to solve somehow. They people seek for many people, their sense of identity is me, the problem that's to be solved. And if I could only solve this problem of me, I would be okay. And of course, yes, you can't really solve it. You can step out of it and then it solves itself.