Eckhart Tolle explains why beautiful moments feel so alive: they quiet the thinking mind. When you see something magnificent like a sunset, the intensity stops your compulsive thoughts, and that presence is what makes the moment feel intensely alive. Joy fades because the mind returns to its habit of dwelling on complaints.
The moments when you are happy, really happy with your life, usually don't last that long. The voice in the head, the compulsive, tends to dwell on things that are not good rather than things that are good. Why does it do that? There's so much more to think about when it complains than about something good. Let's say you saw a sunset yesterday, it was so magnificent, and in the moment of seeing it, it freed you for a moment from the voice in the head because you just went, wow, and you felt more intensely alive suddenly. Why you felt intensely alive? Because you were so overwhelmed by the beauty of it that for a moment your thinking subsided and something else arose, and that, and that something else was presence or awareness.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
