You Don't Have To Think All The Time | Eckhart Tolle on Discovering Reality (Part 1)

But the amazing thing is for you to discover that you don't need to think all the time. That there is a realm, a dimension of consciousness in you that does not consist of thought. That is an amazing discovery and as perhaps I would say the most essential discovery for anybody to make. And I believe it's never been mentioned on the news. The world's most amazing discovery, never been mentioned. So you have two identities. We could say you have your form based identity, which is the identity of your physical body, and your psychological identity that is largely determined by your past. The past, so called past, leaves accumulations in the mind. And of course that's what the past is. Because apart from the accumulations in your mind, there is no past, there's only the eternal presence. So apart from the identity that is past based of who you are, which is a mixed bag for most people, there's good stuff in it and bad stuff in it. For some people, it's pretty bad. So that's where people get their sense of self from who I am. And that's what they like to think about. Most people's mind activity is to a large extent occupied by thinking about themselves and trying to solve the problem of me, trying to solve me and my problems. The strange thing is you solve one and another one pops up behind you, problem after another. So you have to think even harder about yourself, especially in the middle of the night. And so your sense of identity becomes a problematic, one very common phenomenon for most people, to the extent even that they regard themselves as a problem to be solved. I am a problem that requires a solution. And that's a heavy identity. And this is what happens easily when you're not aware of your deeper, more essential identity. That has nothing to do with, with your personal history or your past or your future. But realizing the essence of who you are is formless. A formless sense of presence like this. Sometimes I call it space consciousness. Sounds a little bit like science fiction, but it's not. It's awareness of that inner space or spaciousness. And usually meditation is designed to help you realize that no matter what technique you use, the technique is not the meditation. The. The meditation is the realization of your essence. Now, many people who meditate don't really get anywhere much with their meditation, first of all because they think they need to get somewhere. That's why they don't get anywhere. And they think meditation is a doing rather than realizing it's a relinquishment of doing, even internally. But this does not mean sleep. In ordinary life, the Relinquishment of doing is usually associated with the onset of sleep. Everybody stops doing when they finally drop off to sleep. Well, they're still dreaming, so they're still doing. But then they go into periodically into dreamless sleep, and that's the end of all doing. But here that you consciously realize the being state as your essential self. And another reason why people don't. For many people, meditation works a little bit, but a brick barrier is also the belief that there is something to achieve when you meditate. But true meditation is not an achievement, but a discovery. Now, what's the difference between an achievement and a discovery? An achievement is something that you. You do and you make it happen and you create it. Discovery means there's something that's already there. You don't create it. You don't contribute to that. You discover a new continent, you discover a new planet. You don't achieve a new planet. It's already there, but you didn't know it was there. So this dimension of consciousness is already there in everyone. The only thing is they are so hypnotized by the paintings on the canvas, which are your sense perceptions, your thoughts, your emotions, that they are never aware of the canvas itself as the essence of the painting. That's all. So it's just, one could say, a redirecting of your attention. Normally, your attention is in sense perceptions and thoughts. In the Bhagavad Gita scripture, it has this image of wild horses that are dragging along the carriage, which are the sense perceptions that pull your attention continuously outward like wild horses, and you can't stop them. Now, that was a long, long time ago. Now that hasn't changed. But something has changed in the meantime since that was written. The mind, the thinking function, has become magnified and amplified since then. So the real wild horses, much wilder than the senses, which draw your attention. Something that draws your attention much more powerfully is your thoughts. Because humans, contemporary humans, are burdened with incessant bombardment of thinking. Dreadful state.