This is a YouTube video titled "You’re Not a Person, You’re Presence | 20 Minute Meditation with Eckhart Tolle" created in January 2023. The content features Eckhart Tolle leading a guided meditation and teaching session focused on transcending the personal self to experience presence, stillness, and timeless awareness. The talk explores themes of ego, reactivity, and spiritual awakening, aiming to help viewers connect with a deeper state of consciousness beyond the individual persona.
Welcome to our live meditation. Last month we had our live meditation from Amsterdam. I was still on the Europe Channel, and we used a webcam rather than a bigger camera, as we used to do. And then I realized, and many of you realized, that our meditation, or teaching, whatever it is, actually works better with a little webcam than it does with a bigger camera. It may have something to do with the fact that I'm very close to this little webcam. And there is a deeper sense of connectedness. So we can share this state of consciousness, presence. And we're using the medium, the technology, how it works. I don't know that there's a transmission of presence, and that's why we're here, to enter that shared state of consciousness, the dimension of inner space, stillness, presence, whatever you want to call it. And while we are in that shared space, inner space, ultimately, who you are as a person is of little or no importance. Who I am as a person is of no importance, at least while we're here. And then hopefully that will have some effect on the rest of your life when you go about your business. So that the me, the person, loses its overriding importance. Your life, it's still there, but it's no longer what dominates your life. So it's really transcending the person. And being here together can give you an intensified experience of the shift from being primarily a person to being primarily a presence. I don't speak to you as a person. My mind is used as a tool through which presence speaks. That's why I have a little book called Stillness Speaks. Seems almost paradoxical. This entire teaching, if you even want to call it that, is not. Does not come from a person. It only happens because the person got out of the way, became transparent, subsided, and so something deeper was able to come through into this dimension. That's your destiny and purpose also. So to. To be the presence consciously, to experience yourself as. As that underlying presence is liberating, it frees you from the density of being only that person. Knowing yourself only as that personal self. Being a self in the Buddhist sense, which is ultimately a delusion, did delude it. What emerges is, in Buddhist terms, you might say the no self, which is not something. It's not an object. It has no form. Or in Hindu terms, the transcendent self emerges, the formless self, not the me anymore. And it's timeless. There's no past and future to it. And so this is recognizing yourself as essentially timeless. Timeless awareness, timeless consciousness. So when you look at me, you're not looking at A person, but you're connecting with yourself. So the depth of who you are is reflected back to you. That's all it. When you go back into your daily life, there may be times when the person reasserts itself completely. So you lose yourself again in the person. And then you wake up again and some presence comes back. There may also be times when you are primarily the presence. That's wonderful is that happens more and more in your life. With that comes an openness in non judgment, the judgmental mind subsides and a real sense of connectedness, or rather oneness with other beings, human beings on the life forms. And so that means the way in which you experience your so called life, the way in which you experience the world, people, situations, events, that changes the reactive person, the reactive me is no longer running the show. And where before there was a reactive judgmental person, there is now a deep benevolent presence. When you go on the Internet and read what people have to say about this or that, most of all that is the reactive person. And there are millions of people who are angry and upset and they can energize other people who are equally unconscious. And when you begin to notice in your daily life when things happened, things went wrong, people didn't do what they were supposed to do, which happens a lot. And you begin to notice where before there was an immediate reaction, an immediate complaint, an immediate judgment. And now when something happens like that, there's a non reaction. There's just an aware space that in that space, here's the situation, there's the person, and that's what is. And that's wonderfully liberating when you don't need to react all the time. You can see how very unconscious people love their reactivity. You can't take it away from them. They have to arrive at a point point where they realize that they are causing themselves and others suffering. Until a human being arrives at that point, they don't want to let go of their reactivity. The ego loves it. So you have to see how it makes your life difficult. You have to experience the suffering that it creates to a sufficient degree so that you reach that point of readiness. Because this is really seeing that 90% of the suffering in your life is created by the conditioned mind, by your mind. And it's good to arrive at a point where he said, I can't stand it anymore, I can't take this anymore anymore. But at that point, some people still think that what they can't take anymore is to do with whatever happens around them. But really. It's to do with their mind. It.
