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Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises for Living the
Liberated Life by Eckhart Tolle
EXCERPT from Chapter One Being and Enlightenment
There
is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life
that are subject to birth and death. Many people use the word God to
describe it; I often call it Being. The word Being explains nothing,
but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open
concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity.
It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim
exclusive possession of Being. It is your very presence, and it is
immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence. So
it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
BEING IS NOT ONLY BEYOND BUT ALSO DEEP WITHIN every form as its
innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is
accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But
don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You
can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when
your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt,
but it can never be understood mentally.
To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment. The
word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman
accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply
your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of
connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something
that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater
than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The
inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of
separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then
perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated
fragment. Fear arises, and conflicts within and without become the
norm.
The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of
your connectedness is identification with your mind, which causes
thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a
dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody
is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental
noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is
inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that
casts a shadow of fear and suffering.
Identification with your
mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words,
judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes
between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman,
between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of
thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that
there is you and a totally separate "other." You then forget the
essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and
separate forms, you are one with all that is.
The mind is a
superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes
very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you
use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.
This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the
delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself.
THE
BEGINNING OF FREEDOM is the realization that you are not the possessing
entity - the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity.
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of
consciousness becomes activated.
You then begin to realize
that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought
is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all
the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner
peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
Freeing Yourself from Your Mind The
good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the
only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. START
LISTENING TO THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD as often as you can. Pay particular
attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old audiotapes that
have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is
what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying:
Listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
When
you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do
not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would
mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door.
You'll soon realize: There is the voice, and here I am listening to it,
watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is
not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So when you
listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of
yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of
consciousness has come in.
AS YOU LISTEN TO THE THOUGHT, you
feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the
thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and
quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through
identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary
and compulsive thinking.
When a thought subsides, you
experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind."
At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually
they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain
stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural
state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the
mind.
With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will
deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a
subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.
In
this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake
than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also
raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life to
the physical body. As you go more deeply into this realm of
no-mind, as it is sometimes called in the East, you realize the state
of pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with
such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your
physical body, as well as the whole external world become relatively
insignificant in comparison to it. And yet this is not a selfish but a
selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as
"your self." That presence is essentially you and at the same time
inconceivably greater than you.
INSTEAD OF "WATCHING THE
THINKER," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by
directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become
intensely conscious of the present moment.
This is a deeply
satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from
mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert
and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
IN
YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE, you can practice this by taking any routine
activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your
fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example,
every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of
work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your
breathing. Be totally present. Or when you wash your hands, pay
attention to all the sense perceptions associated with the activity:
the sound and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent
of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after you
close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the flow of your
breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.
There
is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this
practice: the degree of peace that you feel within. The single
most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: Learn to
disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream
of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day
you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would
smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the
content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not
depend on it.
Enlightenment: Rising Above Thought As you
grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal
and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It
consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant
thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but
when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious
identification with the mind.
To the ego, the present moment
hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This
total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode
the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the
past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects
itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek
some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when
this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at
peace." Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present,
it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely
because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the
present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the
mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is
how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation.
But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
Enlightenment means rising above thought. In the enlightened state, you
still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused
and effective way than before. You use it mostly for practical
purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and
there is inner stillness. When you do use your mind, and particularly
when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or
so between thought and stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is
consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think
creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power.
Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster
realm of consciousness quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.
Emotion: The Body's Reaction to Your Mind Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It
includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional
reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body
meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say a
reflection of your mind in the body. The more you are identified
with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and
interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the
watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will
be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your
emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience
them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. If
you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention
on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This
will also put you in touch with your emotions. If you really want
to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection,
so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an
apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the
emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but
the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. You may not
yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as
thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion,
and of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way
is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought, which I
described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in
your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is
primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there
without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are
the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness.
MAKE
IT A HABIT TO ASK YOURSELF: What's going on inside me at this moment?
That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze,
just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the
emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more
deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into
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