Eckhart Tolle: What do you believe in?
Eckhart Tolle: What do you believe in?
Deepening the Realization of Being
This clip is taken from a special edition of Eckhart Answers – 10 profound inquiries into the nature of fear, the mind, faith, aliveness and more.
This preview clip is pulled from the Question & Answer session entitled:
“What do you believe in?”
Overview: Eckhart differentiates between knowledge, faith, belief, and more.
Photography by Kevin Steele
To the uninitiated, Eckhart Tolle might be mistaken for a nature photographer. His persona—a soft German-accented voice, a boyish visage, his love of vests—doesn’t exactly scream, “guru!” Yet Tolle is one of the world’s most popular spiritual teachers and a literary powerhouse whose best-selling books The Power of Now and A New Earth have influenced millions.
Born in Germany, educated at the universities of London and Cambridge, and now a resident of Vancouver, Canada, Tolle writes and lectures on the evolution of human consciousness. His work synthesizes many world views and spiritual teachings, including those of Buddhism, the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, and the German mystic Bo Yin Ra—all delivered with wry, gentle insights.
Tolle has embraced new technology to connect with others, airing videos and live feeds of his lectures and guided meditations on his web channel, Eckhart Tolle TV. In June, he plans to be in San Francisco, where he’ll record new material to share. S&H Editor-in-Chief Karen Bouris spoke with Tolle recently about how we can best deal with daily human challenges—both personal and collective—and transform them into opportunities.
Why are people so focused on this notion of enlightenment?
If people are focused on enlightenment—or whatever word they are using to describe self-realization or awakening—at least they’ve realized that the answer does not lie in external things. They have realized that the answer lies within rather than in obtaining more possessions, or achieving this or that, or changing the world out there. So it’s a good thing. It’s a transitional stage from the normal state of consciousness, where all the solutions and problems are seen as external, to realizing that whatever we experience as our external reality is a reflection of our inner state of consciousness.
It’s true that the people who are looking for enlightenment are a minority. In ordinary human existence, people want to find the ideal partner, acquire more things, gain power, or acquire a better body. And in ordinary consciousness, you look to those things for salvation, fulfillment, and happiness. As you’re beginning to awaken, you realize it’s not there. But even for those who are beginning to awaken, the old mind pattern—the deeply ingrained pattern that always looks to the future for fulfillment and salvation—still tends to operate.
So, even when we are “searching,” we are still looking toward the future?
Yes. This mind pattern assumes that the future is going to be more important than the present. It ignores the present moment, does not honor it, and does not give it its due. I have met people who have been spiritual seekers for 20 years, have read hundreds of books, attended workshops, gone to ashrams in India—and they are getting frustrated, asking, “When am I going to get it? When am I going to get enlightened?”
The actual experience of awakening can only be in the present moment. The future does not exist, because nobody has ever experienced it. You can only ever experience a present moment. The future is a mental projection that you are having in the present moment. I’m not talking about the practical aspects of the future, like booking a flight or planning what you want to do this year, but the psychological future. That’s where we can get trapped. If you are always focused on the future, you miss the reality of life, which is the present moment.
When people get very old, there isn’t much future left, so they tend to focus mainly on the past. But they are still not in the present moment. Life is now.
How do you catch yourself from drifting into the past or the future, maybe even avoiding the present moment?
Whenever you get drawn back into the mind and into the future, you’ll notice it because usually you don’t feel so good anymore. You become upset, discontented, irritated, depressed. It means you lost the present moment, you lost the vertical dimension, and you lost awareness of yourself as consciousness. [You’re back to being] a mind-created person with this limited personal history and a mind-created “little me,” the ego. It’s never satisfied for long.
You can only break through to a deeper level of one’s self in the vertical dimension of the present moment. That’s regardless of the circumstances of your life. So many people say, “Oh, if I had more free time, if I didn’t have to worry about my finances, or I didn’t have this or
that, I could dedicate all my life to spiritual awakening. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Yes, the idea of the monk sitting peacefully on the mountaintop.
It would not be great, because it’s through the very challenges of daily life that you become more motivated to awaken. You can actually use whatever the circumstances are, and instead of working against them, see if you can align yourself with the present moment internally.
When people talk of being present, though, there is this idea they’ll only encounter good, positive feelings. Can you talk about observing presence, as you call it, in the face of negative feelings or situations?
It’s important to bring awareness into whatever arises in the present moment. Negative feelings arise, and “negative” is not a moral judgment; it just means it doesn’t feel good.
The difference between being aware and being unaware of the negative feelings is that when there’s a lack of awareness, then you get completely taken over by those negative feelings. There’s no inner space anymore, and you think, say, and do things that are controlled by that negative energy inside you.
Often it happens that people get taken over by that temporarily, and then when they become a little bit more conscious again, they say, “Oh, how could I have done that?” or, “How could I have said that?”
So the difference is, when the same thing happens again and you become irritated, you become angry, whatever it is—reactive in some way—sad or depressed, there’s an awareness that this is happening to you. You have the observing presence in the background that’s more who you are rather than the emotion. You are still there as it happens.
Can you give an example of an observing presence?
Let’s say you’re in a long line at the supermarket or the airport. The line isn’t moving and you’re getting irritated and angry. If you’re present with it, you may realize it’s not the line that’s causing you to be angry. It’s your mind, whatever your mind is telling you. And the emotions are your body’s reactions to your thoughts about the situation. That’s a very important realization, because now an element of choice comes in. You see that it just makes your life unpleasant to be feeling those things—the irritation and anger serve no purpose. It doesn’t change the situation. And now you have the choice of letting go of those thoughts, to experiment to see what the situation is like when you don’t attach these thoughts to it. You’re in the same situation, totally free of negativity.
What about dealing with other people? Isn’t that harder?
You have a lot of power and freedom to become free internally from external conditions. That includes other people and whatever they do and how they behave. They no longer have the power to determine your inner state of consciousness.
If you meet a person who’s rude to you, for example, your thoughts automatically are, You shouldn’t behave like that! But of course, these thoughts conflict with reality, because the person is behaving like that. [When you are observing,] you’re able to let go of those thoughts. You’ve realized the fallacy of internally arguing with what is. And you can simply be with what is in any given situation.
How should we look at global challenges—things like climate change—from this place of awareness? Is it a response of my ego, for example, to think that I have a responsibility to help save the planet?
Personal challenges can sometimes be quite big, whether they’re challenges with health, finances, or relationships. Yet sometimes those personal ones are actually connected to the larger challenges in the collective.
We need to save the planet, of course. Yes, it’s true that we need to save the planet. But let’s not fall into the erroneous thinking that all the solutions are out there somewhere. Because most of the problems—violence, pollution, war, terrorism—all those things have their origin in human consciousness or unconsciousness. So your primary responsibility is not doing anything outside of you; your primary responsibility is your own state of consciousness. And once that is achieved, then whatever you do and whomever you come into contact with, and even many people you don’t come into direct contact with, get affected by your state
of consciousness.
If you don’t take responsibility for your state of consciousness, and you believe all the solutions are out there, then you fall into errors like they did with communism, for example. The initial motivation for communism was actually idealistic; it was good. The proponents said, “There’s so much injustice in the world—there are people who are exploiting millions of others,” which was true. They wanted to create a society that was more just and fair and do away with personal property. It all sounded wonderful, but what they had neglected was there was no change in their state of consciousness. And once they got into power, they re-created the same evils. What they ended up with was as bad as, if not worse than, what they had fought against. So many revolutions have ended up like that. Initially people had good intentions, but good intentions are not enough if you bring your old state of consciousness to them.
So if you have awareness, then you can begin to engage in “awakened doing”?
Yes. Awakened doing is when you don’t create suffering anymore for others—or for yourself—by your own actions. It also implies that your primary intention, the focus of your attention, is on the “doing” in the present moment, rather than the result that you want to achieve through it. Joy flows into what you do, rather than stress. Stressful energy arises when you think some future moment is more important than the present moment, and the doing becomes only a means to an end. Many people look always to the end of the workday, or the end of the week, or the next vacation or a better job. Millions of people live in almost continual stress because they are not aligned with the present moment.
In some of your books, you mention the imbalance between the male and the female energy. Can you talk more about this?
Yes. Male energy doesn’t necessarily mean men, and female energy doesn’t necessarily mean confined to women. But male energy resonates more with doing, and the female energy resonates more with being. The world is out of balance because it is focused primarily on the doing, and there is a loss of the awareness of being. This is when stress and negativity arise: when people try to get things done and they no longer are centered within that aware space of being. You cannot feel your being anymore; you cannot feel the consciousness behind all the doing. So many women these days have internalized the imbalance and are also out of touch with being more focused on doing.
Both society as a whole and individual humans need to find some kind of inner balance between the ability to be still and the ability to do. Personally, I’m more in the feminine realm than in the male realm. I’m much more drawn to being than doing. Every human needs to look within to find some kind of balance. In the famous symbol of the yin and yang, the two sides are embracing each other. But in the middle of the white side there is a black spot, and in the middle of the black side there is a white spot. Even within the stillness, there needs to be the dynamic quality of doing so that you don’t go to sleep. And when you’re doing, there needs to be a stillness at the center. Otherwise you’ll lose yourself in the doing.
It’s sounds so simple, the idea of balancing presence and stillness. So why does it feel hard?
The difficulty is the shift from the old consciousness to the new, because the old consciousness still has a momentum behind it. When we step out of the old consciousness, yes, the transition may be difficult, but the more we embody and live through the new consciousness, life actually gets easier for us. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more challenges; the challenges will continue to come, but you’ll find you’re more capable of meeting the challenges when you aren’t creating the negativity around them.
One Perfect Sentence
“You may remember the book The Road Less Traveled. The first sentence of that book is ‘Life is difficult.’ I think it’s the best beginning of any book I’ve read,” says Tolle, referring to the 1978 classic by M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who blended theology and science in the study of human behavior. “He says once you accept the fact that life is difficult, it’s not really difficult anymore. It’s only when you think it shouldn’t be, that it makes it very hard. We’re here, we’re meant to be challenged by life, and that is part of the how consciousness evolves.”
Tolle asks us to imagine a world where we could all choose our own life circumstances. “Everyone would say, ‘I want love. I want to have absolute financial security. I would like to have perfect health. I would like to have a wonderful and happy relationship with no conflict, children who are no problem. A good job, a fulfilling job.’” But if you actually had that ideal life, he says, “it would not contribute to your awakening. It’s the very things that we don’t want that provide the motivation for becoming more conscious.”
Karen Bouris
Eckhart explores the powerful addiction to thinking, offering a handful of ways to put a stop to thoughts and choose presence instead.
Eckhart Tolle Reveals How to Silence Voices in Your Head
When we announced on Facebook that Eckhart Tolle and Oprah were sitting down once again, questions for Eckhart began pouring in. Watch as he answers two of your most burning questions: How do you calm the voice in your head, and how can you clear your mind of bad memories?
Eckhart Tolle – Don’t take your thoughts too seriously
As part of The Chopra Center’s “Seduction of Spirit” retreat at La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., on April 24, 2013, EckhartTolleTV hosted a live-streaming event called “A Conversation with Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle.”
Both authors discussed consciousness, the present moment, discovering silence and more to an audience of more than 1,400 locally in California, and thousands more over the Internet.
Eckhart Tolle took the stage first and asked everyone to join him in the present moment rather than be absorbed by their thinking, which by itself is a shift in consciousness, he explained. An easy way to enter the present moment is through sense perceptions – noticing whatever a person can see and hear at the moment. A huge amount of our attention is “continuously absorbed by thinking,” and much of what we think is not relevant to anything important, and is negative, said Tolle.
“Every thought has a seductive quality, and it wants to draw you in,” he said. “But if you follow each thought you are at the mercy of what is in your mind.”
Living this way, consciousness is actually being absorbed by the mind. All the things that make life worth living – beauty and joy – actually involve less thinking.
“For joy to come into your life – a moment of joy – you might not realize it, but at that moment there is a space that opens up inside you where you are not thinking,” Tolle explained. “To recognize beauty anywhere, the thinking mind needs to subside and a little bit of space opens up … you might not recognize it, but you are not thinking. If you are thinking, you are not really seeing it. To really see it, there has to be a moment of alert presence where thinking subsides.”
This moment or gap in thinking is the presence or consciousness that resides within us all. This is the space that does not judge another human being, and where we can feel empathy and compassion, said Tolle. However, many people are so trapped by their minds, they live in a “totally conceptualized universe where every human being they meet, they judge, and they take entire groups of humans and judge them – they dehumanize them – and this is how violence can happen,” he said.
Recognizing Consciousness
Most people identify themselves based on images and thoughts in their mind, which have been taken from what they are told by others – their mother, father, siblings, environment and culture. They take this self-image on as their “story,” and it becomes the foundation for their sense of identity.
They often believe in order to feel better about themselves and their place in the world, they need to collect more possessions, or find the right relationship. They believe these things will bring them peace and happiness, but it is never enough.
“We are never satisfied for long and always things will go wrong,” Tolle said. You will never be satisfied for very long if you don’t know who you are and you try to enhance the mind-made sense of self.”
By identifying with the mind, we are only focusing on half of who we are – they physical and physiological form. “That is how most people live their lives, and they don’t know what they are missing,” Tolle told the audience.
While those who find themselves on a spiritual path understand there is a state of enlightenment, they often mistake it for something that needs to be reached or achieved. The truth is, this state, which Tolle called “the transcendent dimension” is who we really are and is always present. The reason people don’t recognize its presence is because they are tied up in the movement of thought and emotions in the mind.
‘Those things absorb your attention, and there is something very vital that you overlook, and that is something that without which you couldn’t even think. There would be no thought, and there would be no emotions. That something is presence – the formless presence of consciousness itself, which is always there if you stop thinking for three seconds,” Tolle explained.
While meditation helps us get there, we can be aware of this state at any moment. This is our other half known as inner presence, he said. Using the room where the event was taking place as an analogy, he compared the people and the furniture or chairs to the thoughts in our mind, and the space holding the people and furniture as the essence representing consciousness.
“Without the space, the room means nothing. It couldn’t even exist,” he said explaining the same is true within us. “There is a spaciousness within you that is continuously missed because you are so interested in the furniture in your head.”
Humanity is beginning to enter into an evolutionary shift where thinking is transcended, said Tolle. We are moving away from identifying ourselves as a thought-based entity and moving toward recognizing ourselves as presence-based entities.
“If you derive your sense of identity from the presence within you, and more and more you become comfortable with spaces of not thinking, you can walk from one building to another, or from the building to your car and just be in the state of alert presence. You see beauty everywhere, and you don’t need to label anything.”
One of the great spiritual practices is the practice of not labeling anything and not interpreting what we perceive. This can be done anywhere, said Tolle, recommending we try it the next time we find ourselves waiting at a checkout, traffic light or airport.
“Instead of waiting, invite the state of alertness in and realize there is nothing wrong with waiting. You either stand, sit or lie somewhere. Does it really matter where you stand, sit or lie?” he asked the audience. “You can use your waiting periods – instead of complaining – to just be present. Enter the field of presence that you are and at that moment you become a spiritual master.”
Who is Looking?
Following Tolle, Chopra took the stage and immediately picked up where he left off. “Right at this moment, as you are about to listen to me, just turn your attention to who is listening. You are looking at me. Turn your attention to who is looking. That is you. That has always existed,” he said to the audience.
That consciousness or “the one who is listening” has been with us all along, and is essentially timeless, he explained. “Time is just the movement of thought that creates a subject and object split. Transcendence is simply going beyond the subject object split – which is an artificial split, and the cause of every single problem that we know.”
Coming from the Vedanta tradition, known as Hindu philosophy, Chopra spoke of the five kleshas known as the cause of suffering. These are:
1. Not knowing who you are
2. The addiction and craving for permanence in a world that is inherently impermanent
3. The fear of impermanence
4.. Identifying with your self-image – all the labels, evaluations, judgments, ideas and concepts collected since birth – instead of your true self
5. The fear of death, which is also the fear of the unknown.
In the real world – the world of consciousness – there are not objects, said Chopra. Objects exist through perception. Another way of putting it is to say, “there are no nouns, only verbs,” he explained. “The universe is a verb. It’s an activity. It never stops.”
All suffering comes from nouns – or things – that don’t really exist, he told the audience. When looking at the five kleshas, or causes of suffering, all of them are contained in the first one – not knowing who we really are, which is essentially consciousness.
“You can’t find this presence by looking for it because it’s the one that is looking. You can’t find consciousness by looking for it because consciousness is the one that is looking,” Chopra explained.
Quoting Rumi, he said “who am I in the middle of all this though traffic.” He explained many of us identify with the traffic instead of the presence around it. We are always looking outside of ourselves for happiness – be it the right person, the right job, winning the lottery, perfect health – and all of this is thought.
“Before the thought arises you are already happy and after the though subsides you are exactly where you started from,” he noted. “Happiness or joy is the starting point, and it’s also the ending point.”
Chopra spoke about an acronym SIFT created by Dan Siegel, which stands for Sensation, Image, Feeling and Thought. These things occur within consciousness, but consciousness is always present with them.
“People ask where do I go when I die? Let me ask you a question,” he said to a person in the audience. “What did you have for lunch today?” The answer was a salad, and Chopra explained the memory came back to her through SIFT, an image, a feeling or a thought. “Where was that image before I asked you the question?”
He said traditional neuroscientists would say the image was in the brain, but they can’t answer where memory is stored at the cellular level. “Do you think if I went into your brain I could see that picture?” he asked the audience member. “So where do we go when we die? We go where the salad was before I asked you the question,” he joked. “We don’t go anywhere because we are there all the time.”
What we call the physical world – the one we experience with our five senses – is awareness within awareness, he said. If we could anchor ourselves in the “space” that Tolle spoke about prior, we can find a new and more joyful experience open to us.
“It’s your ticket to freedom,” said Chopra. “Why? Because it’s the you that never dies.”
Deepak’s Retreat
Chopra shared an experience he had at a retreat in Thailand two years ago in a monastery. Everyone there shaved their heads and eyebrows, went begging for food and shared one meal a day. The remainder of the time was spent in silence and “observing impermanence.”
“It had a dramatic effect on all of us because it threw us into presence,” he told the audience. “When we were leaving, the senior Abbott left us with two things, and I want to leave you with them.”
1.There are no boundaries in the universe. Every boundary is conceptual. In reality there are no boundaries. We create them, just like we create longitude and latitude for convenience.
2. The present moment is the only moment that never ends. Situations and circumstances around the present moment will change, but the moment won’t change because it’s timeless. It’s transcendent. It’s eternal.
“The most important moment of your life is now. The most important person in your life is the one you are with now, and the most important activity in your life is the one you are involved with now,” said Chopra. “If you do that, the unknown will become known to you. The unknown is actually known only in the present moment. Death happens only in time. Only that which is born dies; that which is never born cannot die.”
Source: Elevated Existence Magazine
Eckhart Answers Snippet: Help me stay sane during a period of joblessness.
Overview: Freedom from thought patterns open possibilities.
How do you know when higher consciousness guides you?
The Many Faces of Awakening
Tara Brach: The Invitation for Awakening
Eckhart Tolle: Awakening in the Now
Eckhart Tolle: The Awakening of Consciousness
We live in fragments
We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill him with competition; there is one part of you working, looking, independently of the other. Are you aware of this fragmentary existence in yourself? And is it possible for a brain that has broken up its own functioning, its own thinking, into fragments. Is it possible for such a brain to be aware of the whole field? Is it possible to look at the whole of consciousness completely, totally, which means to be a total human being?
Jiddu krishnamurti
Eckhart presents a timeless teaching on unblocking the obstacles to the living inner peace that is everyone’s birthright.
Born at the very heart of Greece—between Athens and Apollo’s shrine at Delphi—in the mid-40s of the first century CE, Plutarch combined an intense love of his locality and family with a cosmopolitan outlook that embraced the whole Roman Empire.
His encyclopaedic writings form a treasure trove of ancient wisdom, yet his strong religious feelings and deeply humanist temperament give them all a compelling and individual voice. Whether he is offering abstract speculation or practical ethics, fresh and arresting reflections on anger and flattery, military versus intellectual glory or the reasoning powers of animals, Plutarch’s charm and personality constantly shine through. Above all, concludes Kidd, his essays remain magnificently readable, works that ‘can still entertain, instruct, stimulate and educate us and also introduce us to one of the most attractive characters in classical literature’.
Plutarch’ Essay on Contentment is on page 208, click here to browse inside.
A fragment from The Journey Into Yourself Q&A
