Eckhart Tolle on Stillness

Ingredients:

A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach... to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs or rules of conduct... you already know... The spiritual teacher is there to uncover and reveal to you that dimension of inner depth that is also peace.

If you are looking for food for thought, you won't find it and you will miss the very essence of the teaching... which is not in the words but within yourself.

Things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much "noise". Because the thoughts came out of stillness, they have power - the power to take you back into the same stillness from which they arose. That is the essence of your Being. It is inner stillness that will... transform the world.

Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks

Directions:

Silence & Stillness

Stillness is the ground of consciousness that is your essential nature. To lose touch with it is to lose touch with yourself and to lose yourself in the world. Become aware of the breath to reconnect with it. 

Listening to outer silence awakens that awareness of inner silence that is without thought, the gap that our conditioning strives to fill with all manner of addictions. But even when there is outer "noise", we can learn from it by dropping all resistance or attachment and finding peace despite it. That is the way of nature. 

Look at a tree or a flower. Let your attention rest upon it, and just be. It will teach you stillness. Out of stillness comes a deeper intelligence and creativity. This deeper creativity is itself made of stillness, the universe and God in communion with itself. Let this stillness guide you in thought and deed through every problem.

Beyond Thought

Go beyond thought to the Christ or Buddha nature within. You are not your thoughts. Witness them arising and passing in the same way as the breath arises and dissipates. Don't take your thoughts too seriously. They are just perspectives, fragmentary visions of a unified whole. Compulsive thinking avoids what is, the here and the now.

By contrast, pure attention breaks down the barrier of separation between observer and observed, between past and future, between good and evil. Dogmas are conceptual prisons that give a false sense of security. They may be modified or replaced through time, but their underlying delusion remains: identification with thought.

We must awaken to feeling and the body is then a doorway to a deeper sense of aliveness beyond feeling and beyond thought. This involves welcoming a state of "not-knowing" which most would fear, but from this "not-knowing" a deeper non-conceptual "knowing" arises. 

A sign of identification with mind is boredom, which is hunger of the mind. We usually satisfy it, or else transform it into hunger of the body, but what if instead we recognize it, bring our awareness to this feeling and so create a peaceful space of stillness around it? Its energetic hold on us will dissipate. 

Mastery in any field is rooted in spontaneous right action that comes without thinking. It is the opposite of control. We get a taste of what it means to be alert and aware in moments of danger. Thinking stops as we fire into action. Truth goes beyond comprehension. An experience cannot be known. It can only be felt.

The Egoic Self

While the mind seeks food for thought, the ego seeks food for identity, hungry to confirm its existence and security and to continuously re-create itself in the image of its memories, likes, fears, desires and goals. The egoic self is always seeking, for complexity and for completeness. The moment we recognize that we are seeking for a future moment of completeness, we step outside of the egoic self and place our attention in the present. Resentment, reaction, prejudice: these are all by-products of ego that separate "me" from "not-me". Observe and recognize all labels of exclusion and "other" and all attempts at possession, both good and bad, including subtle possessions such as envy and guilt. By all means, set goals, but not for self-enhancement. "No self, no problem" said one Buddhist master. The goals are but signposts along the way. Life is in the journey, in the Now.

The Now

When the Now is the foundation and primary focus of your life, then your life unfolds with ease. Looking forward and looking back create undercurrents of tension which we need to release. Breathe in and feel the aliveness in the body. This anchors you in the Now. There is an alertness, a sense of sacredness in all things. A simple but radical spiritual practice is to accept whatever arises in the Now, within and without. When you say "yes" to what is, you become aligned to the power and intelligence of life itself. Many people confuse the Now with the contents of this moment. The Now is deeper than any content that arises in it. You step out of content into a spacious stillness. I am not the content of my life. I am life. I am consciousness. I am the sace in which all things happen. I am the Now. I am.

True Self

Peace is internal. It comes from recognizing who you are at the deepest level. Rearranging circumstances only brings peace to our false sense of self. This realization of true self cannot be looked forward to. It is always in the Now and you are it, not its object. The very reason why egoic identity arose is because mentally you made yourself into an object. "That's me" you say, and then you tell others and yourself your story. But you cannot make an object out of your true self. It is the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, and knowing this, you become free of dependency on phenomena and self-seeking. Things lose their heaviness and a playfulness arises, the world becomes a cosmic dance. Desire and fear add nothing and take nothing from your Being.

Surrender & Acceptance

Wherever you go, there you are. Do not label, reacting with like and dislike as this creates conflict. The reactive "no" strengthens the ego, while surrender to what is weakens it. In whatever you do, do it totally, and do it one thing at a time without resistance. This surrender to life is to identify with the depths of your Being like the depths of a lake. You may be happy or sad, but these are ripples on the surface. The background peace remains undisturbed throughout. It is not a fatalistic surrender to some interpretation of those ripples. Rather, it's a recognition that they don't matter all that much. Surrender comes when you no longer ask "Why me?" It is in the acceptance of the unacceptable, such as in the face of impending death when so many men and women throughout history have found "the peace that surpasseth all understanding". It is in accepting impossibility and unknowability that we find grace. 

It is a shift from reaction to the space around reaction, from our identification with form to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form. Whatever you accept completely will being you peace, including acceptance that you cannot accept. Let it be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP6keEPIQa0