Friday, February 23, 2024

Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond the Thinking Mind


My “season of listening” continues.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one writer whose words I’m using as a guide throughout this season is Eckhart Tolle who in his book Stillness Speaks, writes the following.

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

In you, as in each human, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness. In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.

Finding that dimension frees you and the world from the suffering you inflict on yourself and others when the mind-made “little me” is all you know and runs your life. Love, joy, creative expansion, and lasting inner peace cannot come into your life except through that unconditioned dimension of consciousness.

If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own mental-emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen – the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds.

How easy it is for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons. . . . The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don’t realize that it is only a small part of the consciousness that you are.

Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention. Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exists in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.

Eckhart Tolle
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks
Hodder & Stoughton, 2003
pp. 13-16


NEXT:
Eckhart Tolle on Being
“Conscious Without Thought”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
A Season of Listening
Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
Time to Go Inwards
A Prayer of Anchoring
Today I Will Be Still
Cultivating Stillness
Inner Peace
A Sacred Pause
Aligning With the Living Light
Mystical Participation
I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
Stepping Out of Time and Resting Your Mind
In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
Threshold Musings
Brigit Anna McNeill on Hearing the Wild and Natural Call to Go Inwards
Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”
To Dream, to Feel, to Listen
The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
The Source is Within You
Forever Oneness
In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible

Image: The Center for Reflection and Renewal at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, MN. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)


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