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)