Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness

My “season of listening” continues.

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.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

~
Stillness is your essential nature. What is stillness? The inner space or awareness in which these words are being perceived and become thoughts. Without that awareness, there would be no perception, no thoughts, no world.

You are that awareness, disguised as a person.

~
The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

Whenever there is some silence around you – listen to it. That means just notice it. Pay attention to it. Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.

See that in the moment of noticing the silence around you, you are not thinking. You are aware, but not thinking.

~
When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.

~
Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

~
When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself. You connect with it at a very deep level. You feel a oneness with whatever you perceive in and through stillness. Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.

~
Silence is helpful, but you don’t need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noice arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of stillness.

~
Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is – no matter what form it takes – you are still, you are at peace.

– Eckhart Tolle
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks
Hodder & Stoughton, 2003
pp. 3-6

NEXT:
Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond
the Thinking Mind

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Season of Listening
• 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)