Eckhart Tolle on Being “Conscious Without Thought”

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.

Dogmas – religious, political, scientific – arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know.”

Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness, however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.

What is this basic delusion? Identification with thought.

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Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought.

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The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

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The mind exists in a state of “not enough” and so is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its humger is not being satisfied.

When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind’s humger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or – and this is not uncommon – transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting food.

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

You discover that a “bored person” is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours,” not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

Nothing that comes and goes is you.

“I am bored.” Who knows this?

“I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this?

You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

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Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

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Thinking that is not rooted in awareness becomes self-serving and dysfunctional. Cleverness devoid of wisdom is extremely dangerous and destructive. That is the current state of most of humanity. The amplification of thought as science and technology, although intrinsically neither good nor bad, has also become destructive because so often the thinking out of which it comes has no roots in awareness.

The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn’t mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.

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Feel the energy of your inner body. Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases. Feel it in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest. Feel the life that you are, the life that animates the body.

The body then becomes a doorway, so to speak, into a deeper sense of aliveness underneath the fluctuating emotions and underneath your thinking.

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There is an aliveness in you that you can feel with your entire Being, not just in your head. Every cell is alive in that presence in which you don’t need to think. Yet, in that state, if thought is required for some practical purpose, it is there. The mind can still operate, and it operates beautifully when the greater intelligence that you are uses it and expresses itelf through it.

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You may have overlooked that brief periods in which you are “conscious without thought” are already occuring naturally and spontaneously in your life. You may be engaged in some manual activity, or walking across the room, or waiting at the airline counter, and be so completely present that the usual mental static of thought subsides and is replaced by an aware presence. Or you may find yourself looking at the sky or listening to someone without any iner mental commentary. Your perceptions become crystal clear, unclouded by thought.

To the mind, all this is not significant, because it has “more important” things to think about. It is also not memorable, and that’s why you may have overlooked that it is already happening.

The truth is that it is the most significant thing that can happen to you. It is the beginning of a shift from thinking to aware presence.

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Become at ease with the state of “not knowing.” This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.

– Eckhart Tolle
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks
Hodder & Stoughton, 2003
pp. 17-23

NEXT:
To Be Still

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Season of Listening
• Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
• Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond the Thinking Mind
• 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
• 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 1: The Center for Reflection and Renewal at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, MN. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)
Image 2: Matt Allen.