Peace Meditation fr/Eckhart Tolle

With all the craziness of modern life, it is well to take a few moments off for meditation.  Check this out:

 

Eckhart Tolle’s Meditation For Finding Inner Peace

Eckhart Tolle TV is dedicated to providing you with the resources to put his teachings into practice everyday to transform your life, which ultimately transforms the world. In his GPS Guide below, Eckhart Tolle shows you how to find inner peace through meditation.

lzf via Getty Images

Eckhart Tolle’s profound, yet simple teachings reveal a path to inner peace and true happiness. These teachings have helped countless people throughout the world awaken to a vibrant joy and greater fulfillment in their daily lives.

This GPS Guide was inspired by Meditation on Eckhart Tolle TV, which features Eckhart Tolle and his partner, Kim Eng’s teachings about meditation and practices to help bring awareness to the present moment.

“The fact that breath has no form is one of the reasons why breath awareness is an extremely effective way of bringing space into your life, of generating consciousness,” Eckhart explained. “It is an excellent meditation object precisely because it is not an object, has no shape or form.”

Take a look at Eckhart Tolle’s guide on meditation and finding inner peace below. 

eckhart video 1

Eckhart Tolle on Meditation
In this video, Eckhart talks about how our minds may have ideas about the ideal environment for meditation, quiet and tranquil, conducive to relaxation. He points out that whatever sounds or disturbances we encounter during our meditation are part of the experience.

eckhart video 1

A Guided Meditation With Kim Eng
In this video, Kim guides us through a meditation to help us stay present, rooted in our bodies, while we notice our thoughts and emotions pass.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/eckhart-tolle-meditation_55ccb7efe4b0cacb8d3322d1?utm_hp_ref=gps-for-the-soul

Eckhart Tolle on Unconsicousness

Ordinary Unconsciousness And Deep Unconsciousness

As you probably know, in sleep you constantly move between the phases of dreamless sleep and the dream state. Similarly, in wakefulness most people only shift between ordinary unconsciousness and deep unconsciousness.

What I call ordinary unconsciousness means being identified with your thought processes and emotions, your reactions, desires, and aversions. It is most people’s normal state. In that state, you are run by the egoic mind, and you are unaware of Being. It is a state not of acute pain or unhappiness but of an almost continuous low level of unease, discontent, boredom, or nervousness — a kind of background static. You may not realize this because it is so much a part of “normal” living, just as you are not aware of a continuous low background noise, such as the hum of an air conditioner, until it stops. When it suddenly does stop, there is a sense of relief. Many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, or even shopping as anesthetics in an unconscious attempt to remove the basic unease. When this happens, an activity that might be very enjoyable if used in moderation becomes imbued with a compulsive or addictive quality, and all that is ever achieved through it is extremely short-lived symptom relief.

The unease of ordinary unconsciousness turns into the pain of deep unconsciousness — a state of more acute and more obvious suffering or unhappiness — when things “go wrong,” when the ego is threatened or there is a major challenge, threat, or loss, real or imagined, in your life situation or conflict in a relationship. It is an intensified version of ordinary unconsciousness, different from it not in kind but in degree. In ordinary unconsciousness, habitual resistance to or denial of what is creates the unease and discontent that most people accept as normal living. When this resistance becomes intensified through some challenge or threat to the ego, it brings up intense negativity such as anger, acute fear, aggression, depression, and so on. Deep unconsciousness often means that the pain-body has been triggered and that you have become identified with it. Physical violence would be impossible without deep unconsciousness. It can also occur easily whenever and wherever a crowd of people or even an entire nation generates a negative collective energy field.

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life’s challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.

If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won’t be able to stay conscious when something “goes wrong” or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the way in which you deal with them will show you and others where you are at as far as your state of consciousness is concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or what visions you see.

So it is essential to bring more consciousness into your life in ordinary situations when everything is going relatively smoothly. In this way, you grow in presence power. It generates an energy field in you and around you of a high vibrational frequency. No unconsciousness, no negativity, no discord or violence can enter that field and survive, just as darkness cannot survive in the presence of light.

from:    http://spiritlibrary.com/eckhart-tolle/ordinary-unconsciousness-and-deep-unconsciousness

Video: Eckhart Tolle w/Cesar Millan

 

Interesting and fun interview between Cesar Millan and Eckhart Tolle.  Cesar Millan made a curious comment:  “Animals don’t fight balance.”  Curious because what is unspoken is the assertion that humans do.  Perhaps it is a good idea to consider what it means to be in balance and to take some time to watch the critters around us as they attempt to get into balance.

Here is the link to Part 1 of the interview.  You can get the other parts from there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuOVBgypTyQ&feature=related

 

Enjoy!

 

Eckhart Tolle on Creativity

Eckhart on Creativity

Eckhart Tolle
a message from Eckhart Tolle
Friday, 18 November, 2011

There’s a particular dimension where creativity arises.  It’s a little bit like the wick burning the flame, and its sustenance is the oil – it’s in an oil lamp, and you are the flame.  All the analogies, by the way, are very deficient, but it’s just a distant approximation to get you into a sense of what that place is.  So you are the flame, and you feel your way into the very source – down the wick into where the oil is, inside yourself.  That’s the place, the source, so if anything is new, creative, then it has a fragrance of the source.

Somehow, humans, even humans who are still very much identified with their mind, many of them are touched by when they see or hear or whatever – come into contact with – something that came out of that deeper level, whether it’s a work of art, or a piece of music, or it could just be somebody talking.  And the words come from that deeper level.  It could just be somebody who has a good sense of humor – even that is already a form of creativity.  Spontaneous humor is to suddenly see something that one wouldn’t normally see – a connection between two seemingly unconnected things, and suddenly you connect them and everybody laughs.  Some people have that. Some people have one small area in which they can be creative, and that can be enough to provide you with fulfillment and an income, for the rest of your life – and to contribute that gift to others.

Great stand up comedians, for example, have that gift.  Of course, not everything they say is spontaneous, but when they prepare their stuff, they have to be creative.  Now I don’t know if anybody here has tried to be a standup comedian, but it’s difficult.  Many people try.  It’s hard to be funny.  But some have it, and it’s amazing – those few that have that gift.  And there too, the sense of humor is spontaneously something arises, and there it comes.  It’s being in touch with that.  It’s wonderful to be able to be in touch with that, and feel the power that flows from there, out into this world.  Now for that, of course you need some kind of vehicle, because the power needs to flow into some kind of form.

You can touch that place also, within, and it may not flow into creativity, because you have not developed a vehicle for it.  The very same power that gives rise to creativity can also manifest itself in different ways that we would not call creativity.  It could be a healing power that comes into effect the moment you enter into relationships with others.  Healing in a wider sense, not just physical healing.  You will not suddenly become a great musician if you have never touched an instrument, just because you touch that place within yourself.  It’s not going to manifest as a great scientific discovery in my case, because the vehicle is not prepared for that.  My mind is not prepared for that.  It doesn’t even work that way.  So for me to expect to come up with the Unified Field Theory that Einstein didn’t come up with – he tried after the theory of relativity, he tried for the rest of his life to come up with that – I am not going to come up with that.  It’s very unlikely.  The vehicle has not been prepared. I am not going to be a great pianist, because I don’t know how to play the piano.  So no matter how deeply I go within, it’s not going to flow into that.  You need to prepare the vehicle for creativity.

More important than that is the place – to be able to go within to that place of vibrantly alive stillness, where creativity arises.  And you can go in there, and if there’s no vehicle, it will not express itself in any form of creativity, not any conventional form of creativity.  But it may actually express itself in different ways.  I just mentioned one, which is an outflow in human interactions – and outflow of – very hard to put a word to it, but you can sense it, when you meet a person who is present in the interaction.  It’s a different energy frequency that operates.  And that is healing.  It is so formless that it does not require a previously prepared vehicle.  You can just be.  And you emanate Being.

© copyright 2008-2011. Eckhart Tolle . All rights reserved. http://www.eckharttolle.com/

Eckhart Tolle on The Dark Night of the Soul

Eckhart on the Dark Night of the Soul

Eckhart Tolle
a message from Eckhart Tolle
Friday, 7 October, 2011

Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul?  Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.  Can you address this subject?

The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time.  Yes, I have also experienced it.  It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.  The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression.  Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything.  Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level.  The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies.  Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before.  Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it.  So that results in a dark place.  But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness.  Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain.  Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind.  A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer.  It’s a kind of re-birth.  The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die.  What dies is the egoic sense of self.  Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity.  Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening.  Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”.   What is the purpose of a lesson like that?  It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul.  It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”.  With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”.  You wipe the board clean.  In the dark night of the soul it collapses.

You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.  Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.  Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning.  It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything.  That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it.  It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence.  You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness.  Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

© copyright 2008-2011. Eckhart Tolle . All rights reserved. http://www.eckharttolle.com/