You have a problem to work out. You sit with it for twenty minutes, then an hour, and by the end you are further from an answer than when you started. Thinking harder is not producing anything. Eckhart Tolle offers a method for this, and it is not what people expect from him. He does not suggest you stop thinking. He suggests you break it. Think about the thing for a few thoughts. Then step back into stillness. Three or four seconds is enough, and the length does not matter. In that gap the mind stops but awareness stays, and then you step forward into thought again. In, out, in, out. If you want to do genuinely effective thinking, he says, that is how to do it. Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes for a decision you are facing or something you are trying to create, and work in that rhythm rather than in one unbroken stream. Underneath the technique is a correction worth hearing. The goal is not to be permanently in one state or the other. At first you will slip between them, still and present one moment, entirely back in the thinking self a minute later. Over time they come together, so a spacious awareness stays in the background even while you speak, act, and think. Th
AI Generated·May contain errors
Video Summary
AI Generated
This talk explores the concept of salvation as an awakening from the limited identity of the \"historical person\" to a deeper state of awareness. By contrasting the \"surface eye\" of the ego with the \"deep eye\" of presence, the speaker explains how integrating these two perspectives can alleviate suffering and enhance cognitive and creative processes.
The last words of the Buddha before he passed away were,
work out your own salvation with diligence.
Work out your own salvation with diligence.
So this last message to the world
is to awaken to that dimension
because otherwise life is suffering.
The historical conditioned entity,
the person unconnected, unaware of its being
is condemned to experiencing suffering
and will transform, we've mentioned it before,
will transform every challenge of life into suffering.
And it will experience life as heavy,
very serious, often traumatic,
and ultimately always frustrating.
Always looking for something
where it cannot be found.
And so that's the reason why Jesus in his teaching
talked about salvation.
He used the term salvation.
Of course, that has been interpreted in a certain way
by conventional Christianity.
But if you know more about true spirituality
in no matter what tradition,
you will know that the real meaning of salvation
is salvation from only knowing yourself
as that limited entity.
Salvation from the heaviness of life
and the fear, the constant fear that is your companion
when you only know yourself as the historical person,
but you do not know the being that you are.
And so that's why he speaks of salvation.
You need to be saved from,
you need to be rescued, one could almost say.
And in some traditions, if I remember correctly,
the Buddha also sometimes used the word salvation.
I believe, I don't, my memory is not very good,
but in one tradition,
the last words of the Buddha before he passed away
were, work out your own salvation with diligence.
Work out your own salvation with diligence.
So this last message to the world
is to awaken to that dimension
because otherwise life is suffering.
So space is a lovely way
of connecting with inner space.
Awareness of outer space
brings about awareness of inner space
and it stops your mind.
That's what is required.
It does not mean that when you connect with a deep eye
at first, like now,
it may be that you can only feel it
when somebody is pointing you to it, as I am now,
or in rare moments of solitude, perhaps.
But it doesn't mean that you can either be the deep eye
or the historical eye.
At first, it seems that sometimes you shift to the deep eye,
the mind becomes still,
as happens when you look at the vastness of space.
The mind becomes still, awareness remains.
That is the deep eye.
And then usually what happens when you get up,
open your, start moving and talking and thinking again,
within a minute or two,
you're back completely in the historical eye, the person.
The surface eye, I think,
would be a good way of describing it.
Surface eye, deep eye.
But ultimately it's not being either in one or the other.
The two can come together so that even while you speak
or perform some action
or are engaged in some kind of activity,
whatever it may be,
but even while you think,
there can be some spacious awareness
of just the deep eye in the background.
This would be a, it's an interesting new way of thinking.
And one way to describe it, you should try it out,
is that when you think about something specific,
after a few thoughts, learn to step back, so to speak,
into stillness or presence.
It must only maybe just for three, four seconds.
Doesn't, length doesn't matter.
And then you step forward again into thinking
and you step back into a pure awareness of presence,
cessation, the mind stops, conscious awareness remains.
And so if you want to do some very effective
and powerful thinking, you learn to step back and forth,
speak into thought and then out of thought,
into thought, out of thought.
I would suggest that you practice that
when you have something specific to think about,
you have some kind of situation that needs to be resolved,
but you don't know how yet,
or you're planning a certain course of action
or whatever it may be, let's say you've decided
you're setting aside 15 minutes, 20 minutes
to think about a particular subject matter
or a particular so-called problem in your life
and to see what you can do, what's possible.
And, or you might be engaged in some creative endeavor
that requires thought, you want to create,
or even write a book or set up something,
set up an organization, if possible,
one that is conscious rather than unconscious.
