How Do We Break the Habit of Excessive Thinking? | Eckhart Tolle

I've read all your books and I listen to your recordings pretty much on a daily basis. I don't say that to build up an ego that doesn't exist. It leads into my question. What I find in trying to practice the power of now, trying to be conscious without thought, is a very heavy inner dialogue of all the principles and things that I've read. How should I do this? What would Eckhart say? Actually, my thought process starts getting more active. I think I'm losing the presence by that thought process. Then I think of your latest book with the cartoons, which I love. I think there's one with a little bird in the tree. He's talking to the dog. He's very upset. The dog says, what's wrong? The bird says, well, I'm thinking about yesterday and this and that. I'm worried about what's going to happen in a week, two weeks. It's about the future. What do I do? What do I do? The dog just looks at him and says, stop thinking. It seems you try to stop thinking and you read all this and you try to practice it, but yet in any given situation, I find that in order to get closer to practicing it or even practice it, it's causing a lot of thoughts to happen. Is that different kind of thoughts or those thoughts that I should break that kind of habit? If so, how? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Now, there's a lot of talk these days about, not just talk, actually, it's happening, addictions. Many people are addicted to all kinds of things, substances, but one of the greatest addictions or one of the greatest addiction never actually, you never read about it in the papers because the people who are addicted to it don't know it. It's the addiction to thinking. It's actually addictive. Can't stop thinking. It's like, can't stop drinking, can't stop smoking, can't stop eating, can't stop thinking. Thinking is the greater addiction than any of these. It's an addiction because it's first, it's been a drug, it's been around for so long and it's a pseudo sense of self. It's a great reluctance on the most people to let go of thinking, which is equated with the state of sleep, to let go of thinking. There isn't that much to understand in this teaching. There's a little bit to understand about how the ego works, but even that is just mainly a self-observation. The main thing about it is presence. Presence is a space of no thought, but presence can also be there in the background, even when thinking is happening. You can still be not completely involved in the thinking. Thinking loses the ability to create havoc in your life and confuse you. Your choice then is not to understand more or to bring some intellectual analysis to the practice, but to practice the state of not thinking, which can be arrived at by various ways, as you probably know. If you don't think about it, just do it. Becoming more aware of the present moment and accept it as it is slows down the overactive mind is one thing, because a lot of the overactivity of the mind is an attempt to get away from the is-ness, the simplicity of the present moment. To become more aware of the present moment as a practice, have perhaps little pointers in your office, at home, in your car. Let's say present moment or whatever, or a symbol for it. There are different entry points into the present moment. Present moment awareness means thinking subsides, may not disappear completely, but something else arises that is primary. We call it presence or awareness. Buddhists call it mindfulness, which I don't use because it implies your mind is full of things, but it isn't, of course. It's just a mistranslation. To be present, first of all, use the present moment. How do you become conscious of the present moment? When you get it, after a while, you can actually sense the presence of the present, so to speak, directly, and there it is. Helpful things are sense perceptions, take you out of thinking. If you're not judging the sense perceptions, labeling, naming, looking around, anywhere, wherever you are, look around. Practice sense perceptions without this compulsive interference of naming what you're perceiving. Oh, that's a beautiful flow. I wonder what it's called. I don't know what it's called. Oh, that helps. I can be free of thinking. If I know what it's called, I can say, oh, that's such and such, and then drop that. See what it means to perceive without the interference of concepts, words. At this moment, for example, you're looking at me now. Let's say between now and now, were you thinking? No. Okay. Again, between now and now, were you thinking or present? No thought. While I speak, do you need to think to understand what I'm saying, or can you just listen and understand it? This is what you're doing. That's part of the teaching and the function of the spiritual teacher. Imparting information is secondary. What I'm telling you now is secondary. What is primary is the underlying state of consciousness, which is presence. That's the teaching, but you can't talk about that. It's underlying. A sign that it's working is that while you listen, there's no thought. There's just an alert presence. When the so-called teacher stops speaking for a moment, the alert presence remains. It does not need to be filled with anything like now. What is there to think about? Nothing. Now, if we do this for longer, at some point, your mind will probably start up and think, how much longer is he going to sit there? When that happens, you can allow your mind to say, how much longer is he going to sit there and say nothing, and then come back to presence. Then some other thought will come. What's this all about? Then you can allow that thought to rise and then be present again, which means your priority is no longer to follow the thought where it wants to take you because the thought has a magnetic pull. It wants more of your consciousness, but it wants to grow because it's a little entity. It wants to grow, so it wants your attention, and in subtle ways, it tries to get your attention. It might even use a bodily feeling. It says, God, I'm hungry suddenly. Why didn't I need to eat something? Then you think of what restaurant I'm going to afterwards. The presence is gone. You are gone. You are looking for a restaurant in your mind, which means the thought used as some bodily thing to make thoughts out of it completely pointless because you can't find a restaurant because you're standing here, but it can use all kinds of things to manufacture most to get your attention. If you're not careful, if you don't know the mechanism, it's not so much an intellectual understanding but a simple realization that this is what the mind does. It tries to pull you in. It's fine. That's what it does. Once you know that, you can allow a thought to arise without following it where it wants you to go, which is into another bigger thought and a bigger one, so then you become like my dog when it finds a scent. Then suddenly, even when the dog is off leash, usually she's fine. She just runs around you, but suddenly, she picks up a scent, and then she goes off completely unaware of surroundings or anything. She just follows it, and she could get lost. She goes off to the horizon sometimes, just disappears. When you follow a thought, it goes like that. You can wake up 20 minutes later, and it started with her being a little bit hungry and thinking of a restaurant, and it ends up with thinking about how unthreatening your life is.