The Journey to Spiritual Awakening: Beyond Thinking | Eckhart Tolle

when you go out into nature and you see something extraordinarily beautiful like a Sunset and it's a moment of intense aliveness and you feel that was such a beautiful moment why because that freed you from the incessant stream of thinking I don't know if you're familiar with the famous Zen story that the I mean everybody knows a bit about Zen well for many people Zen means Simplicity of interior design or whatever but that's not what Zen is it was not created by an interior designer uh there was a story about a man comes to the Zen master and he's a university Professor who has studied all the Zen scriptures and all the other Buddhist scriptures and so he comes to the famous master and the master says sit down please and uh the professor says well I've studied it all but I want to hear from you also what really Zen is can you explain the essence to me and the master was making tea so the master was there was the cup the professor's Cup and the master took a teapot and started P pouring tea into his cup and he he didn't stop pouring in the and then the tea overflowed and the professor was looking saying stop stop can't you see the cup is overflowing and the master said well just like this overflowing cup you are full of your opinions viewpoints knowledge and speculations how can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup that was his main lesson how can I teach you Z unless you first empty your cup so the cup here stands for the full cup the cup that's overflowing with stuff refers to the Clutter of your mind the incessant thought stream of your mind the accumulated clutter the incessant repetitive thought stream and that and the personality that I talk about the personal identity and the thought stream are really go together so you are familiar with that now the difference between you and a unwant person is that you know that there's a voice in your head there are still millions of people out there who don't know that there's a voice in their head that never stops speaking because they are so identified with the voice that they have become it there is no separation there is no awareness there is no presence their entire Consciousness is trapped in thought so that that is and that is the state of being trapped in your personality so every thought that comes into your head immediately grabs you and possesses you and you're so identified with it that you believe in every thought that comes into your head and that's how it is the simplest thing the simplest thing you don't see it clearly you see it through the thinking veil of thinking which is conditioned by your past your culture your upbringing the country you grew up in the culture the society the family your personal circumstances your Collective circumstances determines the type of thinking that has you in its grip that varies from person to person and culture to culture but the basic mechanism behind it is the same they are all in the grip of the unobserved mind that is invested with a sense of self every thought has a sense of self in it you ident that this is what the word identify means you identify with every thought that comes into your head and you believe in every thought that comes into your head what this this is the case if there's no awareness whatsoever then that is your fate then awareness is the dormant faculty presence awareness whatever you want to call it that's a dormant faculty in you it's still dormant and as long as it's completely dormant you're totally in the grip of your conditioned personality and your conditioned mind you are basically possessed it thinks through you it acts through you it is an energy field that has you in its grip and you don't even know it because you think you are it and for many the beginning of Spiritual Awakening is to realize that there is this stream of continuous commentary in their minds and that is a thing oh that's interesting that's a thought of course but before the thought that's interesting there's the the recognition it's it's a voice in the head and the recognition is not the voice in the head although you might say it after the recognition but in the moment of recognizing there's a voice in the head that's not a thought the recognition the recognition of thought is not a thought the recognition of thought comes through awareness or presence and awareness or presence is the higher consciousness the arising new Consciousness wow so that's that is really the meaning of Spiritual Awakening in the by the way in this first half of our gathering I will be talking more about it in the second half we will do more experiential but even while I talk about it here I would hope that if it works for you there's already also an exp experiential realization of what it is I'm talking about so there's the voice there's the voice in the head and people say things like I think they don't think because thinking is not a voluntary action for them so it's a delusion to even say I think you don't think you are being thought by thought you are created by thought there that energy field it's amazing so the master said how can I teach you Z unless you first empty your cup now that's a huge demand if if I'm full of clutter mental clutter how am I going to empty my cup I would be immediately be enlightened if I could empty my cup but the the teaching points to something it points to this the word empty and that's interesting that is an important word in Buddhism and I it's don't think it's a good translation who first came up with it I don't know in the 19th century the Europeans started to translate ancient texts from Sanskrit and one person came up with a translation probably of the Sanskrit terms sunata and translated it as emptiness that doesn't sound so nice it sounds like a something missing or something like that so I have an alternative translation for the Buddhist term emptiness so that empty is an important word so remember the Zen master said how can I teach you then unless you first empty your cup empty emptiness my alternative translation for that is spaciousness spaciousness is a dimension of Consciousness in you and that is what we could call the spiritual dimension of Consciousness the deeper or the higher Consciousness just words doesn't matter and that is in every human it's there many don't know that it's there because the Clutter is so dense that they have no realization of the underlying spaciousness and that is why I say in millions of humans that is still a dant faculty so to speak so the most important realization in your life much more important than what you have achieved on the level of the world whether your life in worldly terms is regarded it as a huge success or a dismal failure or for most of you probably something in between that's normal sometimes you fail sometimes you succeed and then you move from Gaining losing high and low up and down that's the identity for most so the Clutter of your mind is there but there are moments in your life whe