A Practical Guide to Being Present in the Moment by Eckhart Tolle

And the moment your thinking mind ceases, in between two thoughts, right now, in between two thoughts, what is left of you? A spaciousness that at first seems like nothing, and then you sense it is a presence, and it is essentially who I am. And to live in connectedness with that, and ask that as the foundation for your life that is awakened living, and that's why we are here. And as you go to bed tonight, for a few minutes, lie on your back, on your bed, in the spaciousness of presence, and feel that presence with your entire body. So that one could, you may almost find that these cells begin to tingle with presence almost. It's an aliveness. And then you begin to see that that aliveness is not confined to the body. You're surrounded by that presence also, so it is within and without. And there's no thought in that. There's no thought, there's just being it. And from there, perhaps you can go to sleep. And when you wake up in the morning before you do anything else or get out of bed, again, lie on your back and feel yourself as presence. And then open your eyes and look around, and as you look around the room, continue to feel the energy field of presence. That makes it easy to look without labeling anything, just pure perception. This is a little bit like a child would perceive the world where conceptualization hasn't happened yet, but there's an added dimension when you do it because you have gone through conceptualization and there's a deeper knowing now. But this is the reason why Jesus said, you must become as little children if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven. Little children are not burdened by conceptualization, by the conceptualizing mind. Now, we are not going back to the child stage, we are transcending the human stage, the intermediate stage of dysfunctional humans. And we're becoming, we could say, fully, completely human. So far, we've only going towards it, have been going towards that. Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And then, of course, you can only understand that if you look at a one-year-old and look into their eyes and sense the consciousness that's there that has not yet been obscured by conceptualization. And it's beautiful, you go, ah, ah, because it opens something in you. When you see that, it triggers that opening in you where you can sense that in yourself. When you go, ah, then really what happens is for a moment, you join with that child in the non-conceptual state of consciousness. And it, of course, it opens your heart in colloquial language, it opens your heart. This is what presence does. And you go, ah, and that's the beauty of it. Even a dog can do that to you. You look into the eyes of a dog, and the tail, and you go, ah, so sweet, that sweetness of being coming through the eyes. Ah, or a cat, and rubs itself against your legs. And you go, ah, and you can sense the being there. And so those animals are more rooted in being still. Humans, of course, are still also in being, but they don't know it anymore. They've become externalized through the mind. And they can no longer sense their rootedness, their oneness with the one, so to speak. So the animal, I say, the animal or anything natural has integrity that most humans don't have anymore, but they can regain it at an even deeper level. Integrity, of course, really means translated being one with who you are, not being divided, split into two, and suddenly have an identity that you can be concerned about and talk about in my life. I have to think about my life now. And then you have a relationship with yourself. I hate myself, but I'm trying to love myself. Of course, loving yourself is better than hating yourself, much better. But I would suggest there is a way beyond also loving yourself, and that is called being yourself. Because when you love yourself, there's still a duality there. There's the self that you love, and maybe one day you don't love it. But if you are yourself, then you become an expression of love. You are one with the one, and then love, just true love flows through you. So self-images humans have, they are problematic self-images. No dog has a self-image. No dog has a problem with self-esteem. Even the ugliest dog in the eyes of humans is simply in itself. It doesn't have a mental image of this is me, this is me. But we are not regressing. We are transcending that intermediate stage of where we think we are our mind, whatever our mind tells us who we are. So that's our essential practice. And it's about the most, well, not about, it is the most vital and the most important thing in your so-called life. Although, of course, it's not your life at all. I'm just saying it. It's just words. There's no such thing as your life because you don't have it. It's not yours. You are it. If you say you have a life, there's a duality there of you and life, which is absurd. There is no you, or let's say I, there is no I apart from life. I can't say my life, really, although I sometimes use those words. It's colloquial language, semantics. But I don't, I cannot have a life. You cannot have life. It's not your life. People think they are independent, little independent life entities with their own life. It's, but of course, it's not possible. You cannot have your own life. You can only be an expression of the one life moving through a temporary form. It's obvious, isn't it, that when you say my life or he lost his life or I don't want to lose my life, it's all erroneous. It's created, a delusion created by conceptual, by language and concepts that you have a life. You can't, because that would imply that there is a life and then there's you, and you have it. But what are you without life? There's no you without life. It's an absurd duality created by conceptualization. You are life, I am life. You are, I am, temporary, brief expressions in form of the one formless essence, which goes into billions of life forms on this planet alone, let alone the rest of the galaxy and other galaxies. And it moves, it becomes form. It goes into forms, billions of, and it evolves in time on this dimension or in the essential dimension, there is no time. And it forms, come and go. And it's all one, it's all one. So it's quite a relief, ultimately, that your life is not yours. You are an expression of the one. Oh.