What being awake actually means | Eckhart Tolle

You woke up this morning. Your eyes opened, and for a few seconds there was nothing but simple awareness of the room. Then the machinery started. What is happening today. What went wrong yesterday. What needs handling. And within moments you were gone again, into a running commentary that continued for the rest of the day. Eckhart Tolle makes a claim about that. What we call being awake is not really being awake. It is a second kind of dream, made of thought, and almost everyone lives inside it from the moment the mind switches on until they fall asleep again. This is why so many traditions use the word awakening. Everybody understands the shift that happens each morning between sleeping and waking, because they experience it daily. The suggestion is that a second shift of the same magnitude is available, out of the dream of being completely identified with your thinking. The word Buddha does not name a person. It comes from a root meaning awake, and when he was asked who he was, the answer was simply that he was awake. Jesus returns to the same instruction in several parables. Stay awake. Eckhart came to understand his own experience through a remark by a Zen monk, who described the practice as not thinking, but staying awake. That is when he realised what the peace he had been living in actually was. His thinking had reduced by something like eighty per cent. He could still think when thinking was needed. What had stopped was the endless self-seeking commentary that most people never put down. Eckhart goes much further into this in the full session. Join Eckhart Tolle Now to watch. 👇

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Eckhart Tolle is widely recognized as one of the most inspiring and visionary spiritual teachers in the world today. With his international bestsellers, The Power of Now and A New Earth —translated into more than 50 languages—he has introduced millions to the joy and freedom of living life in the present moment. The New York Times has described him as “the most popular spiritual author in the United States,” and in 2011, Watkins Review (now Watkins Mind Body Spirit) named him “the most spiritually influential person in the world.”

Eckhart’s profound yet simple teachings have helped countless people around the globe experience a state of vibrantly alive inner peace in their daily lives. His teachings focus on the significance and power of Presence, the awakened state of consciousness, which transcends ego and discursive thinking. Eckhart sees this awakening as the essential next step in human evolution.