Is it possible to silence the heavy voice that speaks nonstop from our head? Who is that voice? Is it possible to go beyond thought?
These questions stalked Eckhart Tolle for a while. The noise of his mind was increasing until in the middle of the anguish and anxiety his mind collapsed. The mental voice fell silent and his thoughts stopped making him suffer. The spaces of silence between thoughts increased and peace and stillness settled in his life.
Suddenly, like a flash, it reached the state that Zen monks pursue for decades in monasteries and very few reach. Following this experience, he left his position as a researcher at the University of Cambridge and dedicated himself to giving seminars throughout the world, talking about the importance of becoming masters of our thoughts, “that have possessed us”, and of living in the present moment, because "it is the only thing that exists."
How did you achieve such clarity?
It all started one night when I experienced a kind of transformation of consciousness. The next day I suddenly found myself in a state of inner peace that has never left me.
Since then I have always had a state of peace in the background. Before I had lived in states of depression and anxiety, and when that transformation happened to me, I did not understand it, I had no idea what had happened to me, I only knew that I was in a state of peace. It took me a few years to gradually understand what had happened to me. I started reading spiritual books, old texts and some new texts, I was looking to compare what had happened to me with what these books said. A strange thing happened to me every time I opened a Hindu or Christian spiritual book, I immediately understood the essence.
The texts and conversations with the spiritual masters, Buddhist monks, yogis ... explained to me what had happened to me. Two years after the transformation I was in a monastery talking with a Zen Buddhist monk and he told me that the essential thing about Zen is to go beyond thinking. Then I realized that that had happened to me because after that night, my mental processes had been reduced by approximately 80% of what they had been before. There were many spaces without thoughts in my mind, not unconscious but very conscious, but without mental process.
The state of peace had always been there but it was covered with continuous mental noise and gradually I began to understand what the essence of spiritual transformation is. All teachers talk about the same thing; they use different words but basically they all point to the same state. Then I also recognized him in the gospels of Jesus in some things he said.
Now that you sell millions of books and give lectures to large audiences, I guess a lot of people will idealize you. How do you carry that?
They are projections because they think that I am special. But all the power of spiritual teaching comes through this way that I am for the simple reason that I know that I am no one special. Many people identify the power of the spirit that comes through form with form, and it is very important not to accept those projections. I am very aware of these projections and I do not accept them, I think they are illusions.
The moment I think that I am very special, I would identify myself again with a conditioned thought. I know that it has happened to some spiritual teachers, the danger is greater if you live in an 'ashram' surrounded by disciples and never have contact with other people. After a few years you start to believe that you are what they think you are, I have seen it in some people, and the ego returns.
You talk about going beyond thinking. For people who are used to being almost always identified with thinking, how can we imagine that other scenario that you propose?
No need to imagine it; almost everyone is able to experience even for a very small moment what it means to be without thought and at the same time to be fully aware. Most people don't realize that even on a normal day, there are always very small intervals between two thoughts at some times.
People who do not have these intervals are very sick psychologically, but if there is still in your life from time to time the joy of being or love, understanding or beauty, if you respond inwardly to something that is beautiful, that means there is those intervals because that's where they arise. Thoughts cannot recognize how deep something beautiful is.
Love or compassion does not come through thoughts, they come from a deeper dimension, and people who do not have access to that dimension never experience beauty, love, compassion or a deeper joy of being. In this crazy civilization (laughs), there are people who in their life no longer have that experience of love, of beauty, of an inner peace from time to time, they lack all that and in those people the mental noise continues, without interruptions .
What is the first step to silence the mind?
Become aware that these spaces exist on a normal day. You are looking at a tree or the sky, at the clouds, and it is a time when there is no thought. Only the perception and awareness through which the perception happens. A space.
The first step is to realize that, without doing anything, some spaces exist in my life. Then you can actively search for those spaces. I recommend doing things that one normally does such as washing one's hands, drinking coffee, going from here to there, entering the stairs, getting on the elevator ... becoming aware of the act and the moment, without making it a means to an end but an end in itself. Wash your hands feeling the water, soap, dry your hands ... Only perception and awareness.
Another thing that I also recommend is when you enter your car, close the door and stay for about thirty seconds without doing anything, feel the body, life inside the body. It is not much, 30 seconds, but many of these moments in a day initiate a change. Those little moments when we don't think but are conscious without thinking.
It is more important to have many small moments during the day than to be in a half-hour meditation every day and then spend the day without having spaces. Then a change begins, unconditioned consciousness arises, pure consciousness. The rest, thoughts, are a form of consciousness conditioned by the past. Almost all people are trapped in a sense of yo that depends on conditioned thoughts and a mental image that has qui n soy, that is, an identity that depends of thoughts
That means moving on the surface of life without ever going deeper. A life that way becomes very unsatisfactory, there is always suffering. If your life develops only on the surface of being, which is when you always identify with thoughts, then you lack depth and suffer.
If I am not the thoughts, who am I?
You are not thoughts, you are the space from which thoughts arise. And what is that space? It is consciousness itself. Consciousness that has no form. Everything else in life has form. In essence we are that formless consciousness that is behind thoughts. But to experience it, an experience of inner stillness is necessary. If I have only one moment in the day of alert stillness that gives me a taste of what it is, I already understand what unconditional consciousness is, beyond that of thought. A person who does not have that moment, not even a moment, can never understand what we are talking about now. I will not understand.
Have you reached any conclusion of what is after death?
Somehow, I can almost say that I have already died because if you are not identified with the form, what remains is the eternal that has no form. To enter that consciously is to find death before death finds you (laughs) and if you already enter the dimension that has no form and you have entered death, you realize that what we call death it is really life, it is life without form. Death is only the dissolution of the form and life is left, or what Jesus calls eternal life . That is why death, even death that happens near you when someone dies, is always a possibility of spiritual realization. Grace is hidden behind every death.
So, what are we here for?
We are here so that consciousness can flourish through this form and enter the world of forms to transform it. The purpose of life, deep down, is to be like a door to the formless dimension, which then enters the world of forms and turns the world into something that is no longer hostile.
In the book A New World Now, you establish a relationship between what is happening in the world at the level of climatic catastrophes, etc., with the state of consciousness of human beings.
Could you develop that idea a bit?
What one experiences as the outside life, the situations one encounters, the things that happen, the relationships he has, that is, the way in which the person experiences life, is always a reflection of his conscience, of his inner state, of the state of mind. If a person, for example, is always surrounded by violent people, in every situation he finds violence, it means that there is something inside that is a violent, aggressive force. They are unaware of this situation, and a completely unconscious person experiences their own state as things that happen to them from the outside world. If such a person becomes conscious, he would suddenly be able to see that within him there is emotional or mental violence, then the transformation begins.
What is an ordinary day like in your life?
Very simple. I think relatively little. In everyday life, if I am with a person, I listen to it until the words come up, or if I am in the street shopping I also have few thoughts and reactions. The situations are as they are. Life is very simple. Very rarely do I think about the past and the attention is on simplicity. The present moment is always quite simple because it is just that. Consciousness is in the simplicity of the present moment. There is peace even if something is not going well. I do not carry an identity.
For example, in spiritual teaching, people call me a spiritual master and they think it is my identity but I see it simply as a function. When I am with a group of people and I am speaking, then I am the spiritual master, but the moment I leave the room I cease to be the spiritual master immediately and there is only an open consciousness that does not carry an image of who I am. Because every image you carry will lead to suffering.
I go down the street without being anyone in particular, simply a conscious space. You take a walk not as a person but as a conscious space, or you are having a coffee not as a person, thinking about your personal history, simply as a conscious space, without carrying the constant definitions of who I am or talking about my life with that Inner voice that tells me things about my life: "I'm not happy with my life" or things like that are stories, thoughts. ) These complications, fortunately, I don't have them.
Published in Namaste Magazine
