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SPEAKER: Google has a mission to organize
the world's information.
And I think if you think about the hierarchy,
there's signal and data and information and knowledge,
and at the very top of the pyramid is wisdom.
And I wondered if you could comment a little bit
on what you understand to be the difference between information
and wisdom.
ECKHART TOLLE: Of course, with the technological revolution,
information revolution, digital revolution, whatever
you call it, there's an enormous amount
of knowledge available to everybody, almost the whole
of the world's knowledge.
And there's the interconnectedness
between people and so on.
That's all very good, of course, to have all that accessible
to you.
There's a danger, though, that you
get drowned in too much information and too
much knowledge.
And by drowned, I mean that the mind gets bombarded
with an excess of input, and therefore you
miss something that is essential for a human life
to be truly fulfilled.
And that is a place of peace, inner peace or stillness,
a place that one could describe as the source
of all intelligence that many people actually don't even
realize exists within them.
So I'd like to just talk briefly about that, that really we
are talking about the core of what spirituality means.
Spirituality is not having a particular belief structure.
It's not subscribing to a particular set of thoughts.
Spirituality is discovering a dimension within yourself
that is, we can either say deeper
or higher than the continuous movement of thinking.
And of course, all this information and knowledge
is experienced in you as thought.
So the thinking mind has always been active
for many thousands of years in humans.
But now, it's even more active than before
because it gets energized by the incredible increase in input.
Before, all you had was the simple sensory input
in your immediate surroundings.
Then later came books, so you had the added input of that.
And then gradually came the mass media, and now
this incredible revolution of information technology,
computers, and so on.
So it energizes that movement of thoughts
that's taking place in every human, which in itself is not
necessarily a bad thing.
It only becomes a bad thing and self-destructive thing
if that is all you experience inside you,
in your consciousness.
If all you ever experience is that, I call it sometimes
mental noise, then you begin to derive your identity
from the thoughts in your head, what the thoughts tell you
about yourself.
And you are trapped in that identity
that is based on identification with thinking.
All spiritual teachings point to the possibility
of finding something in you that is deeper
than thinking, this place of stillness that's always there.
And the informational excess of information,
you can only successfully deal with that
if you have a balance in your consciousness between using
your mind to absorb information, to put out new information,
to work on the information that you have taken in,
input, if you have a balance between that and something
that is deeper than thought in you.
And really, instead of giving you new knowledge here,
I don't want to do that because I
don't want to add to the knowledge
that you are taking in anyway, far more than you ever need.
So instead of giving you knowledge here,
I'd like to suggest that you experience it firsthand
in yourself, that place of--
I call it sometimes presence, where you are alert, conscious,
but not thinking.
And every creative person has some access to that realm.
If you have a truly creative insight,
you have to go to that place that is deeper
than analytical thinking.
Analytical thinking itself, or processing information,
is not creative.
So even to find a creative, a new solution
to a problem in your life requires some creative insight.
So whether it's a problem in your work situation,
or your personal life, or something
that you need to build or do, and you
have come to a dead end, or you want to create something,
whatever it is, a work of art or a new system for the computer--
I don't know the expressions for that--
you need to go to the place where creativity arises.
And every human who is creative has some access to that,
even if they don't know it.
But it's not only the place where creativity arises.
It's also the place that gives sanity to your life,
to find a place of stillness, peace, aliveness,
where you are not burdened by most,
a lot of the time, unnecessary mental noise.
So when you do start thinking again,
it actually can be more productive.
So where is that place?
How do you find that place?
If it's there in everyone, how do I
realize that within myself?
That's really the question.
So a week ago, I was in LA, and I gave a talk
about transformational movies, bringing consciousness
into the movie industry.
I gave as an example two movies by Clint Eastwood,
an early one, I think it was called "Dirty Harry."
And that's a very entertaining movie.
It's quite satisfying to watch because the bad guy gets
killed in the end.
Nevertheless, it's not a transformational movie.
In the end, you might remember the memorable lines,
make my day, when he is about to shoot the bad guy.
Make my day, punk.
And that's the most satisfying moment
in the movie for the viewer.
Not a transformation, but entertaining movie.
And then, 30 years later, Clint Eastwood
made a movie again about bad guys.
And that movie was called "Gran Torino."
If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you see it.
And that perhaps shows a shift in his own evolution,
because again we are faced with bad guys,
but how that is solved or resolved in the end
is very different from the early movie.
I'm not telling you how here because, if you
haven't seen it, you want to experience it for yourself.
So that's transformational, "Gran Torino."
It's the same actor, and I think Clint Eastwood directed
the "Gran Torino" one.
So that probably shows the evolution
of his own consciousness, from the early stage
to the later stage.
But he had this-- really, it's a reflection of life.
You can resist continuously life,
or you can internally align yourself with life
so that your life becomes a good movie, rather than a bad movie.
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