>>Rich Fernandez: Hello everyone.
>>audience: Hi.
>>Rich Fernandez : Welcome. I'm Rich Fernandez from the Learning and Development Team here
at Google. So about six months ago we wrote a letter to Eckhart Tolle inviting him to
come here to Google. "Eckhart, dude, come to Google," we said.
[laughter]
Well, something along those lines. We make some of the world's most valued and most used
technology. We aspire to do epic stuff and to make a difference in the world. And yet
even as we create this dazzling technology, we wanna be sure to pay attention to our own
inner technology. We wanna ask ourselves the searching and far ranging questions about
how we're getting on in the world. As we optimize our technology how can we also optimize our
lives so that we can be our best selves?
All of this is a lot easier said than done. We operate in a hyper-connected world always
on and we go at it with great pace and intensity. The urgent question of the day is how we can
take an intelligent approach to our work and our lives with all of the demands of our time
and attention.
Amidst this flood of information how can we discern the signal from the noise in order
to access and act on what is most essential to each of us?
Eckhart Tolle takes a refreshingly contemporary approach to the question of what it means
to live a meaningful and inspired life and with great intelligence. And in so being,
how we can each experience a great sense of clarity, peace, and the joy of being alive.
So we're very lucky that Eckhart accepted our invitation and said yes to come here today.
He knows our ethos that we have a profound interest in being our best selves and doing
meaningful and inspired work. We seek to change the world for the better and he understands
that we understand that in order to transform the world we must first render the necessary
transformation within ourselves.
So Eckhart is here today to assist and suggest with some things for us to consider.
Eckhart Tolle has written bestselling books including The Power of Now and A New Earth
and they've sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into 33 languages.
He's widely regarded as one of the foremost teachers on the subject of wisdom and conscious
living.
Joining Eckhart in conversation today is our Vice President of Product, Bradley Horowitz.
Now when we proposed to Bradley that he might engage in a dialog with Eckhart as part of
this tech talk he was really excited which makes sense because Bradley's cool like that.
[laughter]
Bradley also helped create Google+, Google Apps, and Google+ which we all love.
So without further ado please join me in welcoming Eckhart Tolle and Bradley Horowitz as they
discuss what it means to live with meaning, purpose, and wisdom in the digital age.
[applause]
>>Eckhart Tolle: Thank you.
[applause]
>>Bradley Horowitz: So on behalf of Google and all the many Googlers here and those tuning
in from our overflow rooms, welcome it's great to have you here. And it's very special to
have you here. I understand that you don't often visit corporations and so this has been
a journey we've taken together over the course of the day.
Eckhart had a moment to meet with some of us earlier and we found that really valuable.
And one of the things we discussed this morning was wisdom and the difference between information
and wisdom. 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: Good question. Let's kind of set that aside for just one moment –
>>Bradley Horowitz: Let's do that.
>>Eckhart Tolle: to say how happy I am to be here, how impressed I am by what I have
seen, and by the people who work here, and the general energy field in the company. And
if you have come, the many young people here, if you've come straight from college then
I'm sure you don't know how lucky you are until --
[laughter]
you start working for another company.
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
>>Eckhart Tolle: Perhaps everybody who works here one would, as they would say in India
"You must have very good Karma to be working here."
openness of people that's reflected in the structure of the company, the way things are
arranged, the little rooms that you have for quietness, for meditation, the cafeterias
and all that is just beyond belief so --
I also experience an openness in the people who work here and far less ego because many
companies are still predominately run by very big egos. I'm not saying that everybody here's
entirely free of ego yet, but --
[laughter]
much less so than in many other places. So it's wonderful to be here and if my book sales
ever decline and I need a job --
[laughter]
I hope you will, you probably won't but --
[laughter]
because first of all I have no computer skills --
[laughter]
and secondly I'm too old --
[laughter]
since the average age here is probably about 30.
So your question was important?
[laughter]
I remember it, I remember it.
>>Bradley Horowitz: I don't. [laughs]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
Knowledge, information, and wisdom, how do they relate?
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 the place of peace,
inner peace, or stillness; the place that one could describe as the source of all intelligence
that many people don't actually don't even realize exists within them.
So I'd like to just talk briefly about that, that really we're talking about the core of
what spirituality means. Spirituality is not having a particular belief structure, is 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 get energized by the incredible increase in input. Before
all you had was simple, the simple sensory input in your immediate surroundings then
later came books, so you have 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 thought 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; a space, a 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're taking in anyway, it's far more than you ever need.
So instead of giving you knowledge here I'd like to suggest that you experience at first
hand in yourself that place of, I call it sometimes a 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. Analytic
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 the expressions for that, you need to
go to the place where creativity arises. And every human who brings, who is creative has
some access to that even if they don't know it.
But it's not only the, 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're
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.
I can just suggest to you three or four entry points into that state of consciousness and
after I've done that we can carry on the conversation. [laughs]
[laughter]
A very simple entry point, and this is why my first book is called The Power of Now,
is the realization that your entire life consists of the present moment and only the present
moment ever.
Now most people perhaps they in some abstract way they know that but they cannot sense or
feel the truth of that and I'd like to invite you to actually sense and feel the truth of
what I'm saying which not, even if there's a great philosopher here he cannot possibly
argue, he or she cannot argue with this statement that whatever you experience ever is present
moment. Your entire life unfolds in the present moment; that's all you ever have.
Most people don't live as if this were true they don't, they live as if the opposite almost
were true, as if the future moment were more important always than the next one. And that,
that happens because of excessive identification with thinking because usually the thoughts
are about the next thing, the next and the next or what could happen or might happen.
So if you can just come to this realization, "Well, this is all I ever have and ever experienced
is this moment this is undoubtedly true, there is nothing else ever," and at that moment
when you fully realize that you can only realize that an alertness arises in you. "Wow." You
become alert to one could almost call it the presence of the power of this moment, the
power of life itself in this present moment which consists of, yes it consists of sense
perceptions --
it also consists of, well, let's look what is this present moment? This present moment
is this room, what we perceive here visually, what we see, hear, , the lights, the totality
of the room. So let's become alert so that we can really perceive that and be on to that
to which we perceive in this room. Is there anything else about, that we could call the
present moment?
Well, if you look deeply enough, yes, there is also the inner energy field in your body
that you can actually feel, that you're alive in your legs, your arms, your feet. It's also
part of the present moment to sense the energy field that pervades the physical body that's
also something you can feel.
So there's external sense perceptions and there's the feeling the aliveness inside your
body. And if you're totally in thinking you can't feel that at all; you don't feel alive
you're only alive in the upper story of the house, your head. The entire house you don't
inhabit then. [chuckles] So you inhabit, you begin to inhabit the entire body. This becomes
part of your experience of the present moment so sense perceptions yes.
And there is an aliveness even to artificial light 'cause you might say, "I prefer sunlight
okay, me too, but there's a beauty and aliveness even to artificial light. And there's a beauty
and aliveness that is usually overlooked that's in the texture of this chair here or whatever
you're wearing and certainly the flowers.
And suddenly you become aware of that and that's not all yet we're just going into the
present moment. So you have that externals and you suddenly appreciate the aliveness
of all the things that surround you.
Other people have to take acids to get there.
[laughter]
So you don't need that.
[laughter]
You know with acid people sometimes they look at a teapot and they say, "Wow --
[laughter]
oh my God."
[laughter]
But you don't need to do that just be present and then you appreciate the beauty even of
a mass-produced teapot.
[laughter]
If it's handmade and hand painted even nicer, but even a mass-produced teapot has a presence
there, it's there and it's an alive energy field. Every physicist will tell you it's
not a dead teapot, its molecules and atoms in continuous movement.
Everything is vitally alive and you miss that if you're totally trapped in the mental noise
all the time, taking in information. Present moment, sense perceptions. So the inner energy
field of the body and then what else is there to the present moment?
Okay then you have to go become really alert and the next thing that you notice about the
present moment is really the deeper level of the present moment it's not something that
arises in your consciousness as does the table and this room and even the inner energy field
of the body. These are all things, objects that arise in your consciousness but if you
go deeper even into the present moment what you encounter is the most incredible secret
of human life which is you encounter the fact that --
at the bottom of it all you are conscious.
There is the presence that you are without which you couldn't perceive anything; you
couldn't perceive this room and you couldn't feel the body without that consciousness that
you essentially are which Jesus by the way called the light of the world. He said to
his Disciples, "You are the light of the world." And these Disciples were not special people
they were fishermen so certainly He wasn't telling them that they are VIPs.
[laughter]
They were the opposite of VIPs. And yet he said, "You are the light of the world." He
also said it about himself but he also said it about others.
And so you suddenly discover that essentially at the most essential level the essence of
who you are is consciousness but consciousness isn't something you can say, "Ah, there it
is," because consciousness cannot become an object to itself, it's the eternal subject,
the I am that I am of the Old Testament when God is asked for His or Her name God says,
"I am that I am." That is the essential identity of all beings.
So when we talk about the present moment we talk about different levels of the present
moment from sense perceptions to the feeling of aliveness in the inner body to the realization
that ultimately what we call the present moment and the light of consciousness are one and
the same because that's the thing that always remains.
That consciousness you can sense it as yourself right now the presence that you are even beyond
physical presence and that is the alertness, that is the realization that is sometimes
called awakening. And that is the place of also of stillness where you get out of the
mental noise and that is the source place of creativity, that is intelligence, that
is non-conceptual, its primordial intelligence.
And if you touch that in yourself then at first it's glimpses, it's brief realizations
and then gradually integrated into your daily life then you can live from that place, the
source, and be not only a more productive human being but also a more peaceful human
being because then you no longer contribute to the conflict in this world because the
conflict is only created by all those humans who don't know that level in themselves; they
don't know who they are.
And again, to quote Jesus again on the cross He said, "Forgive them; they know not what
they do." And why do they know not what they do? They don't know who they are essentially.
So this, I've talked about this in the hope that as I'm speaking there is an experience
in you of really of the depths of the present moment because the present moment, people
think it's present moment is what happens. And of course because what happens changes
all the time people say there are many present moments. If you look more deeply of course
there are not many present moments there's only ever this present moment, there's only
this ever. [chuckles] So there're not many present moments there's only the space of
this moment.
So there's what happens in it and there is the space in which it happens and that space
is consciousness and that is who you are. And when you realize that you become free
of the false sense of self that when your mind tells you something about who you are
which has to do with your history and your successes or your failures or what other people
tell you who you are, little present.
So that's really basically the essence of spirituality which is very simple, but for
some reason it's not taught at school. All kinds of inessential things are taught at
school --
[laughter]
but what really matters, the very foundation of human life, and it's not some belief structure.
I'm not saying indoctrinate, children must believe, it's not believe at all it's an experience,
it's a realization. That's what needs to be taught, that needs to be subject number one
at school: who am I? And everything else is easy once you have that.
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: Well I'm not sure I have any more questions.
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
[applause]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
>>Bradley Horowitz: We'll press on. [laughs]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: I wanna ask you about the work that we do at Google. And if you
look at any given webpage it's almost a model of the mind; there's all of these jumping
off points; you can jump to this story or that story or Hawaii vacation or you can jump
around so easily. And in fact the product I work on Google+ allows me not only to examine
the contents of my own mind but all of these people's minds as well in a flood of a stream
coming at me. And I'm wondering if the real reason you've chosen to come to Google today
is 'cause we're actively working against you and [laughs] --
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: you've come to help us get over that. But more seriously do you think
there's a place for technology and how do you make sense of the work that we're doing
and how it impacts people's attention in relation to what you just described, sort of transcending
the mind and going to a deeper place?
>>Eckhart Tolle: Well it's, the technology is quite miraculous of course; in itself it's
neither good nor bad. The --
I only recently, which means like two or three years, started using it, I came to it very
late. I --
I still haven't developed an addiction to it as many people have.
There is incredible possibilities here with that technology and there's also a great danger
with that technology. It could lead to contribute to the awakening, and an example of that is
our gathering here which people can apparently see on their screen. So this is just one example
of how this technology can contribute to spreading a vital message. It goes far beyond any ideology
or anything like that. Same thing the work I did with Oprah some years ago for the first
time, the Webinar as they call it, went out and the first time the whole system broke
down because so many people tuned in and then second week it started to work.
>>Bradley Horowitz: We don't have that problem.
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
So there are incredible possibilities also for humans to connect with each other, well
that's another topic whether they're really connecting as human beings. But also the fact
that the flow of information is no longer monopolized by the powerful few corporations
but everybody can participate in that free flow of information, having led already to
all these things the Arab Spring and all those things that have been happening recently;
all that is potentially good.
The danger of course is, and again that connects with what I've been talking about earlier,
that you get more and more inundated with information, with knowledge, with mind stuff
so that you more and more lose a deeper sense of connectedness with being, with presence,
that deeper level that I talked about just now. And that would then lead to increasing
confusion in your mind and an inability really to create anything new anymore; you would
be just trapped in the mental, continuously increasing mental noise.
And if you look at people in this field who do come up with something really creative
that is new they all have some access to that deeper level in themselves as I'm sure many
of you have, and quite a few people don't even know that they have access to that, it
just happens. They become still and they go for a moment or a few, they go --
and you connect with a power inside you. You can actually feel the power of consciousness
inside you as you become still. And there's no mind movement in that it's a kind of listening
that opens up.
And then after while the mind starts working again and it's very often then you have an
answer or then you have the creative solution or some new insight. But if you don't go there
anymore, if you get continuously drawn only into the noise, the mental noise, then you
lose touch with your own power and you become more and more confused. And it could easily
happen that what now looks like miraculous technology could, within two generations,
could lead, I'm not saying that it will and we are here now so there's hope, it could
lead to a complete breakdown of civilization. [chuckles]
So here you have this miraculous technology and two generations later all humans walk
around like zombies --
[laughter]
It could happen, it's an idea for a science fiction novel perhaps, but it could happen
because it's neither good nor bad. If we are not careful it could draw us in to such an
extent that we lose ourselves in our own creation; that we have created something that's an old
mythological theme. We create a kind of entity that becomes a monster and then our own creation
devours us; that could happen, it doesn't have to happen.
So this is I believe why I've come here as a little warning: [laughs]
[laughter]
if you're not careful then what looks so wonderful here could turn out to be a monster, but it
doesn't have to be; it could turn into something wonderful that contributes to the awakening
of humanity. We need to recognize its dangers; the danger is that this screen that you look
at of course connects with your mind, it links into your mind and then you link into the
collective mind on the screen and it grows and grows, the noise grows and grows and you
become more and more confused and completely uncentered.
[laughter]
You walk around, I mean youngsters who are so addicted to their screen, they can't give
attention anymore to another human being: to their parents or others. There's always
something okay --
what?
[laughter]
I have an iPhone I have to hide this here.
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: What?
That's see why it's so vital for humans if you work with your screen all the time then
what do you do? You have to recognize the danger and you have to give yourself some
space many times during the day even if it's just for one minute at a time. Give yourself
space so that a balance arises between that interaction with the screen, which is the
collective mind, and connectedness with being is a way we could put it.
So I suggest, I sometimes suggest to people to put a flower or a potted flower next to
their computer screen so that from time to time they look at that for half a minute,
even a few seconds, and really look or learn to take a breath, a conscious in and out breath,
let's call that a mini meditation.
Meditation is very helpful for many people, not for everybody. If you find it hard to
meditate use mini meditations; one mini meditation is one conscious breath. What does that mean,
conscious breath? It means you look away from the screen, if you can look at something natural,
a plant or the sky, but if not that's fine, look at a light, artificial light whatever
it is, and breathe in and follow the breath with your attention into the body and then
follow it with your attention as it flows out of the body. What does that do? It takes
attention away from thought and puts it into the body. In other words, it creates a space
in your consciousness because while you are following the breath with your attention you're
not thinking and when you're not thinking but you haven't gone to sleep, you've created
a space in your consciousness and there, that's it. So that's just one conscious breath occasionally,
two is even better or three, but that's fine --
[laughter]
that's enough. And of course that's the oldest, one of the oldest forms of meditation is conscious
breaths, probably already recommended by the Buddha who is supposed to have said, "Just
be conscious of your breaths for one hour and you'll be totally enlightened." But if
you miss just one you have to go back to the beginning.
[laughter]
And feeling the inner body, if you don't have, nature is very helpful to take you out of
your mind although many people walk around nature and they're still in their minds, but
if you can interact with the natural world: the trees, the park, the beach, the mountain,
the forest walking occasionally and pay attention, truly pay attention to what you see without
interpreting, that can bring you into connectedness with being and into the present moment.
Your dog, wonderful thing I noticed here is people are allowed to bring their dogs. That
makes an enormous difference to the energy field, not to every home and to the company
when you interact with a dog there's a moment when you're not actually thinking that's why
it feels so good because you know the dog is not thinking about you.
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
Although you might have heard the saying, "Please, God, make me into the person that
my dog thinks I am."
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: The fact is the dog isn't thinking --
[laughter]
that's why the dog relates to you with unconditional love because a dog doesn't judge you and you
know that the dog doesn't judge you and therefore the dog does not stimulate your thinking mind,
it actually frees you for a moment from your thinking mind.
That's why people love, many people unless you have a phobia that's a different matter,
most people love interacting with a dog, cats also, but let's talk about dogs because they're
here in the company.
So when you pet a dog or even just look at a dog and their tail wags there's something
liberating there for a moment and that's why humans respond to the dog and you go, "Ah."
If you look very closely inside yourself at that moment, there's a moment when you're
not thinking when you're interacting with a dog, unless you're so obsessed with your
mind that you immediately judge the dog.
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: That can happen too --
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: I've met people like that. But for most people, it's a liberating thing
because the dog is nature; in its beauty and aliveness has not arrived yet at the stage
of thought that humans have had to go through so you experience that aliveness of nature
in the dog.
So okay you have that and if you don't have a dog that's fine too, you can feel nature
as the inner energy field in your body, and you can even practice on the computer screen.
While you're looking at something, see if you can be in two dimensions at the same time:
while you are looking, don't do it at first with something extremely demanding, but just
when there's something kind of routine thing you're checking on the screen, and see if
while you're looking you can feel the inner energy field of your body as you do perhaps
now in the background so to speak.
I recommend it as a kind of meditation; you can practice it when the screen, nothing's
happening on the screen first or put a flower on the screen [chuckles] and look at that
and see if you can at the same time feel the aliveness in your energy field that keeps
you rooted in being and then you don't lose yourself totally in the collective minds that
comes at your through the screen.
That's a beautiful, I highly recommend that; put a little reminder on your computer screen,
a little thing that says, "Inner body," or whatever else you want to call it so that
you remember and you will find you're more energized, it's extremely energizing to sense
that, to be connected with that. So one could call that the balance between doing and being
in your life because thinking is part of doing; doing is not just what you do physically,
doing, thinking is also a kind of doing but the human needs the two dimensions being and
doing and if balance is lost you could lose it in being but that's not the danger of our
civilization.
There may be some Indian yogis who get lost in being and don't want to get up anymore
because they're so happy in being that there's no need to get up anymore even put food in
their mouths, that's fine. I'm not talking to them, I would have to have a different
message for them.
[laughter]
But I'm talking to this civilization people who are lost or who get too much doing, which
really is thinking, there the balance is between being and doing, doesn't have to be 50/50,
20 percent [chuckles] it's hard put a figure to it but --
>>Bradley Horowitz: We like to measure things.
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: I know, yeah.
[laughter]
So 25 percent being, 75 percent doing and you're doing very well.
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
>>Eckhart Tolle: Even 10 percent being would make your life much easier and much more enjoyable.
>>Bradley Horowitz: I wanna remind the Googlers this dual presence technique of being and
doing, please don't do that while coding on the GFS, BigTable, or Megastore systems.
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: I don't know what you're talking about.
>>Bradley Horowitz: Inside joke.
[laughter]
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
>>Bradley Horowitz: I do have a question: you've talked, I think most of us are engineers
and technologists and we live a lot in the realm of thoughts and ideas and in our head
and not necessarily in our being. My wife has also described to me these things called
feelings --
[laughter]
that some people have as well. [chuckles] Could you speak about feelings of anger and
frustration and happiness and how they relate to this experience of being?
>>Eckhart Tolle: Yes. Sometimes words are used in a loose way and sometimes what I just
described, I sometimes call it feeling the inner body, that word is a very vague word
so it can be used to describe what we were just talking about, feeling the inner body.
But then there's a different kind of feeling and that's feeling an emotion for example
that arises. So there's basically there's thoughts, let's look at your entire life,
your entire life consists of basically sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotions. I think
that's about it, right? Sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions put them together and mix
them up, that's my life.
[laughter]
Okay. So that applies to everybody. Now the particular mixture differs from person to
person. What exactly goes into the sense perceptions and the thoughts and emotions varies slightly
from person to person, but basically that's the mixture.
Now the question is you can't escape that of course that's normal life. Is there anything
else? Sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, okay, let's see; there must be something else
because how do I know that there's sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotions? Is the ability to
recognize, to have a sense perception based on thinking? No, because to have a sense perception
you don't really need to think you can just look and see.
So what else is there and this is a key thing, there is something else about sense perceptions,
thoughts, and emotions which is we could call it an awareness that there is a sense perception,
there is an emotion, there is a thought and that is, we could call that pure consciousness.
Otherwise, how could you have a sense perception?
So there is something there that enables sense perceptions to be there, that enables a thought
to be there, that enables an emotion to be there and that is the thing that in most humans
is hidden, in order words, they don't know it's there [chuckles] because that is presence
which we could also call consciousness, which we could also call awareness.
And that is the spiritual dimension and that is the awakening once you realize that that
is there, we could also describe that as the space for all those other things.
So let's say, let's compare this room to your consciousness and then we say, "Okay, there's
the furniture in the room, there's the bodies in the room, and there are the other lights
in this room; those things are in this room. So if I asked you to describe the room you
would probably describe it in terms of the furniture in it, the walls, the ceiling, whatever
you see. Yet, when you describe that room you would miss the most essential thing about
this room because it's so obvious that you miss it which is the space that really is
the essence of this room isn't the walls or the ceiling or the floor, the furniture or
the bodies in this room; the essence of this room is the space in this room. [chuckles]
But space is not something tangible that you can say, "Ah there it is." Where?
And the same thing applies to inside. The space of consciousness is the very thing that
enables everything else to be but it's very much like the fish in water that says, "Why
are you always talking about water, you haven't shown it to me yet," says one fish to the
other. The other fish is a spiritual teacher.
[laughter]
"So what water are you talking about? Where? What water?" And of course you can't, it's
everywhere; it's inside you, it's outside you. [chuckles] But the amazing thing is you
can be aware of it but not as an object but as the awareness itself.
"Ah.
I got it now, I got it." But you can't say what it is. You can't say, "There it is."
That reminds me of something I read in the New Testament where He said, "The Kingdom
of Heaven does not come with signs to be perceived. You cannot say, 'It's over here,' or 'It's
over there.' But truly I tell you the Kingdom of heaven is within you." Somebody said that
2,000 years ago, but very few people in the churches understand the depth of it. [chuckles]
It gets completely misinterpreted. [chuckles] But that's the deepest spiritual teaching.
Now that Kingdom of Heaven, that's spaciousness that's in you, it cannot be observed as if
it were a chair because it is the observing agent, it is that which makes all observation
possible. So it cannot become an object to itself because it is the eternal subject,
the I; consciousness itself, the light of the source you could call it; the light of
God, the light of the One. The ancient Greek philosopher called it the One.
It's a beautiful term. And the Buddha didn't call it anything because he said, "If I call
it something people will make it into some idol, so better not call it anything." So
when they asked the Buddha, "What about God?" What they say when he was asked that question
he kept noble silence. And of course then noble silence itself is the state of presence.
So they asked the Buddha, "Tell us about God." And he went --
And that's the answer. [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: So you've given us some clues on how to explore this within ourselves.
You mentioned changing the balance and things we could do with the breath and a note on
our computer monitor and looking at nature, these are some very practical suggestions.
I often find for myself that the time when I would probably most benefit from connecting
to that part of myself is the time when I'm least able to. It's the time when I'm very
activated and I'm either emotional about something or lost in thought or in the heat of the moment.
Do you have any suggestions for how to sort of find that even in the midst of these sort
of challenges that come along throughout life?
>>Eckhart Tolle: First I recommend that you practice when you're not being challenged
because if you can't do it then, then when you're being challenged it's impossible. So
first you practice when you're relatively undisturbed and there's a moment after getting
up or you take a short break in your normal daily routine or several short breaks, one
minute breaks, half minute breaks.
So when you're not being challenged then you bring in that awareness, you become the awareness,
you go into the present moment perhaps as I described just now starting with sense perceptions;
become alert. An alertness is required to truly perceive things, and immediately things
become more alive and less problematic when you go into sense perception because the problematic
dimension is in the head. And you go into sense perception suddenly you have into the
present moment and in the present moment problems disappear. Isn't that strange? The mind says,
"Well, I still have them." Yeah, when you start thinking about them you have them again.
But when you're not thinking about them you have no problems. Now some of you will argue
with that but let me explain.
You have situations in your life that can be challenging and you have to deal with these
situations but the only place where you can deal the challenging situations is in the
present moment. And dealing with a challenging situation in the present moment is not a problem,
you're dealing with a challenging situation, you're facing it, you're looking at it, and
that looking is important what I call looking really is putting your attention on it which
is the power of consciousness. And while you're looking, you're not thinking.
Every person who has achieved mastery in any field knows what I mean by looking because
there's an absolute presence and then that person does what he or she does. It flows
from that presence. So you look, there's no problem; problem is when you dwell mentally
on something that will happen, could happen, might happen; a problem is something I have
to face next week but not now and you're totally absorbed in that, that's problem.
An interesting thing I may have even written that in The Power of Now, if you think you
have problems ask yourself, "What problem do I have at this moment?" But this moment
really means this moment. And then you have to go, "Hum, well I've got my wife, my ex-wife
is suing me, I'm about to lose my home, uh --
a person close to me is ill, I might lose my job, I have to look for a new job." Okay
what problem do you have at this moment?
You're breathing, feeling the aliveness in the body, looking around, well at this moment
I don't actually have a problem. You have to then admit, if you really go into the present
moment the problem cannot survive in the present moment. [chuckles] That's an amazing realization.
Doesn't mean that you no longer deal with what you need to deal with, you deal with
it when the moment comes more effectively when you don't waste your life energy in the
mental realm of creating problems that you cannot be dealt with at this moment.
And if you wake up in the middle of the might thinking about your problems and what you
can do about them it's extremely unlikely that you find any solution by worrying at
four o'clock in the morning about it. But if you became still at four o'clock in the
morning and wake up and go into the inner energy field of the body rather than thinking
about your problems, in other words, leave the dimension of problems, come deeply into
the present moment, then perhaps the next morning when you wake up you suddenly say,
"Oh I know what I have to do now. I know how I can deal with it now." And the right course
of action happens because you've gone there but not through the problem making faculty
in the human mind.
So again coming back to your question when things are, when you're not being challenged
practice it and then when you are being challenged by little things that goes wrong so to speak
in daily life tends to happen, you might have noticed things don't always go according to
your expectations, sometimes you miss the bus or something you miss the plane or something
else goes wrong, it tends to happen actually quite a lot; it seems to be part of life.
By the way it's the reason why people go to see movies because the substructure of every
movie that you see we could call it, it applies to virtually every movie you see if you can
examine any movie you see what actually happens in the movie, in fact I can describe every
movie to you in three words, "Something goes wrong."
[laughter]
[chuckles] Because there wouldn't be a movie otherwise,
[laughter]
nothing would happen. Nobody would evolve, everything would be dead.
But in your own life you complain so you see movies to see something go wrong but when
it happens in your own life you complain, not you personally you've transcended it perhaps
already --
[laughter]
but so the strange thing is things are not meant not to go wrong; going wrong is part
of the totality of how life experiences itself. If things didn't go wrong it would be very
uninteresting and nobody would evolve because people only evolve through the challenges
that they encounter.
And in a good movie the protagonist or the character changes as he or she faces that
which goes wrong in the movie. In a bad movie the character does not go through any changes,
that which goes wrong is only solved on an external level, in the end the bad guy is
killed and that's the end of the movie but nothing else happens. [chuckles]
So something going wrong is part of how life experiences itself. And again you can then
bring awareness to that so that you don't always fall into reactivity when something
goes wrong, but you immediately align with it.
Or when people behave in a way that you find offensive or they behave in a way that they
create difficulties for you because you wanted this and they want something else, you don't
have to go into hostility or opposition. You can immediately say, "Oh that seems to me,
this is what is and then how can I approach that without the negativity and just accept
that something has gone wrong?" It's not wrong at all, it's called life. [chuckles] So, something
going wrong really what it means is it's called life.
So you welcome every little challenge so it's a shift in attitude and then your practice
becomes easier when you see you can almost, almost welcome when things happen --
>>Bradley Horowitz: [chuckles]
>>Eckhart Tolle: that before you called things going wrong; little things and later big things.
"Oh okay." And then you evolve just as a character in a good movie.
I gave a talk, I'm talking about this now because a week ago I was in L.A. 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 the, oh 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," --
[laughter]
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.
[laughter]
Not a transformational but entertaining movie. And then many 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 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 that probably shows his
own evolution of his own consciousness from the early stage to the later stage. But here
this really is 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. [chuckles]
>>Bradley Horowitz: So if there's hope for the movie industry there's certainly hope
for us I think.
>>Eckhart Tolle: [laughs]
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: So we're gonna take the time we have left and take questions both
from the Google Moderator online system as well as live in the room here. There is one
mic in the center and so if you have a question you can approach that mic, and if the technicians
could get the Google Moderator questions up on the monitor here too that would be helpful.
And why don't you introduce yourself and maybe what you do at Google and then ask the question.
>>Unika: Sure. My name is Unika and I do marketing so I'm one of the, you mentioned there's lots
of engineers, I'm one of those people that agrees with you and all those codes and terms
you mentioned I have no clue what you meant earlier.
>>Bradley Horowitz: [chuckles]
>>Female #1: So I just wanted to know about your journey. You had explained a little bit
in The Power of Now about the nightmare waking up when you were 29, 30 and I just would love
to hear about it. How you went from that state of anxiety into where you are right now.
>>Eckhart Tolle: Well as I, for most people the shift is a gradual process from one state
of consciousness to another and occasionally it happens in some people as it happened to
me that it happened virtually overnight, the shift from one state of consciousness to another.
And I was deeply depressed for many years and close to suicide several times and that
night as I describe in The Power of Now at the beginning, I dis-identified from the thinking
mind. I didn't know that that was what was happening, it just happened. "I can't live
with myself any longer," I thought, "It's so dreadful; I can't live with myself any
longer." And then suddenly an awareness came in, I didn't know it was called awareness,
an awareness came in and looked at the thought and the thought seemed suddenly looked very
strange; the thought seemed to consist of two people, I and myself. [chuckles] "I can't
live with myself." So then another thought came, "Am I one or two and who am I and who
is that self that I can't live with?"
That's almost a Zen-like question.
[laughter]
And like all Zen questions, it didn't really have an answer on the conceptual level. So
on the conceptual level, I didn't get an answer but the answer was that the myself and the
I suddenly separated. And I realized, although I couldn't have explained it then, that the
myself was a mind-created entity, the me, the poor little unhappy me, it was consisted
of mind movement, and identity, a mental identity of an unhappy human being with an unhappy
history and a very uncertain future. That probably applies to many humans, not if you
work at Google, but --
[laughter]
There was a separation and what was, there was an I suddenly that saw that and that I
years later I realized what that I was, it was consciousness itself.
So before there was consciousness and thinking forming a unity; my consciousness was trapped
in my thinking. Through the suffering at that night and looking at that sentence the consciousness
separated itself from the movement of thinking and the self that I couldn't live with was
not being sustained anymore by consciousness and it kind of crumbled. That was a false
self that crumbled and what was left was simply a space of awareness.
And the next morning I felt very peaceful, never felt that peaceful before, nothing had
changed in my environment and I couldn't understand it. It took probably at least three, four
years before I could begin to understand what had happened. All I realized I'm suddenly
so peaceful, the whole world is peaceful, what's happened? [chuckles]
So the mind itself had dissolved and later I talked to some Buddhist monks and others
and through listening to them I realized when they talked about the teaching of the Buddha,
later I also realized that Jesus was talking about the same thing, but I realized the Buddha
talked about the delusional self, the unreality of the self, that the self is not real as
it's called, he taught there is no self really. Anatta is the word in the Pali language in
the Buddhist teaching; it's an illusion that self is an illusion. And so when I talked
to Buddhist monks I began to realize, it was three years later, "Oh that must be what happened,
this must be why I feel so peaceful." [chuckles]
So understanding came much later, it kind of just happened. And then it became a teaching.
So I'm now showing to people this is something that you can, that can happen in your life.
But for most people it's a gradual process of dis-identification from the thinking mind
which doesn't mean you don't think anymore; it just means your identity or your self is
isn't trapped in it so the thinking is free of self and it's very liberating. And you,
essentially, who you feel yourself to be and who I feel myself to be is not to do with
the physical form or my personal history or what I have achieved in life, fortunately,
because otherwise you get unhappy.
For many years, before I wrote The Power of Now and it became successful, I was basically
a failure [chuckles] in the eyes of the world. So he's already almost 50 and what has he
achieved? My Mom said, "You have thrown away your life. You had so many possibilities in
your life. You walked out of graduate school in Cambridge. Why did you walk out of there?"
My Mom and many other people said, "This person has failed in life; he has no job, he has
no insurance policies --
[laughter]
nothing; no pension plan --
[laughter]
just almost nothing in the bank. Failure"
And then a few years later as people bought The Power of Now and became a bestseller,
"Oh, a big success."
Okay, if I had derived my identity at that time from what the world was telling me or
my mind would have told me if I had been listening to my mind, I would have been very unhappy
and I didn't so I was fine because my identity wasn't derived from that anymore.
And fortunately even when in the eyes of the world I suddenly became a success I don't
want to derive my identity from that, it's a cheap substitute for who I really am. So
I don't see, I don't derive, the satisfaction that comes is the satisfaction that the work
that's happening, the teaching that's happening is transforming people's lives; that's very
satisfying. I don't get any personal satisfaction though because I don't feel it as this separate
me produced it.
>>female #1: Thank you.
>>Eckhart Tolle: Thanks.
>>Bradley Horowitz: I have a question about that. You mentioned for you the transformation
came quite suddenly and for others it happens more gradually. Do you have any sense of why
that is? Is it because you had bottomed out and were having these feelings or is it because
of a certain ripeness that had brought you to that moment or --
>>Eckhart Tolle: Yes.
>>Bradley Horowitz: is it just inexplicable?
>>Eckhart Tolle: I don't have the answer to that. I don't know why some people have said,
"Well, it must have something to do with past lifetimes," maybe, or whatever it is but I
don't have, or maybe I suffered more deeply than others, I don't know. I think there are
many people who suffered deeply so I don't have the answer to that.
>>Bradley Horowitz: Thank you.
>>Eckhart Tolle: I'm quoting the Dalai Lama who loves saying, "I don't know."
[laughter]
But usually after he says that he starts talking and then the answer's actually quite meaningful.
[laughter]
But the wonderful thing is, really what he's starting with is a space, "I don't know."
And then something comes.
[laughter]
But he doesn't say, "Yeah, I know."
Probably Socrates, if you have read any Plato, ancient Greek philosophy, Socrates also taught
in that way. Although in Plato, perhaps I'm only talking to a few people here, [chuckles]
in Plato, Socrates, the way he teaches is, he continuously when reported by Plato he
teaches as if he didn't know. So he asks these questions, people ask him a question then
he asks, "Well, what do you think, how is this?" In Plato, Socrates pretends not to
know but I believe the real Socrates, who never wrote anything, the real Socrates actually
came from that place of not knowing but that was misinterpreted by Plato as if Socrates
were pretending not to know. But let's not go into deeply into that.
[laughter]
>>Female #2: Hello.
>>Eckhart Tolle: Hello.
>>Mary: My name's Mary, I work in HR.
So here at Google they have this really wonderful class called Search Inside Yourself, created
by Meng, whom I believe you met with. And yesterday was our last class and we talked
about compassion and having compassion for the world. So I work in HR so all us HR people
have lots of compassion for other people because it's our job.
>>Eckhart Tolle: [chuckles]
>>Mary: [laughs] But we also work at Google and Googlers are sort of a high achieving
bunch. Not only high achieving in the eyes of the world but high achieving to ourselves,
meaning did I get up out of bed today and what did I accomplish? If I didn't accomplish
anything I'm a failure to myself. So I was wondering if you had any advice for those
of us who don't have as much compassion for ourselves?
>>Eckhart Tolle: Okay, thanks.
Well, yes, compassion for yourself of course is as important as compassion for others.
Often I get asked questions like people who did something that they now realize was deeply
wrong in the past, sometimes people ask questions about they brought up their children in a
way that they now realize was not very conscious, and so they may have caused suffering to their
children or other people find they have caused suffering to loved ones and they now realize
that what they did was wrong. And again, I say, this is an example where you need to
be compassionate with yourself because no human being can act beyond their level of
consciousness; so that was your level of consciousness at the time and you could not go beyond that.
And again here to make demands upon yourself up to a point it might be a good thing as
long as you enjoy it, it's a wonderful thing. When the enjoyment of what you're doing is
lost then you have to be careful because there you have to come to a stop and say, "Okay
there's something here that's not right because I'm no longer enjoying what I'm doing." That
really, that's the danger and so as long as you enjoy you don't even need compassion.
Some people have a very active mind, maybe that's what Freud called the super ego or
some other entity that criticizes you. Some people have a particular function in their
minds that's very critical of themselves. [chuckles] Perhaps everybody has it to some
degree but some people have it to a high degree and that's a dreadful thing to live with;
living with a voice in your head that continually criticizes you and tells you, "You haven't
done well enough, you're not good enough, you should have done better." I mean if you
had to live with a person like that you would leave.
[laughter]
I mean it would be horrible to live with a person who continuously tells you these things
but if that thing is stuck in your head what can you do?
[laughter]
Now what you can do is to become aware that all that it is it's a particular pattern in
your mind, it's a particular way in which your mind works. And so you could call it
a sub personality but what it really is it's a mind pattern that operates in you and when
you bring awareness to it you can recognize it as a mind pattern in you. In other words
you no longer believe every thought that arises that it says; you recognize it's an old pattern
that says the same thing that it said five years ago or ten years ago and it says that
all the time and you recognize it.
In order words, you're not trapped in the thoughts anymore, this is again the whole
thing we are talking about, you don't believe in every thought that comes into your head.
What that really means is there's an awareness beyond the thought and you realize there's
the voice in my head saying this again, that's all it is. And when you don't energize it
with your identification it begins to subside. In this way you become free of this dreadful
burden of having that thing in your head talking to you and making your life miserable.
But what matters is the awareness needs to be there that frees you because then you become
the awareness rather than being the thought or being trapped in the thought or possessed
by the thought.
Again there's a movie that many of you have probably seen called A Beautiful Mind; it's
about the scientist, it's actually based on a real person what happened to him, quite
a genius in his field but he developed delusions, he saw people that weren't there, whatever
it's called clinically schizophrenia whatever.
And the great thing about the movie is the viewer up to the point where the protagonists
realizes that these things are illusions the viewer of the movie doesn't know it either;
the viewer participates in the illusions of the protagonist, he believes these people
are real too until suddenly the protagonist realizes, "Oh my God, I'm seeing things that
are not there," and then he continues to see these things but suddenly there's an awareness
in him.
And so although these people still appear to him that are not really there there's an
awareness in him there that he's no longer totally reactive to them, he doesn't feed
them with his reaction and gradually they subside over years, it takes years for them
to subside. But the decisive point is, although the word is never mentioned, the decisive
point is the awareness, "Wow."
And that's the same thing that applies to any pattern in the human mind not just a totally
insane pattern; bring awareness to it so that you're not tortured by that. And real compassion
always arises out of awareness anyway. Yeah.
>>Bradley Horowitz: My childhood violin teacher used to shake his finger at me and say, "You
hear but you don't listen."
>>Eckhart Tolle: [chuckles]
>>Bradley Horowitz: And he didn't mean it as a compliment but it seems like this may
be the technique for --
>>Eckhart Tolle: Yes.
>>Bradley Horowitz: dealing with the inner critic.
>>Eckhart Tolle: Ah, yes, very good, yes.
[laughter]
>>Bradley Horowitz: [laughs]
Yes.
>>male #1: Hi, thank you first Eckhart for coming.
>>Bradley Horowitz: Tip the microphone.
>>male #1: Oh.
>>Bradley Horowitz: Yeah, thank you.
>>male #1: I wanted to ask you it seems like the state that you're talking about of being
at peace and being in the moment is, it's a very appealing state that you feel more
in touch, and I'm wondering why society or people, why is there this attraction to distraction?
And what is it about us that leads us to develop these systems that take us away from that?
>>Eckhart Tolle: Distractions, excitement, stimulus are kinds of drugs or substitutes
for the true feeling of aliveness within yourself. So in the absence of that true feeling of
aliveness within yourself which we could call connectedness with being, connectedness with
source, you have to look, you look to the outside for something to make you feel more
alive because when you're totally trapped in your thinking mind there's a lack of aliveness,
there's a sense that something fundamental is missing in my life; it's an unconscious
sense for many people.
But that is the basis for many people's lives is actually a sense of lack and that's an
amazing thing if you really look at that, that the basis for your life is there's something
missing. And there are millions of people on the planet who live their lives on that
basis without even fully recognizing it as if continuously they were telling themselves
and certainly feeling, "Something missing here." [chuckles] So they always, "How can
I fill that thing that's missing," they don't know what's missing but there's, it may sound
familiar to some of you because it's such a prevalent mind pattern, "Something missing,
I need something."
And of course what's missing is the true senses of connectedness with being, with aliveness.
And then of course you look for, "Okay what's the next fix that I can get?" And then you're
kind of you become a little bit greedy and addictive for stimulus, that's why the bad
movies they produce more and more things that stimulated more and more into violence because
at least you get to substitute feeling of aliveness and then you look for the next fix;
some people get it in drugs or alcohol.
It's almost like needing to suck up something to fill that thing that's missing or you're
looking to another human being to fill it, sex, where is the next, or even the next affair,
the excitement that comes from you just starting into a love affair, "Wow now it's really happening."
Of course and then you start living together and then it goes downhill from there.
[laughter]
So that doesn't work and so always looking for something and not knowing that what you've
been looking for is actually already within, it's in you. It's taking attention instead
of out there looking for it, go in there.
This is why I start in The Power of Now giving the parable about a beggar sitting on an old
box holding his baseball cap, "Can you spare a dime, can you spare," and for years he sits
on this box, "Can you spare a dime," until finally somebody comes along and he doesn't
give him a dime and says, "What's in that box you're sitting on?" I'm telling that parable
in the book and he said, "Nothing I've been sitting on it for years, it's just an old
box." And the man says, "Well, look inside." And finally he gets, "Okay," and it's full
of gold, he's been sitting on it for years begging [chuckles]. It's just a little parable.
Of course the real thing is not even close to you it's essentially part of who you are
so that's the reason why people, people also look, they even look for stimulus in drama
in relationships because it makes them feel, "well at least we're still alive, we're fighting
we must be alive." [laughs]
Thanks.
>>male #1: Thank you.
>>Bradley Horowitz: I think we'll have time just for one more question.
>>Alex: Hey, my name is Alex, I am an equipment maintenance tech so I keep rooms like this
operational.
So you gave us some very practical things to try to rid ourselves of distraction. I'm
curious about another issue really strong emotion. For example, like right now I'm like
nervous, there's no reason to be nervous, nothing bad could possibly happen. How do
you overcome emotions like that and jealousy, hatred, any strong emotion? Do you have any
practical tips that we could try for that?
Thank you.
>>Eckhart Tolle: Well, first it's helpful to see the connection which is usually the
case between the particular thoughts that you are thinking and the emotion that you
feel. Most of the time the emotions are caused by particular patterns in your mind, for example,
anxiety is caused by thinking about possible future things that may happen or things that
you want to happen but they may not happen, you may not get what you want, you may not
get what you need, you may lose what you already have; these things are all mind patterns that
create fear.
So very often it is the thought that creates the emotion and the thought creates the emotion
because you are totally, you totally believe in the thought, in other words, you're totally
identified with the thought then the body responds as if the thought were reality. "I
might lose my job." If you think that you wake up in the middle of the night and then
you start thinking more thoughts on those lines, the body can't tell the difference,
the body kind of responds to the thoughts that go through your mind, they affect the
physiology of the body. I mean if you doubt that think of biting into a lemon and you'll
find saliva accumulating in your mouth, [chuckles] so what you think affects the body. The body
believes your thoughts to be real so when you think that you might lose your job, you've
lost your job already according to the body and you're destitute and that's how the body
reacts and that's how the emotion is created.
So it's often then by looking, seeing a thought as untrue that you actually begin to become
free. You can only see it as untrue if there's an awareness there that is aware that there
is a thought; without the awareness there's only the thought. The thought then swallows
up your entire consciousness and there's nothing else you can do then. But with awareness:
here's the awareness and here's the thought and then the thought may still operate for
a while but it's not empowered anymore and the emotion then is also going to weaken.
There may be times when there's not much thought as in this, when you just said when you came
up to the microphone, you felt nervous, perhaps you didn't have any particular thought on
this occasion, you just became nervous because many people when they go up to a microphone
and speak in public feel nervous. And again, in these cases the question of simply allowing,
acknowledging the emotion and allowing it to be there, as I sometimes put it you become
the space for it; you allow it to be there.
So you could step up to the microphone, it's actually what you said is very helpful when
you go to the mic and you start by saying, "I feel nervous, the palms of my hands are
sweaty because I'm here." It's a beginning of allowing it to be there without feeling
that I shouldn't be feeling nervous then you feel even more nervous.
But if you allow the emotion to be there, there comes a little space around it and there's
an aware space, yes, there's nervousness, but there is an awareness around it, so you're
not totally in the nervousness, you allow it. And when you share it with others it's
even, it's a lovely thing when you share any emotion in that way with others rather than
inflicting your emotion on them and saying, "You did that to me." But when you say, "When
you said that, this is what I felt," there's an awareness there rather than, "You make
me feel this." You can say, "When you said that, this is what I felt," or "At this moment,
this is what I feel."
Everybody loves that and there's an honesty with that rather than coming up to the microphone
and pretending not to be nervous; it's actually much more powerful and you connect more deeply
if you ever go into public speaking, perhaps you will --
[laughter]
you connect much more deeply to the audience when, instead of hiding the fact that you're
nervous you start off by saying, "I feel really nervous," then you connect with everybody.
If you're pretending you don't connect.
So again, just brief summary, see what thoughts are causing the emotion which is often the
case or in other cases, if an emotion just arises allow it to be, be the space for it,
and it's part of your experience of the present moment and you might as well say yes to it
because whatever arises in the present moment is as it is already, whether you argue with
it or not. The present moment is always as it is and that's the is-ness, and when you
become friendly with the is-ness that in itself is a transformation of consciousness.
>>Bradley Horowitz: So there's a lot of people to thank. I wanna start by thanking those
that tuned in on the webcast, I wanna thank all of you Googlers who chose to take your
afternoon and spend it here with us, I wanna thank Rich and the Learning and Development
Team here at Google who make events like this possible, and of course I wanna thank Eckhart
on behalf of all of us.
Thank you for your wisdom, thank you for your being, and also your doing in the world, your
choice to share this knowledge with us. You've given us a lot to think about and more importantly
the ability not to think at all.
>>Eckhart Tolle: [chuckles]
[laughter]
Thank you.
[applause]