Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher, author of Power of Now, and for me, the person that most easily embodies the principles that they espouse. In this episode, we talk about the importance of living in the moment, and how we can live in a state of consciousness that allows us to live in the present moment, even in times of crisis. We talk about how important it is to align individual spiritual awakening with collective awakening, and why it s so important to live each and every day as if we were living in a time of crisis, where we move from a financial crisis to a pandemic crisis, into a war crisis, and what it means to live a life that is grounded in the now. And, of course, we have a Q&A at the end of the episode, where you can ask any question you have about life, love, or self-improvement. Stay Free AF is a charity that helps mentally ill people and drug addicts, and every penny we get we give to junkies, is going to help them get the help they need. If you want to help the Stay Free Foundation, that s the charity we get, you can get new merch including hoodies and t-shirts and journals! There s a link there in the description, and all of the merch we get is a link to the Strive Foundation, which we get to help junkies. Get ready, get ready to live the moment right now! by becoming a supporter of the StayFree Foundation, and get your own hoodie and journals here. You can get a discount code: STrive.fm/subcutaneous to receive 20% off the price of your first purchase, plus a discount of $50 or more when you become a patron. This offer valid through Paypal. Subscribe to StayFreeAF.org.ee/subscriber_tweet and receive a 20% discount when you sign up to the Stayfree AF membership starting on 1/27/19th, and you get 10% off your first month, and a discount on the second month only starts starting at $50/month, and 5% discount starts after that gets you get VIP access to $99/ VIP + VIP gets a discount, and they get 7 days of $99, VIP access, and I mean VIP access starts next week, they get $25, and 4GBR, and VIP gets VIP access.
00:00:25.000Remember, you can watch this show live on Rumble every single day.
00:00:30.000And all of the episodes we've recorded, they're over there on Rumble.
00:00:32.000You can see people's faces as they handle these questions.
00:00:36.000But today, it's time to talk to Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher, author of Power of Now, and for me, the person that most easily embodies the principles that they espouse.
00:01:11.000Sign up to Stay Free AF for exclusive access to watch weekly interviews being recorded, weekly meditations, lessons in breathwork from the likes of Beate Simpkin, or you can learn tapping also with Nick Ortner, and every single day we do a Q&A straight after our show on Rumble every weekday 10am PT, 1pm ET and 5pm GMT.
00:01:31.000Also, if you want to help the Stay Free Foundation, that's the charity we funded to help mentally ill people and drug addicts, You can get new merch including hoodies and t-shirts and journals.
00:01:40.000There's a link there in the description and every penny we get we give to junkies.
00:01:45.000But now it's time to talk to Eckhart Tolle.
00:01:47.000Get ready, get ready to live in the moment right now!
00:01:54.000What I'd love to frame our conversation around today, if I might, Eckhart, is the sense that we are living in a time of crisis, where we are lurching from one crisis to another, where we move from a financial crisis into a pandemic crisis, into a war crisis.
00:02:10.000How do we align individual spiritual awakening with collective awakening?
00:02:16.000And do you think that spiritual awakening, when attained, as it can only be in the present moment, means that we are somehow divorced or separate from
00:02:25.000community activity in the same way that we would be separate from sort of personal goals of the
00:02:30.000fulfillment of personal passions, say, do you have trouble squaring that circle?
00:02:36.000Well, we are certainly moving into turbulent times and perhaps it's helpful to become more aware of one's own
00:03:00.000That's the main thing, is to become aware that everything is experienced through your state of consciousness.
00:03:08.000And your state of consciousness determines the way in which you experience so-called reality.
00:03:16.000So you could divide, for example, your experience of reality into three parts.
00:03:24.000One is you experience reality through your past, which is of course all the things that have happened to you and all the things that make up your personality.
00:03:41.000They are accumulations, mental, emotional accumulations from the past.
00:03:46.000And that's who you consider yourself to be.
00:03:50.000That's part of your reality is your past or whatever happens even in the more recent past.
00:03:57.000Another part of your reality is the future.
00:04:00.000Many people are very much focused on the future.
00:04:17.000So we have the past as part of your reality, which makes up your identity in the sense of personal identity.
00:04:26.000You have the future, which you look to for fulfillment or liberation from a state of Insufficiency or lack, you look to the future for liberation, which is normal, you look to the future to become a more complete human being, to achieve or acquire this or that, that's all fine, and then you have the present moment, the immediate experience of the present moment, and that's often overlooked, because future and past have
00:05:02.000Obscure in the cases of, in most people's lives, future, past and future, past in the sense of carrying the weight of a personality that's based on the conditioning of your mind, and then the future in the sense of desperately needing to get somewhere, there's the hope of fulfillment, and at the same time there's the fear of non-fulfillment or loss, so the future is a two-edged sword, On the one hand, it promises fulfillment and it might give it to you.
00:05:37.000Or it's experienced as a threat of loss or something bad happening or death or whatever.
00:05:49.000So they tend to obscure the present moment.
00:05:51.000And then there's, I would add, a fourth thing that's only come into people's lives in the past decade.
00:05:59.000In the experience of reality, there's a virtual world of the reality.
00:06:06.000So there are many people these days who spend several hours a day focusing on the virtual reality of social media, whatever it is that they're engaged in, when they look at their screen.
00:06:19.000So we could say perhaps there's your screen reality, which for many people, unfortunately, especially young people, has actually become The main way in which they experience reality, and that's quite amazing.
00:06:39.000Until recently, it's only been past, future, and present moment.
00:06:43.000Now it's past, future, present moment, and then the virtual reality.
00:06:51.000So that's something that we need to be aware of.
00:06:56.000The spiritual dimension can only come into your life through awareness of the present moment reality, your immediate reality in the present moment here and now.
00:07:12.000That's the entry point into the spirituality.
00:07:14.000And that is often overlooked in people's lives.
00:07:18.000They overlook the most important thing there ever is, which is actually their immediate experience of this moment, which after all is all there is ever.
00:07:30.000So, past and future are actually experienced as mental formations.
00:07:39.000One could say that past and future don't really exist except as thoughts in your mind.
00:07:50.000Without the thoughts in your mind, There's no past and future.
00:09:00.000There were no mirrors, but he was just happy.
00:09:03.000One day he saw a very still pool of water and he looked into this pool of water and he saw his reflection.
00:09:13.000For the first time, he saw himself in the reflection of this water.
00:09:20.000And as the mythological tale goes, it says he fell in love with himself.
00:09:27.000When he saw himself, he saw that he was beautiful and he fell in love with himself.
00:09:34.000And after that he was never happy again.
00:09:38.000And this, there's enormous wisdom in that story because to me it tells the story, I sometimes Jokingly say it's the story of the first selfie, but really it tells of the beginning of the human ego.
00:09:53.000The human ego is the formulation of an image in your mind that you have of yourself.
00:10:00.000It consists of visual image and to a large extent A narrative that's connected, a story that you tell yourself, that you believe in, that you say, this is me, this is who I am.
00:10:15.000So you begin, as the ego developed, humans began to live with dividing themselves up into two.
00:10:24.000There's me and the image of the That I have of myself, and I live then through a mental image of myself.
00:10:32.000And so that is the split that happens.
00:10:35.000Perhaps this is what sometimes is described as the fall, the fall of humans into the egoic consciousness.
00:10:43.000And this is what we are still living with.
00:10:46.000And over the millennia, the ego has become stronger and stronger.
00:10:51.000So our Entire identity is then based on that mental image that we have of ourselves, which in most cases has now become a narrative.
00:11:07.000This narrative you call me, me and my life, you call it, people call it my life.
00:11:12.000And they don't realize when they call, when they say my life, they're talking about a story that they're telling themselves in their minds.
00:11:21.000People carry this burden of, because every life is so problematic, every life has is a problem.
00:11:31.000Many people's identity is experienced as a big problem and they're looking for a solution to this problem of me.
00:11:39.000Then you look to the future and occasionally it helps you a bit.
00:11:43.000The future enables you to do things, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:48.000But eventually, as you grow older, as I'm growing older, and I begin to realize the future is also very lethal.
00:12:10.000The universe gives you time to do things, to acquire things, to get better at this or that, and then this beautiful thing, time, that you need for everything, and you have it, and then it turns around and it starts killing you.
00:12:27.000It gives you everything and then it takes everything away.
00:12:30.000That is time and that is the world that we live in.
00:12:34.000I call it the horizontal dimension where things are.
00:12:44.000Humans live mainly through memory and anticipation.
00:12:50.000And what they don't realize is the primary importance of the present moment.
00:12:56.000That ultimate sanity, you have to seek that in the present moment rather than looking for it at some future point or in the virtual world.
00:13:13.000The virtual world is an amplification and an externalization of the egoic mind in many cases.
00:13:20.000The human mind gets amplified there and then you have it there on the screen.
00:13:26.000So I don't know what your initial question was, let's see if we can get back to that, but it's all connected.
00:13:34.000You once told me that in one of the conversations where I was troubling you having gotten your phone number by illicit means, that you said you can never be happy in the conceptual mind.
00:13:48.000You are trying to find happy in the conceptual mind and of course the future is ultimately conceptual, the past is conceptual, my identity as an individual, as a Male, the narcissus identity.
00:14:01.000I was very taken with your explanation of that myth in the pure pool of unbounded potentiality, the super state of all unconscious possibility, connected perhaps that a limitlessness, a choice is made to identify with form, whether that form is physical or thought form.
00:14:20.000I like that at this point of distinction and separation, this point of distinction, separation occurs.
00:14:28.000It reminded me too, as you alluded to, of the fall of humankind, of course regarded as expulsion from the garden, the garden being a cultivated space where everything is immediately available without requirement or recourse for the external.
00:14:46.000Some people, I suppose they're not of a spiritual persuasion, would seek to say that this mythic memory of the garden is born of our shared individual memory of a uteral life, where all of us live initially formless, then single-cellular, bi-cellular, where we live suspended and all of our needs are met by the Great Eternal Mother.
00:15:08.000And while we're on this sort of somewhat mythic pathway, Eckhart, I wondered if I My ask, as I felt you were on the brink of saying it when you talked about horizontal dimensionality of the function of the mythic symbol of the crucifix when it comes to enlightenment beyond Christ's ascension, is there a personal and relevant message for us in this image system?
00:15:38.000It's a very profound image And to appreciate it and understand it.
00:15:42.000You don't need to be a Christian to appreciate this deep wisdom embedded in that image.
00:15:53.000So, first of all, you have... If you came here as an extraterrestrial, well, they're probably here already, but... And if you saw for the first time... Don't think I haven't noticed your initials?
00:16:37.000So the central image of Christianity is the crucifixion, the man on the cross, which really is an image of suffering.
00:16:47.000The central image of Christianity is an image of suffering.
00:16:50.000In the same way that the central teaching of the Buddha is a teaching of the fact of human suffering, called dukkha, the primordial fact of human existence.
00:17:02.000The Buddha taught the primordial fact of human existence is the fact of dukkha.
00:17:10.000Buddha said wherever you go, whatever you do, sooner or later, sooner rather than later, you will encounter some form of suffering.
00:17:42.000The central image of Christianity is also an image of suffering, but it is also an image of The transcendence of suffering, because the crucifixion is the image of suffering, but it also points to the resurrection.
00:18:30.000In other words, it points to something that perhaps no human would have understood conceptually at the time, that the path of human evolution is the evolution through suffering.
00:18:47.000Eventually, we awaken and we transcend through the experience of suffering.
00:18:56.000And the Buddha, when he talked about Dukkha, he also added, he said literally, I teach suffering and the end of suffering, which means, he was saying, I show you how suffering arises, ultimately how the human mind creates it, I show you how suffering arises and I show you how it can be transcended.
00:19:28.000So the crucifixion is suffering and the transcendence of suffering.
00:19:33.000But there would be no awakening, spiritual awakening, if it weren't for the suffering that precedes it.
00:20:13.000I heard some gardeners, when they plant seeds or something, they sometimes, when the first The plant first sprouts, they put more soil on top of it.
00:20:26.000They say that, I talked to a gardener who did this and said, why are you putting more soil on top of this thing that's already sprouting?
00:20:33.000He said, then they have to struggle and then they become stronger.
00:20:39.000When they finally emerge, they are a stronger plant through the struggle.
00:20:44.000The struggle attracts more energy, more life energy.
00:20:50.000And so this is why humans never evolve in their comfort zone.
00:20:56.000No human has ever achieved deep insights or in evolutionary terms, no human has ever Experienced a deeper awakening in their comfort zone.
00:21:14.000Sitting on the sofa, they're drinking their beer, watching NetBinge, watching Netflix.
00:21:32.000Or they might think, when I have enough money I can go to a beautiful spa and out there.
00:21:39.000I will be pampered, I will get the purest food, I will get massages every day, and then I can actually dedicate my life to spiritual awakening.
00:21:50.000Those will be the ideal conditions for spiritual awakening.
00:21:53.000I wish I had the money to do that, they say, but of course the opposite is true.
00:21:58.000In their comfort zone, they would not awaken at all.
00:22:01.000They would gradually go to sleep, so to speak.
00:22:04.000And the ideal situation for your awakening is the very limitations you experience in your life at this moment in your life.
00:22:23.000Firstly, to your point there about the precondition of suffering as the natural environment for enlightenment, it came to me the idea of Marcus Aurelius in this reified position as an emperor and indeed a philosopher king, presumably able to achieve a degree of comfort due to his authority and power and yet living in that place of stoic wisdom.
00:22:45.000I'd like to also add to this because I know that I have to ask all my questions at once because I know I might not be speaking for a while after this, like there's the Marcus Aurelius in a reified position argument, then I want to add to that the idea of Epicureanism, the idea that Pleasure and hedonism can lead to some unbounded state and is this not a sort of an ascetic model that is about the denial of pleasure and the denial of the body?
00:23:12.000Where do you place of sex and sexuality on that spectra?
00:23:17.000But firstly, and I'd like you to cover all of this if you would, and you've still got a bit of question about the war left over from about half hour ago that's just warming on the stove for you in a Tupperware box to answer in a moment.
00:23:30.000And I'd also like to add that I want to talk to you about undifferentiated states because you used when talking about the sapling seedling metaphor that struggle attract you said, attracts more energy and I wonder where this
00:23:45.000attraction is from and where this attraction is going to. I also would like to recount a
00:23:50.000personal story if I may, Eckhart, that recently after doing a show late at night, which
00:23:56.000required of me that I be absolutely present in the moment in order for me to deliver what I was
00:24:01.000required to deliver. I had to function at a high state. After this, I was in this state afterwards.
00:24:08.000Another time when I was troubling you on the phone, you said to me, the minute you're not on the... you said the minute you leave the stage, you said you are no longer that person and that experience is over and you have lost that concept.
00:24:20.000I live in the velocity and momentum of that moment and still the next day after not sleeping well because my body wants to stay awake, it wants action, it wants...
00:24:29.000Essentially, if I may say, coitus and procreation.
00:24:32.000And the next morning, when I wake up, I still feel I'm still in it.
00:24:37.000I'm still in it, but it's sort of glorious.
00:24:40.000And as I drove to work the next day, when I see the bins, the garbage left out, you know, the garbage cans, which are like wheelie bins in this country, when I see them, I see them in a sort of a joyful state, like saintly, like it's Disney versions of trash cans, like they make me laugh.
00:24:56.000I see them as funny, as if they're talking to one another.
00:24:59.000And when I see the pigeons on a wire, it amuses me, and I notice how close it is, this sense of the vibrant, constant vivacity and non-separateness of things, how close it is to glory, how close it is to comedy, how close it is to beauty, to see momentarily behind the veil, how approximate it is also to insanity, To people that go, my television is talking to me, it's telling me that I've got to do this, I'm getting information from the news.
00:25:26.000And it reminded me of my experiences, although they were a long time ago now, of psychedelics, in my case just simple LSD, that whilst it was fearful and unstructured, and I was probably too young and not ready for those kind of experiences, that what I felt I now remember on LSD is non-separateness and that non-separateness was
00:25:45.000scary to know, oh my god this is all a concept, I'm not really me,
00:25:52.000this is the application of concepts to temporal circumstances
00:25:56.000what was that table before it was a table? What will it be in five years?
00:26:00.000What is five years? So I suppose I'm asking to you about these routes to
00:26:05.000First that Marcus Aurelius tag, reified position, how did he experience the struggle to come up with this sort of Stoic philosophy that he's a significant part of.
00:26:14.000What do you say about Epicureanism and the role of pleasure and is it not like because you know what about in Tantra in the Vedas where they say just go crazy man and live it all out.
00:26:24.000And what do you think also about These transcendent states that are achieved through psychedelics, whether or not they can be accessed, I'm guessing you say they do, whether or not you've ever taken any psychedelics, and if you understand what I'm saying about how close this is to a type of insanity, we talk about awakening, but isn't there a kind of danger in there, because obviously I'm very familiar with your personal awakening, but so that's just some questions, Eckhart Tolle.
00:26:50.000Yes, well, there are many questions and ultimately Probably boils down to one question.
00:27:00.000Every human is longing unconsciously, mostly unconsciously longing for self-transcendence.
00:27:09.000They somehow feel that they are not comfortable with themselves.
00:27:14.000They're not comfortable in their own skin.
00:27:16.000There's always in the background and sometimes in the foreground, there's a sense of something missing, something not quite right.
00:27:41.000So there's a longing for self-transcendence.
00:27:47.000And then they may seek self-transcendence in certain experiences, and certain experiences can give them a taste or a glimpse of temporary self-transcendence.
00:28:08.000You drink, you take a few, a whiskey, whatever you drink, and what does it do?
00:28:16.000You have the first one and you begin to feel, let's say this, you're a normal anxious person, Stressed, anxious, you've had a rough day, and your mind says, come on, you deserve a treat, get the bottle, and the mind, even if you have a problem with alcohol, the mind will convince you, okay, just one more, what else do I have in my life?
00:28:57.000So then what that does is, because all the anxiety was your mind continuously creating Anxious states, thinking anxious thoughts and creating anxious emotions.
00:29:13.000So that's a burden of the self, living with myself, this problematic self.
00:29:19.000After the first drink, mind activity slows down a little bit.
00:29:23.000And you go, oh, it feels a little better.
00:29:42.000Because the mind is slowing down even more.
00:29:46.000And so this does not happen in every case.
00:29:49.000There are some people, but that's another story I don't want to go into right now, some people actually become angry and aggressive when they drink.
00:30:00.000But many, many people Experience and ease.
00:30:07.000Life suddenly feels easier, more pleasant.
00:30:12.000And then they start, some people start moving or dancing or singing, then suddenly it's, they're becoming, it's a moment where they're becoming free of this problematic self.
00:30:23.000And then they think, oh, if I heard, I've had two or three, then another If I had another two or three, I would feel even better.
00:30:32.000But unfortunately that does not happen, because if they drink even more, gradually they are moving towards complete unconsciousness.
00:31:30.000And I could see it did something to my mind.
00:31:33.000I could feel a dulling, a kind of dulling of my mind.
00:31:37.000I would not want to repeat it because my normal state is so much more pleasant.
00:31:45.000Then I can see why for people who are burdened by this anxious mind or the problem-making mind, the egoic mind, they experience a moment of release.
00:31:58.000It gives them a glimpse of becoming a bit freer of the me, this always anxious or always regretting this or looking, fearing this, all the fear and anxiety.
00:32:39.000So I took some, and that was years ago.
00:32:46.000People experience in different ways, but what I experienced was an enormous intensification of sensory experience, like everything was, every sense was amplified.
00:32:59.000Like the sense of smell, the sense of touch, the visual sense, looking at an object.
00:33:05.000I could see walls in the room pulsating with energy and I can see how what it does It completely, it removes the thinking mind.
00:33:22.000And what's left is a pure experiencing of it.
00:33:29.000In that sense, it has certain similarities with the state of presence or the conscious, very conscious state of spiritual presence.
00:33:41.000Because in spiritual presence also the mind is still, But consciousness remains.
00:33:48.000The difference between all these things where people seek self-transcendence through drugs or alcohol or even sexual, the intense sexual pleasure will also stop your mind temporarily, not for too long.
00:35:41.000But that's, spiritually speaking, there are certain similarities with that, with these things that give you a glimpse of self-transcendence.
00:35:50.000And spiritually, spiritual awakening, you rise above thinking.
00:35:57.000But there are certain similarities between the two states.
00:36:01.000And the drug-induced temporary glimpses that people have can be helpful if you don't get addicted.
00:36:11.000Some people have started their spiritual life by taking acid once or twice or three times and then they started doing meditation and then they didn't need that anymore.
00:36:23.000There's no, there's no, the ultimate solution is not for us in falling below thinking.
00:36:30.000We cannot, we don't, we cannot regress.
00:37:11.000Our destiny is, the next stage in human evolution, is not to let go of thinking completely, no, thought is the most wonderful tool that there is, but not to seek an identity through the movement of thought, to find a deeper identity that is not That is not separate from thought, but is far deeper than thought.
00:37:37.000You could say, for example, the image I sometimes use is the movement of thought is like ripples on the surface of the ocean.
00:37:46.000The ripple is not different from the ocean.
00:37:56.000Let's say we are all rebels on the surface of the ocean as human beings.
00:38:01.000We are rebels on the surface of the ocean and most of these rebels on the surface of the ocean only know themselves as rebels.
00:38:10.000The form that they are as a rebel, the physical form and the mental form.
00:38:15.000And so they live on the horizontal plane, the surface of the ocean, and are surrounded by other ripples.
00:38:23.000And they feel threatened by other ripples, or they want to attract other ripples in order to become, to join it, become a bigger ripple.
00:38:32.000And that is the existence of the purely horizontal plane where most humans still live.
00:38:39.000And that I'd like to mention in connection with that the cross that you mentioned that there's another dimension to the image of the cross and because the cross is actually also a pre-christian or was already a pre-christian symbol the cross has the two dimensions the horizontal the intersection of the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension so you could say this the vertical dimension is where we live here in In the dimension of time and physical reality, and even our psychological reality, is the vertical dimension of life, past and future.
00:39:20.000You cannot escape time on the horizontal dimension.
00:39:25.000Then there's the possibility of realizing that there is a deeper dimension to life, Then the phenomenal existence that you experience here in the world of a manifest of physical and psychological manifestation, there is the vertical dimension.
00:39:45.000And the vertical dimension, going back to the ripple, what happens if the ripple suddenly realizes that it is not just a ripple?
00:39:53.000Yes, it is a ripple, but it's also an extension of the ocean.
00:39:59.000It's just a way in which the ocean manifests temporarily on the surface.
00:40:05.000And then if that ripple suddenly realizes, wow, I'm not just a ripple, suddenly the ripple can sense the vastness out of which it has come and the vastness to which it is still connected, always connected, ultimately always one with.
00:40:26.000And suddenly, The identity of the ripple, which is, in this analogy, it's a human being, of course, the identity of the ripple suddenly shifts from being exclusively identified with the physical and psychological form of me on the horizontal plane, it begins to identify with the ocean itself.
00:40:53.000Now, in human terms, let's put aside the analogy now, In human terms, that means the human being suddenly realizes that he or she, or they, or whatever, suddenly realizes they are not just the human, this is how I use the terminology that I now use, and they're not just human, they're also the being.
00:41:19.000The human is the personality lives on the horizontal dimension, the physical body, And the psychological entity that is the person or the personality.
00:42:17.000So, in that sense, we could summarize all spiritual experience or spiritual realization by saying that no matter what tradition, you begin to sense It's actually not that complicated.
00:42:47.000It's a sudden sensing, even if it's just come just a glimpse at first, that there is an animating presence within you that far transcends the person, but is not separate from the person.
00:43:01.000And not only is that animating presence in you, you can begin to... I hope it's not too mystical.
00:44:12.000And humans... Now, what is... I mentioned God.
00:44:15.000I don't usually mention God because there's so many misconceptions about God.
00:44:19.000Is this animating presence God, you could ask?
00:44:25.000By the way, to sense the animating presence, all that's required is for your mind for a moment to come to a cessation without loss of consciousness, so you're not falling below thought.
00:44:44.000And what's left, what is left, when the thinking mind stops for a moment, you're still aware.
00:44:50.000There's an awareness, you're still, you can sense perceptions, you're aware of everything, but you're not interpreting it.
00:44:57.000In other words, there's a stillness behind the sense perceptions, and that stillness behind sense perceptions is the awareness, or the consciousness, is another word for it.
00:45:08.000So you suddenly sense The consciousness that is the essence of your being, not that you have consciousness, you are consciousness.
00:45:21.000If you have it, then you are too, who are you?
00:45:31.000Your destiny is to realize that in this lifetime, And then live in connectedness with it, so that you're no longer confined only to the personal identity.
00:45:50.000There is a deeper identity in addition to that.
00:45:53.000Yes, you still have a personal identity, the narrative in your mind, Opinions, you can see in the contemporary world how people are identified with their opinions.
00:46:08.000The opinions, they become part of their identity and that's very dangerous.
00:46:14.000When opinion becomes identity, then you're lost in your mental positions and they become part of your ego.
00:46:22.000There was a Zen master who said, don't seek for the truth, just stop cherishing opinions.
00:46:30.000That was the Zen master's main teaching.
00:47:17.000Sir, it's difficult not to imagine that this process of concretising the present awareness with the opinion is not somehow, if not a deliberate project, then a fully immersive one in our culture at this time, that we are hemmed in to dominions of opinion, that we're We are held there, we are held in a space of external identification that we're encouraged almost to do it.
00:47:45.000When you invite us to, for a moment, not identify with our ever assessing and categorizing mind and to simply be present, I've once either read or experienced you suggesting Bring your awareness to the hands.
00:48:01.000You can feel that there is energy in your hands.
00:48:43.000These kind of concepts can be difficult.
00:48:45.000And I feel that perhaps the greatest, do you agree, Eckhart, the greatest ideological argument, ongoing one, is one of material rationalism, post-enlightenment thinking, that continually tethers us to the measurable.
00:49:00.000I can see how the great scientific and technological revolutions that led to the unbelievable instruments that we are currently utilizing also leads us to identify with that that can be measured.
00:49:13.000And there is something that is Unquantifiable about this prima materia to which you refer, this oceanic oneness, this beingness that it seems that we are all an expression of.
00:49:26.000In this time where we are obsessed narcissistically with our identity, not to challenge the individual identities that certain cultural groups may have had in adversity with other more oppressive cultural identity formats, but when we are wedded and welded to our individual identity, whether that's as me, Russell, or me, a man, or me as a white man.
00:49:49.000I think it becomes increasingly difficult for us to experience and live in accordance with what appears to be a principle of unity.
00:49:59.000And you said, interestingly, that we do not think it, we sense it.
00:50:04.000I've often wondered if the feeling of love was an awareness beyond the individual consciousness, as it were, the persona consciousness, of unity.
00:50:34.000Now, words are always limited, so when we use feeling, I use sensing rather than feeling to differentiate it from, you feel emotions too.
00:50:45.000Emotions come and go, and you can have conflicting emotions, you can laugh.
00:50:50.000On the emotional level, you can, what is called love, that's another word that has many meanings in many levels, Everybody has experienced, they love one person one day, and the next day they hate the same person.
00:51:07.000This is not uncommon in relationships.
00:51:12.000There's always, there's a wedding, which means you have found a person that makes you happy.
00:51:19.000And a few years later, there's a divorce, which means the very person that made you happy is now the person that makes you unhappy.
00:51:39.000So I didn't want to use feelings to describe this realization, the realization of that Dimension within you that one could call the unconditioned consciousness or pure consciousness.
00:52:29.000If you're able to listen to another person in that state of openness where you're not already formulating the next question, already mentally arguing with what the person is saying.
00:53:09.000There was a beautiful, there's this beautiful school of psychology, Carl Rogers, He created an American psychotherapist.
00:53:19.000His main teaching was for the therapist to be in that state of pure listening, which really implies that while you listened, you give your attention, yes, to the words, but you're not thinking while you listen.
00:53:47.000Yeah, feeling with sensing and thinking with awareness.
00:53:52.000Actually, Dan, who's operating the camera also, I do training with Dan and we once did a meditation where he said, move from mental activity to mental awareness, just awareness.
00:54:05.000So, Eckhart, I'm just going to invite now Subhi, who runs our social media here, who's going to, with your permission sir, pass on some of the questions from the people in our community.
00:54:15.000And to cover this moment, I'll say that one time, I know that I go there and I get there.
00:54:21.000That story I was describing about seeing the bins and the pigeons and seeing the great sort of playful beauty which I've I experience it intermittently.
00:54:32.000One time I in fact, using you of course as an example, I said to one of my meditation teachers who I love very much, Bobby Roth, who runs the David Lynch Foundation, I said, I get there.
00:55:16.000What does that sound like to you, that bit of information, Eckhart?
00:55:19.000Yes, it manifests differently to different people because it's like you're the lampshade.
00:55:30.000The lampshades filter the light in different ways.
00:55:34.000The light is the same, but then the light shines through the lampshade and gets filtered in different ways.
00:55:39.000So there's a multiplicity of humans through which the being that's behind the human manifests through the human.
00:55:53.000For example, spiritual teachings and teachers Zen, I love Zen teachings, the Japanese form of, well, originally Chinese and Japanese form of Buddhist teachings.
00:56:43.000And two years after having been so peaceful every day, living in London at the time, I was peaceful even on the Northern Line, which at the time was called the Misery Line.
00:57:02.000And then when I talked to that Zen monk, he said it's about cessation of thinking.
00:57:09.000Then I realized that's why I'm so peaceful.
00:57:11.000I didn't realize that actually my mind was much less active than before.
00:57:16.000All the superfluous thinking that created so much misery in my life, that had fallen away.
00:57:24.000So there was already, the amount of thinking I was doing had been reduced by, I don't know, difficultly expressing percentages, 70% or something, less thinking.
00:57:38.000I could still think, I could do, more than enough left to deal with things, I could still think.
00:57:45.000In fact, thinking eventually became more focused and more empowered than before.
00:57:52.000I was able to finally write a book and then another book because my thinking process became more empowered and more focused rather than this random thinking that creates so many absurd problems in one's life, many of which have no actual existence like all thoughts of anxiety for what might happen and all that
00:58:13.000thing. So the, that's the, it manifests differently.
00:58:21.000The Zen teachers, many of them, they have a lot of yang energy.
00:58:30.000They look quite fierce, traditionally, the Zen teachers in Japan.
00:58:35.000If you look at drawings, of famous Zen teachers they all they look at you like they don't look like some Christian saints so they look or the or even the Buddha itself has this lovely hint of a smile that you see in the some of the Buddha images the Buddha statues that you have the Buddha has a slight hint of a smile just oh the denty just they look at you like
00:59:30.000But again, it can manifest in different ways through different people.
00:59:36.000So it's better not to want to imitate any one human being, even if you think they have a lot to offer.
00:59:45.000The way in which it manifests through you will be different from the way it manifests through me or another person.
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