Being… with Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Within Video Gatherings)

Two recent Eckhart Tolle meetups brought Stillness Within members and others together yet again on April 8th and March 25th.

In March the Stillness Within Meetup group watched a webcast from the home of Eckhart Tolle.  There were 11 of us and after the meditative talk, the group took pause to deepen our own sense of inner being through a group awareness session of simply noticing.

Krishnamurti, in Choiceless Awareness notes:

“…if you are aware of outward things, the curve of a road, the shape of a tree, the color of another’s dress, the outline of the mountains against a blue sky, the delicacy of a flower, the pain on the face of a passerby, the ignorance, the envy, the jealousy of others, the beauty of the earth, then, seeing all these outward things without condemnation, without choice, you can ride on the tide of inner awareness“

There was little discussion but lovely sense of community at this gathering.  

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The April meetup featured a recorded talk “The Awakening Experience – Before and After”.  The talk described Tolle’s understanding of the nature of experience.  The talk focused on the unfolding of deeper consciousness and in his words “the liberation that comes when we transcend the limitations of a solely conceptual identity”.  We had some interesting discussion afterward and a group awareness exercise.  With a few new members joining in, it made for a wonderful Saturday afternoon in the gatehouse.

In Freedom from the Known, Krishnamurti points to the dropping away of identity and concepts in a very beautiful way:

“When you look at the stars there is you who are looking at the stars in the sky; the sky is flooded with brilliant stars, there is cool air, and there is you, the observer, the experiencer, the thinker, you with your aching heart, you, the centre, creating space. You will never understand about the space between yourself and the stars, yourself and your wife or husband, or friend, because you have never looked without the image, and that is why you do not know what beauty is or what love is. You talk about it, you write about it, but you have never known it except perhaps at rare intervals of total self-abandonment. So long as there is a centre creating space around itself there is neither love nor beauty. When there is no centre and no circumference then there is love. And when you love you are beauty.”

I love this expression – or love loves itself!