Stillness Within Meetup – Eckhart Tolle talk: Welcoming Life

For the November Stillness Within meetup gathering, there were 9 of us who enjoyed this final talk from Eckhart Tolle’s 2014 Australian retreat.  The talk explored the tendency for life to be in constant change and strategies for meeting particularly challenging times head on.  These can be potential opportunity for deeper states of awakening. Many of us, upon returning from similar retreats, find our days shifting quickly away from ‘being’ in stillness, to a lot more ‘doing’ and thinking (another type of doing).  The challenge, Eckhart notes, is not to lose that deeper rooted dimension of being as we move through our work and home lives.  This can be even more challenging when we’re faced with difficulties.  Eckhart noted that many of us are prone to a subtle resistance to challenge.  This is based on an underlying belief that there shouldn’t be problems.  He quoted the Road Less Traveled noting that “life is difficult” and that if you know that it’s difficult, and are accepting of that, it’s the end of suffering.  Of course, I wasn’t the only one in the group reminded of Krishnamurti’s openly shared secret – that he doesn’t mind what happens. Later in this talk, Eckhart emphasized that in his experience, everything is connected to the totality – an emergence of ‘what is’.  Eckhart talked about his own journey into greater and greater inner being, noting that there appears to be a direct link between one’s depth of beingness and our impact on the world around us.  We each contain the totality, a microcosm of the infinite…. Eckhart suggests that Humans, like a ray of sunlight emerging from the sun, can begin to remember our historic origin, and then also, find the experience of ‘self’ fading out, coming to know self only as one consciousness, a direct and eternal emanation of source (some use the term God).  When humans are aware of this inseparability from source, we can also begin to create in many new ways (Eckhart used the term ‘lucid living’), beginning to discover the dreamlike nature of existence, and finding a new dream and even a ‘new earth’ being birthed through us.