I heard Eckhard Tolle speak yesterday. Two hours of rapt attention. He talked without notes and with presence and humour. (I was reminded of the Dalai Llama who I saw some years ago who chuckled as he chatted.)

I took a moment afterwards to note down what I took from the evening:

• Think of two dimensions. Along the horizontal is “doing”, what we are bound up with almost all of the time. We strive toward something. Living will be achieved is some “future”. This is the dimension of our ego. Infinitely more is the vertical dimension, that of “being”. Through this we have access to the power of all consciousness and the source of it. Within this dimension everything is created.
• The entrance to this “being” dimension is in the present. Now. It starts with a realisation that all is now. The future of doing never arrives. It doesn’t need to; we are infinitely alive now. A way to arrive at what the Buddhists might call “resting in the present moment, where you are home” is to find external silence and within that to realise an internal stillness. That stillness which contemplates no thing is your real self which is part of the whole Self.
• Thinking is a distraction. This and all truth is within not-thinking. A way to not-think is to become aware of your thoughts, to be able to see the process of thinking happening – separate from you.
• Your real self is within the flow of all consciousness. You come to recognise your self in others, in all other. This is what Indians mean with the phrase Namaste (I salute you in me). People recognise when you are living in the now, and your real self connects to and acknowledges their real self. These are most obscured by the persona that our ego constructs.
• The flow of consciousness is infinitely creative. Life, matter, thought – all flows from this. The source is what has been called God. Something like the sun from which consciousness shines and within which we and all that lives is infinitely at home. All shall be well and and all manner of thing shall be well.
• Our purpose is to live fully in each present moment and to “be” within that flow of conscious awareness. This is the flame which can bring us all to a shared awareness. Humanity needs this full living in our daily lives.

Eckhart Tolle was as pains to say that he was speaking old truths, rather than some invention of his own. As he spoke it resonated with and echoed so many others. Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, David Bohm, Martin Buber, Buddha, Christ, Eastern thought…

I am so very glad to have been there.