Practice of the Presence. In this podcast, Eckhart discusses with a live audience

one of his key spiritual teachings, the practice of presence. He says,

presence arises when we free ourselves of incessant thinking and roll back the

ego so our essential true self can shine through. As we become more adept at

the practice, he says it's possible to stay in the present moment through all of

life's ups and downs.

You don't have to be as slow as I am to be present. I'm not always slow but often

interesting thing to find out for yourself if you've reached a stage in your

spiritual evolution, where you're able to choose to be free of thinking, without

exerting willpower to suppress thought and without stopping your breathing.

And without engaging in a life threatening activity which could easily stop your

mind walking on a tight rope, will certainly stop your mind for two seconds

before you fall off. Now some of you are able to do that when you're not being

disturbed by anything or anybody, everything is fine, you're sitting quietly in

your room or outside and then you just go, there's an intensity of awareness but

there's no willpower, you're not willing it to happen, you're not willing, you're

not suppressing thought. If you're not yet there, that's fine, you can choose

other ways of taking attention away from the stream of thinking by placing

attention on sensory perception into your body, the inner body, or on your

breathing that's happening naturally. So as the Buddha said when they asked how to

attain enlightenment, said just be aware that you're breathing. Now as long as

you're aware that you're breathing, you can't be thinking. So he didn't say

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