Eckhart Tolle stops by Google for a fireside chat with Bradley Horowitz. The subject is: "Living with Meaning, Purpose and Wisdom in the Digital Age."

I'm Rich Fernandez from the Learning and Development team here at Google.

So, about 6 months ago, we wrote a letter to Eckhart Tolle inviting him to come here to Google.

We make some of the world's most valued and most used technology.

We aspire to do epic stuff and to make a difference in the world.

And yet, even as we create this dazzling technology, we want to be sure to pay attention to our own inner technology.

We want to ask ourselves the searching and far-ranging questions about how we're getting on in the world.

As we optimize our technology, how can we also optimize our lives so that we can be our best selves?

All of this is a lot easier said than done.

We operate in a hyper-connected world, always on, and we go at it with great pace and intensity.

The urgent question of the day is how we can take an intelligent approach to our work and our lives with all of the demands of our time and attention.

Amidst this flood of information, how can we discern the signal from the noise in order to access and act on what is most essential to each of us.

Eckhart Tolle takes a refreshingly contemporary approach to the question of what it means to live a meaningful and inspired life and with great intelligence.

And in so being, how we can each experience a great sense of clarity, peace, and the joy of being alive.

So we're very lucky that Eckhart accepted our invitation and said yes to come here today.

He knows our ethos, that we have a profound interest in being our best selves and doing meaningful and inspired work.

We seek to change the world for the better and he understands that we understand that in order to transform the world we must first render the necessary transformation within ourselves.

So Eckhart is here today to assist and suggest with some things for us to consider.

Eckhart Tolle has written best-selling books including The Power of Now and The Power of Consciousness, The Power of Now and a New Earth.

And they've sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into 33 languages.

He is widely regarded as 1 of the foremost teachers on the subject of wisdom and conscious living.

Joining Eckhart in conversation today is our Vice President of Product, Bradley Horowitz.

Now, when we proposed to Bradley that he might engage in a dialogue with Eckhart as part of this Tech Talk, he was really excited, Which makes sense because Bradley's cool like that.

Bradley also helped create Google Plus, Google Apps, and Google Plus, which we all love.

So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Eckhart Tolle and Bradley Horowitz as they discuss what it means to live with meaning, purpose, and wisdom in the digital age.

So on behalf of Google and all the many Googlers here and those tuning in from our overflow rooms, welcome.

I understand that you don't often visit corporations.

And so this has been a journey we've taken together over the course of the day.

Eckhart had a moment to meet with some of us earlier.

And 1 of the things we discussed this morning was wisdom and the difference between information and wisdom.

Google has a mission to organize the world's information.

And I think if you think about the hierarchy, there's signal and data and information and knowledge, and at the very top of the pyramid is wisdom.

And I wondered if you could comment a little bit on what you understand to be the difference between information and wisdom.

Let's set that aside for just 1 moment to say how happy I am to be here, how impressed I am by what I have seen and by the people who work here and the general energy field in the company.

And if you have come, there are many young people here, if you've come straight from college, Then I'm sure you don't know how lucky you are until you start working for another company.

Perhaps everybody who works here, as they would say in India, you must have very good karma to be working here.

The openness of people that's reflected in the structure of the company, the way things are arranged, the little rooms that you have for quietness, for meditation, the cafeterias and All that is just beyond belief.

So I also experience an openness in the people who work here and far less ego Because many companies are still predominantly run by very big egos.

I'm not saying that everybody here is entirely free of ego yet.

But much less so than in many other places.

So it's wonderful to be here and if my book sales ever decline and I need a job, I hope you will, you probably won't, but, because first of all, I have no computer skills, and secondly, I'm too old.

Since the average age here is probably about

Knowledge, information, and wisdom, How do they relate?

Of course, with the technological revolution, information revolution, digital revolution, whatever you call it, there's an enormous amount of knowledge available to everybody, almost the whole of the world's knowledge and there's the interconnectedness between people and so on.

That's all very good, of course, to have all that accessible to you.

There's a danger, though, that you get drowned in too much information and too much knowledge.

And by drowned I mean that the mind gets bombarded with an excess of input and therefore you miss something that is essential for a human life life to be truly fulfilled and that is a place of peace, inner peace or stillness, a place that 1 could describe as the source of all intelligence that many people don't actually, don't even realize exists within them.

So I'd like to just talk briefly about that, that really we're talking about the core of what spirituality means.

Spirituality is not having a particular belief structure, is not subscribing to a particular set of thoughts.

Spirituality is discovering a dimension within yourself that is, we can either say, deeper or higher than the continuous movement of thinking.

And of course all this information and knowledge is experienced in you as thought.

So the thinking mind has always been active for many thousands of years in humans, but now it's even more active than before because it gets energized by the incredible increase in input.

Before, all you had was simple, the simple sensory input in your immediate surroundings.

Then later came books, so you have the added input of that.

And then gradually came the mass media and now this incredible revolution of information technology, computers and so on.

So It energizes that movement of thought that's taking place in every human which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing.

It only becomes a bad thing and self-destructive thing if that is all you experience inside you in your consciousness, if all you ever experience is that, I call it sometimes mental noise, Then you begin to derive your identity from the thoughts in your head, what the thoughts tell you about yourself.

And you are trapped in that identity that is based on identification with thinking.

All spiritual teachings point to the possibility of finding something in you that is deeper than thinking, a space, a stillness that's always there.

And the informational excess of information, you can only successfully deal with that if you have a balance in your consciousness between using your mind to absorb information, to put out new information, to work on the information that you have taken in, input, if you have a balance between that and something that is deeper than thought in you.

And really, instead of giving you new knowledge here, I don't want to do that because I don't want to add to the knowledge that you're taking in anyway, far more than you ever need.

So instead of giving you knowledge here, I'd like to suggest that you experience at first hand in yourself that place of, we would call, I call it sometimes presence, where you are alert, conscious, but not thinking.

And every creative person has some access to that realm.

If you have a truly creative insight, You have to go to that place that is deeper than analytical thinking.

Analytical thinking itself or processing information is not creative.

So to even to find a creative, a new solution to a problem in your life requires some creative insight.

So whether it's a problem in your work situation or your personal life or something that you need to build or do and you have come to a dead end or you want to create something, whatever it is, a work of art or a new system for the computer, I don't know the expressions for that, you need to go to the place where creativity arises and every human who brings, who is creative has some access to that even if they don't know it.

But it's not only the, it's not only the place where creativity arises, it's also the place that gives sanity to your life.

To find a place of stillness, peace, aliveness, where you are not burdened by most, a lot of the time, unnecessary mental noise.

So when you do start thinking again, it actually can be more productive.

How do you find that place if it's there in everyone?

I can just suggest to you 3 or 4 entry points into that state of consciousness and after I've done that we can carry on the conversation.

A very simple entry point and this is why my first book is called The Power of Now is the realization that your entire life consists of the present moment and only the present moment ever.

Now, most people, perhaps in some abstract way, they know that, but they cannot sense or feel the truth of that and I'd like to invite, like to invite you to actually sense and feel the truth of what I'm saying which no, not the great, even if there's a great philosopher here, he cannot possibly argue, he or she cannot argue with this statement that whatever you experience ever is present moment.

There is, your entire life unfolds in the present moment.

Most people don't live as if this were true.

They don't, they live as if the opposite almost were true, as if the future moment were more important always than the next 1.

And that is, that happens because of excessive identification with thinking.

Because usually the thoughts are about the next thing, the next and the next or what could happen or might happen.

So if you can just come to this realization, well, this is all, all I ever have and ever experience is this moment.

And at that moment, when you fully realize that, you can only realize that, an alertness arises in you.

You become alert to, 1 could almost call it, the presence of the power of this moment, of the power of life itself in this present moment which consists of, yes it consists of sense perceptions.

It also consists of, well let's look what is this present moment.

This present moment is this room, what we perceive here, what we visually, what we see here, the lights, the totality of the room.

So let's become alert so that we can really perceive that.

And beyond that which we perceive in this room, is there anything else about that we could call the present moment?

Well, if you look deeply enough, yes, there is also the inner energy field in your body that you can actually feel that you're alive in your legs, your arms, your feet.

That's also part of the present moment to sense the energy field that pervades the physical body, that's also something you can feel.

So there's external sense perceptions and there's the feeling, the aliveness inside your body.

And if you're totally in thinking, you can't feel that at all.

You're only alive in the upper story of the house, your head.

So you inhabit, you begin to inhabit the entire body.

This becomes part of your experience of the present moment.

And there is an aliveness even to artificial light.

Of course, you might say I prefer sunlight.

But there's a beauty and aliveness even to artificial light.

And there's a beauty and aliveness that is usually overlooked that's in the texture of this arm, this chair here.

Or whatever you're wearing and certainly the flowers.

We're just going into the present moment.

So you have that, externals, and you suddenly appreciate the aliveness of all the things that surround you.

Other people have to take acid to get there.

You know with ethnic people, sometimes they look at a teapot and they say, wow.

Just be present and then you appreciate the beauty even of a mass-produced teapot.

If it's handmade and hand-painted, even nicer.

But even a mass-produced teapot has a presence there.

It's there And it's an alive energy field.

Every physicist will tell you it's not a dead teapot.

It's molecules and atoms in continuous movement.

Everything is vitally alive and you miss that if you're totally trapped in the mental noise all the time, taking in information.

Present moment, sense perceptions, so inner, the inner energy field of the body and then what else is there to the present moment?

Okay, then you have to go, become really alert.

And the next thing that you notice about the present moment is really at the deeper level of the present moment.

It's not something that arises in your consciousness as does the table and this room and even the inner energy field of the body.

These are all things that, objects that arise in your consciousness.

But if you go deeper even into the present moment, what you encounter is the most incredible secret of human life which is you encounter the fact that At the bottom of it all, you are conscious.

There is the presence that you are without which you couldn't perceive anything.

You couldn't perceive this room and you couldn't feel the body without that consciousness that you essentially are, which Jesus, by the way, called the light of the world.

He said to his disciples, you are the light of the world.

And these disciples were not special people, they were fishermen, so certainly he wasn't telling them that they are VIPs.

They were the opposite of VIPs and yet he said, you are the light of the world.

He also said it about himself, but he also said it about others.

And so you suddenly discover that essentially at the most essential level, the essence of who you are is consciousness.

But Consciousness isn't something you can say, ah, there it is.

Because consciousness cannot become an object to itself, it's the eternal subject.

The I am that I am of the Old Testament where when God is asked for his or her name, God says, I am that I am.

That is the essential identity of all beings.

So when we talk about the present moment, We talk about different levels of the present moment from sense perceptions to the feeling of aliveness in the inner body to the realization that ultimately what we call the present moment and the light of consciousness are 1 and the same because that's the thing that always remains and that consciousness, you can sense it as yourself right now, the presence that you are, even beyond the physical presence And that is the alertness, that is the realization that is sometimes called awakening.

And that is the place of also of stillness where you get out of the mental noise and that is the source place of creativity.

That is intelligence that is non-conceptual.

And if you touch that in yourself, then at first as glimpses, as brief realizations, and then gradually integrated into your daily life, then you can live from that place, the source, and be not only a more productive human being, but also a more peaceful human being, because then you no longer contribute to the conflict in this world, because the conflict is only created by all those humans who don't know that level in themselves.

And again, to call Jesus again on the cross, he said, forgive them, they know not what they do.

They don't know who they are, essentially.

So this, I've talked about this in the hope that as I'm speaking, there is a, an experience in you of really, of what the depths of the present moment.

Because the present moment, people think it's present moment is what happens.

And of course, because what happens changes all the time, people say there are many present moments.

If you look more deeply, of course, there are not many present moments.

So there's what happens in it and there is the space in which it happens and that space is consciousness.

And when you realize that, you become free of the false sense of self which, that when your mind tells you something about who you are, which has to do with your history and your successes or your failures or what other people tell you who you are, a little present.

So that's really basically the essence of spirituality which is very simple but for some reason it's not taught at school.

All kinds of inessential things are taught at school.

But what really matters, the very foundation of human life, and it's not some belief structure.

That needs to be subject number 1 at school.

And everything else is easy once you have that.

Well, I'm not sure I have any more questions.

I want to ask you about the work that we do at Google.

And if you look at any given web page, it's almost a model of the mind.

You can jump to this story or that story or Hawaii vacation.

And in fact, the product I work on, Google+, allows me not only to examine the contents of my own mind, but all of these people's minds as well, in a flood of a stream coming at me.

And I'm wondering if the real reason you've chosen to come to Google today is because we're actively working against you.

And you've come to help us get over that.

But more seriously, do you think there's a place for technology?

And how do you make sense of the work that we're doing and how it impacts people's attention in relation to what you just described, sort of transcending the mind and going to a deeper place?

Well, it's, the technology is quite miraculous, of course.

The, I only recently, well, which means like 2 or 3 years, started using it.

I still haven't developed an addiction to it, as many people have.

There is, there are incredible possibilities here with that technology and there's also a great danger with that technology.

It could lead to contribute to the awakening and an example of that is our gathering here which people can apparently see on their screen.

So this is just 1 example of how this technology can contribute to spreading a vital message.

It goes far beyond any ideology or anything like that.

Same thing, the work I did with Oprah some years ago, for the first time, the webinar, as they call it, went out and the whole, for the first time, the whole system broke down because so many people tuned in and then the second week it started to work.

So there are incredible possibilities also for humans to connect with each other.

Well, that's another topic, how they really, whether they're really connecting as human beings.

But also that the fact that the flow of information is no longer monopolized by the powerful few corporations, but everybody can participate in that free flow of information, having led already to all these things, the Arab Spring and all those things that have been happening recently.

The danger, of course, is, and again, that connects with what I've been talking about earlier, that you get more and more inundated with information, with knowledge, with mind stuff, so that you more and more lose a deeper sense of connectedness with being, with presence, that deeper level that I talked about just now.

And that would then lead to increasing confusion in your mind and an inability, really, to create anything new anymore.

You would be just trapped in the mental, continuously increasing mental noise.

And if you look at people in this field who do come up with something really creative that is new, they all have some access to that deeper level in themselves as I'm sure many of you have.

And quite a few people don't even know that they have access to that.

They become still and they go for a moment or a few, they go.

And you connect with the power inside you.

You can actually feel that the power of consciousness inside you as you become still.

It's a kind of open and listening that opens up.

And then after a while the mind starts working again.

And it's very often then you have an answer, or then you have the creative solution or some new insight.

But if you don't go there anymore, if you get continuously drawn only into the noise, the mental noise, then you lose touch with your own power and you become more and more confused.

And it could easily happen that what now looks like miraculous technology could, within 2 generations, could lead, I'm not saying that it will, and we are here now so there's hope, it could lead to a complete breakdown of civilization.

So here you have this miraculous technology and 2 generations later all humans walk around like zombies.

It's an idea for a science fiction novel perhaps.

But it could happen because it's neither good nor bad.

If we are not careful, it could draw us in to such an extent that we lose ourselves in our own creation.

That we have created something that's an old mythological theme.

We create a kind of entity that becomes a monster and then our own creation devours us.

So this is, I believe, why I've come here as a little warning.

If you're not careful, Then what looks so wonderful here could turn out to be a monster, but it doesn't have to be.

It could turn out into something, turn into something wonderful that contributes to the awakening of humanity.

The danger is that this screen that you look at, of course, connects with your mind.

It links into your mind and then you link into the collective mind on the screen and it grows and grows, the noise grows and grows and you become more and more confused and completely uncentered.

You walk around, I mean youngsters, there are youngsters who are so addicted to their screen, they can't give attention anymore to another human being, to their parents or others.

I have an iPhone, I have to hide this here.

So what, if you work with your screen all the time, then what do you do?

You have to recognize the danger and you have to give yourself some space many times during the day, even if it's just for 1 minute at a time.

Give yourself space so that a balance arises between that interaction with the screen, which is the collective mind, and connectedness with being is the way we could put it.

So I suggest, I sometimes suggest to people to put a flower or a potted flower next to their computer screen so that from time to time they look at that for half a minute, even a few seconds.

And really look or learn to take a breath, a conscious in and out breath.

Meditation is very helpful for many people, not for everybody.

If you find it hard to meditate, use mini meditations.

If you can, look at something natural, a plant or the sky.

Look at a light, artificial light, whatever it is.

And breathe in and follow the breath with your attention into the body and then follow it with your attention as it flows out of the body.

It takes attention away from thought and puts it into the body.

In other words, it creates a space in your consciousness because while you are following the breath with your attention, you are not thinking.

See all Talks at Google transcripts on Youtube

Eckhart Tolle | Digital Age: Living with Meaning, Purpose & Wisdom | Talks at Google