What you're talking about is the Advaita Vedanta enlightenment when you notice consciousness/awareness/knowing which knows all five senses plus thinking is going on. Yet thoughts can't be targeted as separate from mind so you have some more letting go to happen. Tolle's method can lead to aversion to thinking because you want to "clean the mirror" of thinking and create a dualistic perception of "thinking = bad". Cessation is when subject, object and time go into a non-experience and then you return. You then see the interdependence of consciousness to objects. Remember that Tolle and others talk about a screen, mirror, container of awareness. Consciousness is conscious by inference simply because experience of some kind is going on (including all the jhanas). Any experience (even the nothingness jhana) is a perception. Consciousness, has no space, time, location, color or shape. The best thing to do is keep practicing no matter how enjoyable and refined the experience is. The ego so badly wants to say "mission accomplished!" etc which will just get in the way. Try and test time. Notice how anything that happens technically should be going into the past right away but the present moment persists as short-term memory. That's already a subtle form of clinging right there.
When you return from cessation you still have habits/dispositions/addictions/skills/tendencies but you realise that there was no "self" and thinking, habits, dispositions, skills, tendencies are only those experiences. At the ultimate level all categories are conventions and labels (including Higgs Boson, quarks etc) We haven't found a partless part. The conventions are useful but you have to remind yourself of the emptiness of all experiences when the brain starts to cling. Basically all experiences from subject, object, and time up to having a tantrum are different levels of a self and are considered by Buddhists to be fabricated by the brain. The brain, even when just being conscious is trying to cling to measurements (especially self-measurement), shapes, colors, experience right from the get-go. So you'll be letting go of negative thinking/ruminating etc but you won't have an adversarial aversion to thinking. You'll instead be trying to skillfully fabricate. Eg. Cognitive therapy and imagining positive goals and their benefits and pursuing those things and letting go what is unskillful. See Right Effort for more information.
Make sure you don't obsess about cessation because that seems to be a common thing where people think cessation is superior to experience and they don't re-engage with experience in a skillful way. Teachers like Rob Burbea or Gil Fronsdal mention this.
