A Guide To Becoming Spiritually Conscious, with Eckhart Tolle

To become spiritually conscious is the arising of a. What we could call a dimension of consciousness that is very different from the conventional consciousness, which is when people say, of course, everybody is awake, yes, but not spiritually awake. Everybody who is awake without being spiritually awake is actually unconscious, spiritually speaking. So to be unconscious is to be unaware of your inner state and so identified with your inner state that there's nothing else. There is just. You are in the grip of. Of either an emotion or a train of thoughts. And usually they go together. Emotion reflects thought, thought creates emotion. Emotion amplifies and energizes thought. There's a vicious circle when you are trapped in that kind of negativity and you are, spiritually speaking, unconscious. If you are being possessed by these inner states. Mental, emotional. On the emotional level, it's the feeling fear, anxiety or anger. It's the feeling. You feel it in your body. And then it rises into your mind. And then it creates narratives that reflect that emotion. And often the narratives create the emotion. So you become aware not only of what's happening in your emotional field, but you also become aware. In this enormous step forward in the evolution of your consciousness. You become aware of. Of the kinds of thought that your mind is producing. That is the beginning of what we call awakening or spiritual awakening. Now, before that happens, you are the thoughts that come into your head. You are so identified, there's no space. So every thought that comes into your head takes possession of your mind, and you go. And often accompanied by an emotion. And you go. And you don't realize that something lives in you that isn't really you, but it feeds on you. It speaks through you. It thinks, I'm acting it out. Because it sometimes works better than explanations. And you can recognize it. You can recognize that state. If it's fear, oh, my God. And then fearful thoughts go through your mind that we call unconsciousness. Now, in conventional terms, you are conscious, but you are spiritually unconscious. Because you are totally identified with the movement of thought plus emotions. And you become an entity. It's this mental emotional entity which we call, by the way, ego. It's the ego. The ego is the unconscious part of you, the unconscious being that pretends to be you. And you are. Actually, when this happens, you are like a sleepwalker or a dreamer. You are asleep. You're not really there. You're not there. So your inner space is being occupied by a mental emotional energy form or entity. And this unobserved mind is. Is the ego. And that is the state of human unconsciousness. So at this moment, before we go more deeply into that right now, just acknowledge any emotional state that may still be in you. There it is. Okay, there it is. Let's say it's anxiety, or let's say it's a remnant of irritation from coming here. That is okay, there it is. You are directing attention to it and you just say, yeah, you can name it, but you don't have to. You just know it's there. There it is. Something happened then. What happened is you are no longer totally in the grip of it. You have come in, you have awakened a little bit and you can now observe your inner state on the level of emotion and on the level of thinking. You can thinking, what has your mind been saying about any situation? Suddenly you know what your mind might be creating an unhappy narrative about the situation you find yourself in. Like even a simple thing like you're lining up to at the airport and it's taking. These days, some airports are not doing very well. And so you have. There's a long lineup or wherever it may be, and you're getting very irritated and angry. And you can. Narratives arise in your mind. Stories you tell yourself, God, how dreadful. It's just, why am I even doing this? Why can't they do. Why don't they? Why can't they? Why didn't they? They should have. And of course they should, but they didn't. There are all kinds of shoulds that humans should have done, but they didn't do it. Humans are deficient in many ways, you might have noticed. Not you. Others. It's so much easier to see the unconsciousness in others than to see it in yourself. Obviously, self knowledge is most difficult knowledge. So narratives arise. And you don't know that the narratives arise because you become those thoughts. You are identified and then the emotion reflects the thought. And many people, many people these days, even on planes, they get very. You might have read about it, they get very angry. There have been lots of angry passengers on planes in the last two years. Maybe it's the mask that makes them angry. I don't know what it is, but they get very angry. And some become really violent, very unconscious. They are being possessed by that. They don't know it. They are asleep. Something has taken possession of them, the ego. So just acknowledging your inner state, that is. And something has happened, it's hard to express in words what that means. One could say a little. There's now a little bit of space around the emotion. Here's the emotion and then there's the awareness that comes in ah, there it is. You allow it to be. It's because it's part of the present moment. If you are not aligned with the present moment, you'll be unhappy and frustrated the rest of your life. But we'll probably go more into that later. Present moment. Allow it to be. There's a space around the emotion. And then gradually your sense of self, your sense of who you are, your identity, this is key. That's already, one could say this is a key thought of our gathering. So if you're in a hurry, you can leave after this. Just. It only takes one minute to explain. So the key thing is your identity, which is your sense of self is no longer derived either from your thinking, the stories you tell yourself, the judgments, the interpretations, the labels, etc. Is not your identity is no longer derived from the movement of thought, nor is it derived from the emotional field inside you. Because until this happens, your identity is the emotional mental entity. It gives you your identity, that is the egoic identity. The moment awareness comes in, a slight shift happens. You have stepped back from the movement of thought and you have stepped back from the emotional field, so to speak, and you've become aware. There is now this awareness, I sometimes call it presence, can use other words. This awareness is a higher or deeper, whatever word you want to use. A higher, deeper level of dimension of consciousness that has arisen in you, that is spiritual awakening. And then this is only the beginning, the first arising of it. But you already begin then to see that who you essentially are is not what happens in your emotional field is not the thoughts that go through your mind, but who you essentially are is the awareness behind it all. It's still a lot silent still space of presence. That's an amazing realization that there is a deeper, one could also say higher identity in you than the egoic identity. That's mental, emotional. This doesn't really mean you deny that dimension. That dimension is there. But you have discovered something deeper or higher. I prefer deeper, because it's kind of deep within. You have discovered something deeper, and that is gradually. First it's perhaps a few glimpses you have occasionally, but gradually that deepens. The presence or the awareness in you deepens and the thinking and the emotion still happens, but no longer supplies you with your sense of self.