Awakening from self-talk | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

So how do you get out of the self talk in the head? One, you need to know that that's self talk in the head. If you don't know it's self talk in the head, you become the self talk in your head. You become the voice in your head. You don't know it, you are it. So you have to the vital step, and I cannot tell you how to do that. That minimum of awareness needs to be there where you know that there's self talk happening in my head and it's telling you some kind of story. It could be the briefest of stories, like I shouldn't have come here, or I don't fit in here. All these people are too spiritual for me. Or I'm so spiritual, these people are not spiritual at all. It's all little stories in the head. Even every fragment of self talk is a little story in the head that goes around. And then you look at reality through the lens of the little story. It's not just one story, of course. It comes another one and another. And some stories are not little. They may be big stories about yourself and your life and what's gone wrong with it or what's gone right with it. Even that's a story more pleasant than if it's gone wrong. So you need to know when the self talk happens in the head. The knowing is not part of the self talk. The knowing is just an awareness that there is self talk. The moment there is an awareness that there is self talk, the possibility of freedom from the self talk opens up. If that awareness is not there, there's nothing you can do. You have to wait until life knocks you over the head so that finally some awareness comes in and you go. So you might have to sleep on a banana skin or something, because suddenly you go, oh, life told you to wake up. Awakening, which is a term that's been used for thousands of years in the spiritual context. Not in the conventional context, to awaken means to come out of sleep in conventional language terminology. But in spiritual terminology, to awaken means to awaken, one could say basically to awaken out of the self talk in the head. Because the self talk in the head is a form of hypnosis, self hypnosis. You are hypnotized, have been hypnotized by society, your surroundings, the surrounding culture, even the language that you were taught to use. That becomes a large part of the self talk. Although some of the self talk is also accompanied by images. But a lot of it is language and all that you've been Conditioned. And this is gone. You are possessed by that which is an energy formation. And humans are possessed by that and mistake that conditioned entity which consists of thoughts. They're so trapped in it, they're so identified with it. They believe in every thought that comes into their head. It's absurd, but normal. Well, another word rather than absurd. I could say it's mad, but it's normal. It creates incredible amount of suffering, unnecessary suffering that humans create for themselves and for others. You can't create suffering for yourself without making others suffer who are close to you and whoever comes into contact with you. An enormous amount of suffering is created by not realizing that large percentage of your problems consist of self talk in the head. That's amazing. And once you see that, okay, and then you can have a little bit of awareness. Who am I? Am I that story? Or am I the one who sees that, who recognizes that there is self talk. And in order to recognize that there's self talk going on in you, that's not a thought, it's just an aware presence. And then the compulsive nature of self talk lessens somewhat because some awareness has come in. The light of awareness has come in. And then you realize you are that light of awareness. You are the awareness. And there is a shift. The head may not immediately stop. It will want to carry on. The self talk wants to carry on. There's a momentum to it. You can observe that momentum. If you can't do it in yourself, you can observe it in others. Once they have a story and they're telling you their story, they can't stop. They want to go on and on. And they. And they don't want an end. If they're talking about their problems. They don't want an end to their problems. They want a continuation of the story, which is the problem. They don't know that. That's why we call it unconscious. They don't know that. Their primary thing is they want the continuation of the story because that's the continuation of the fictitious person that cannot live without its story, its storyline. And so those people, do they want an end to their problems? Of course. They will probably tell you. Yeah, I'd love. No, they don't. They don't want an end to their problems because that would be an end to their story, which is their identity. They don't want an end to their sense of identity. I need my story. All the things that I've been telling myself in my mind about myself and other people and my parents and my relatives and my co workers and my ex wife and my ex husband and what people did to me or what I did and shouldn't have done failed to do who am I without that I can't let go of that I need to think about this more so it becomes a habitual place the habitual place of the mental noise where you feel that's me and so every therapist knows that you always reach a point with your clients patients whatever depending on the school of therapy depends whatever you call your clients your patients whatever there comes a point when you hit that resistance they don't want to be free of their problems and the big challenge is there is this person going to overcome that barrier because that barrier is not just becoming free of my problems but also becoming free of a very limited and ultimately fictitious sense of identity the me this mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive to be free you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation it.