Awakening to the Intelligence Beyond Thoughts | Eckhart Tolle

Even if you have failed at everything in your life, most people's life is a mixture of successes and failures. But let's say every decision you ever made was a disaster or resulted in disaster and everything went wrong and you failed at everything. But suddenly you encounter that dimension of consciousness in within you. And you would go, wow. It liberates you from the limited person. And suddenly there's a deeper identity in you that's not. Not the narrative, but of the person. A deeper presence in you that frees you. It liberates you from the person. So even if the person has done a lot of unskillful things, to use a Buddhist term, Buddhist like to use the term unskillful, which means really bad, done something unskillful, or one unskillful thing after another resulting in a disastrous life experience. And yet at this moment you can awaken to presence. Then retrospectively you are grateful for all your wrong decisions because they've brought you to this point. That's just an extreme example. You're more likely to become drawn towards the dimension of consciousness if you experience the unsatisfactoriness of normal existence at some point, unless you're extremely deluded, which is also not uncommon. At some point you experience that there's a strong element of unsatisfactory and normal existence, normal life. There's always something going wrong. Even if you practice positive thinking, which is a great thing to do. And yet you are still finding, why doesn't life leave me alone? Why do I need to always get challenged? If it's not one thing, it's another. You sort out one thing here. Your job, professional situation, the relationship problem comes up, or the other way around, or there's a living situation, you move from here to there. Looked great at first, and then it turned out to be not great at all. And the experience that you never arrive at a lasting sense of satisfaction of him, that you can finally say, oh, I have arrived. Feels good to be here. Now. That only comes when you discover the deeper dimension of yourself through presence. So it is a dimension of consciousness. And then at first you begin to shift back and forth. Sometimes you're present, sometimes you lose presence completely. And you're just totally in the ego. Conditioned ego entity, reacting to things in its conditioned way, at the mercy of fear and desire, torn by this and that, this way and that way, at the mercy of your mind, completely identified with every thought that arises. Very unpleasant state. And then suddenly present is back. And it may only require you to remember that there is such a Thing as presence and where to find it. Stepping out of the stream of thinking for a moment, becoming present this moment, becoming aware of this moment. This is present at this moment is. But what is this moment? Well, there are levels to it. This moment is of course, first, whatever you're experiencing at this moment, which implies sense perceptions. Whatever you experience in this moment is this moment. So it's already helpful if become more alert to your sense perceptions. No matter where you are, give attention to your sense perceptions in this moment. That implies there's less thinking and instead awareness is arising and you're really looking, you're really listening or touching, whatever it may be, or tasting. Just complete shift in from a moment ago. You were stuck in your mind and then suddenly you wake up and that's by the time. Awakening is often used in many spiritual traditions. You. It's to step out of this stream of thinking that when you identified with it, it drags you along, never stops. Identified means you derive your sense of self from it. It's you, but it's not you. You think it's you. And then you step out of that and it's like awakening from a dream. The dream of you, the person, the script that otherwise you act out like an act on stage. So you wake out just as you awaken from sleep like state in the morning dream state, you awaken into the present moment and it's a. And then something may be happening in the present moment. Maybe you have to take some action, you have to say something or maybe not, we don't know. But if there's a situation in the present moment that requires some kind of response, you need to do something or say something. And if you can't become present, then your response comes from a deeper level. Whether there are words that you speak to a difficult person or whether some action you take in a difficult, challenging situation. The. The action or the words. Then if you're present, there's an alertness there. And out of that alertness there the flow of a greater intelligence than the egoic mind. Intelligence, greater intel, a deeper, higher. We could say higher intelligence can use your mind. And then it's not. Then you're. You're not acting out the stretch of your old habitual reactions. You can respond to a situation in a fresh and new and more intelligent way. And you break this, the karmic wheel which goes on and on. Repetition, same thing, Action, reaction, action, reaction. So you may find as presence comes more into your life. This a lot you feel the way in which you deal with people in situations, changes, becomes more intelligent. But that is a deeper intelligence which we could call. It's more closely related to what we could call wisdom. Because intelligence, the way we interpret it in our civilization is fairly narrow thing. There are many intelligent people in this world and there have been always. And they've created havoc. They got their university degrees, whatever. Maybe they actually also very good at doing IQ tests. And yet they produce politicians many other areas of life. You can see well, they're supposed to be intelligent, but their actions seem to show that it's not enough to have this limited type of intelligence. There's a complete lack of something deeper wisdom. And wisdom arises out of presence. Wisdom is the intelligence that comes through presence. SA.