Awakening Your Power | Eckhart Tolle on Everyday Presence (Part 3)

You are life. You don't have a life. You are life. If you have a life, then who are you apart from life? If you have a life. But there's no you apart from life. And life is consciousness. You don't have consciousness. And even to say that you are conscious is not quite right, although we use it sometimes because you are consciousness. Who you are is an expression of consciousness. So we need to. Everything changes as the transcendent dimension arises. But it needs to arise and it needs to deepen before you can. It is strong enough to survive, so to speak, here in the face of the manifold challenges of life. And so it's very helpful to as much as possible access it, be it in your daily life, even when you're not being challenged, particularly when you're not being challenged. Do it when you sit somewhere waiting for something, when you stand somewhere, when you move across the room. But let's just moment, just be. Even when you're not doing anything. And there are moments, and I would suggest that you use those moments when you're not doing anything in particular. Nowadays it's very rare, very rare because of these devices for humans not to do anything. You can sit in a waiting room and everybody's looking at their phones. Very rare. You would see going to a waiting room, wherever you might be. And you would very rarely see somebody just sitting there like this. Very rare. Go to an airport. Be very rare to see somebody waiting there. In the past there would have been more people like that because they didn't have those things to look at. And they might not have had a magazine handy or book. So they were forced to just sit there. No, they were probably completely absorbed in your mind. But that's another story. But it's very. If you go to an airport, just see if you can find anybody. You may find one in a hundred who just sits there. But this person could be you who just who sits there and uses this opportunity of so called waiting. And this is not the waiting that this last night we mentioned the analogy and the Gospels of Jesus. Somebody's waiting for somebody to arrive. It describes a particular state of consciousness. The usual waiting is of different, totally different kind. The normal kind of waiting is a state of consciousness that dislikes the present moment. And it would prefer another moment, a future moment. That's why you're waiting in the normal sense of the word, a normal usage of waiting. There's an implication that you don't really want to be here now where you are, you're just waiting. It is implied that this is an inferior moment because you're waiting for something that's definitely. If you're waiting, the next thing is going to be more important than this. Otherwise you wouldn't be waiting. So waiting means you dislike this moment and you're just hoping that the next one will come soon. And there's another kind of waiting that is used in the. This is not common usage as Jesus used it in the. In the parable, waiting is the state of alert presence as if you were waiting but you have to be so alert that you have to be absolutely present. So we use waiting in a different sense there. And that's the kind of waiting that you should be engaged in when you're not necessarily involved in doing anything. There are moments when doing is not necessary or required of you. And this is an opportunity for entering being so these are all the moments when you're waiting. In the old sense of the word. You would be waiting for something including. Including short moments. And you would be surprised how many moments there are in your life when you are actually waiting for it, but you don't even know it. You're. Because you fill it up with something else. You're waiting for the kettle to boil to make a cup of tea. Well, that's a great opportunity for doing the kind of waiting that is talked about in that. In that parable. Be present. Listen to the noise and elevator. You're waiting for the elevator. You're in the elevator. It's only. It goes up or down presence. Instead of being a person in the elevator, you are a conscious presence in the elevator. You are the Buddha, the deep eye. The transcendence emerges. Waiting all kinds of moments. Perhaps you're trying to get through to somebody on the phone. It's sometimes difficult these days if you call your bank or your telephone company and you may have to. This is a wonderful opportunity because you may have to wait 20 minutes while they say your call is important to us. And usually people don't like that at all. They get very angry. And all kinds of things happen in your mind that make you feel unhappy for no reason. The only reason is your mind dislikes the present moment. That your mind dislikes the present moment. It can't what to do with it. I need to get on with my life. I need to get. And here I am. It's all stories. I can't be waiting on what I'm doing here. I'm not going to stay with this company any longer. This is intolerable. But a great opportunity for just be present. Well either you or you don't have to. Maybe you don't want to wait 20 minutes, but you're present for five minutes and say, okay, that's enough. I'll try again some other time. But at least for those five minutes, you were alert and present. And you know what exactly happens when you're alert and present. When you're alert and present, another way of putting it is you are aware of your essential beingness or yourself. There was a teacher in early part of the 20th century. Gerdiev was his name Russian spiritual Russian or Armenian, Ukrainian. He talked about self remembrance. He used that expression, this is a little bit misleading, but what he meant was to be aware of yourself. To be aware of yourself. And he had disciples. And whenever disciples were congregating or in a room and talking, he would sometimes come into the room and shout, stop. And everybody had to freeze. And the purpose behind it was to show people how absorbed they were in their. In their thoughts. Completely unaware of themselves, completely unaware of their being, of the deeper I of their presence. So they're totally absorbed. So that was a way of helping people to wake up. So while you be aware of your essential, the I am the essential. I am. I'm just talking about it now, but as I talk about it, are you aware of the essential? Are you aware of awareness? Are you aware that you are aware? Are you conscious like this, of the fact that you are conscious? Can you sense yourself being conscious of. Can you sense the consciousness that you are? How many pointers do you need? And once you get that, wow, there's a power there. There is a power there that's. But it has no form. There's enormous. It's the power of life itself that is in you. And in a way, before this happens, you only experience it. Trickles of awareness, little trickles come into your life that keep you from being totally crazy, just 80% crazy. So there's just little trickles of awareness come into your normal person's life. Yes, they do come. There are moments when they go, oh, how nice. Grace is great. Never last very long. And so the more you acknowledge it, be aware of it, the more it deepens and it seems to grow, manifest more fully through you.