Break Free from Victim Identity | Eckhart Tolle on Discovering The Here and Now (Part 2)

My childhood was not particularly pleasant. I was a victim. Not of my parents, I would never say that. But I was a victim of the unconsciousness of my parents. So that's undoubtedly true. So there was constant conflict, even violence, not against me, but anyway, don't need to go there. But there was the victim identity. I'm not saying that people don't do bad things to other people. And there may have been people in your life or even in the life of your group of people, your collective, that were very bad. You can look at that and say, yes, these bad things that humans do to other humans, the way I see it, is unconscious. Humans do it. And this is a manifestation of human unconsciousness. But don't create an identity for yourself out of that. That really keeps you stuck in the egoic sense of self and in unconsciousness. And it also keeps you stuck in. But not. You can't even achieve much when you're so much of a victim. That's a great excuse for never doing anything. I'm a victim. And the implication now, how do you become. How are you superior? Because we talked about the ego needs superiority. How are you superior when you're a victim? Of course, you're incredibly superior morally to almost everybody who is not a victim. It works great. Egos can survive that until you die. And you can put it on your gravestone. Here lies victim, so and so morally superior to almost everybody. So what we need to then recognize in ourselves is conceptual sense of self, which the humans carry that in the absence of awareness. That's who they think they are. And the sad thing is that many humans carry a. A very unhappy sense of self. They carry this burden around without knowing it. And this burden they call my life, all my life. It's so very problematic. There's so much stuff going on. I don't know how much more I can take this. My life is just so. I would have. When I was young, I would have imagined sarpines very different. But it didn't work out. You can either blame other people for not working out, or you can blame yourself. It doesn't matter. It works every time. And so me and my life, people carry this heaviness of my life. But what is my life? My life is a story that I tell myself. It's memories, yes, Things that happened. Maybe they didn't happen the way I think they happened, but something happened. When you hear siblings talking about the same event 20 years later, you often hear totally different stories. So whatever your narrative is that you carry, whether it corresponds to Reality or not, we don't even know. But it keeps your identity going. So this is the egoic sense of self that this is the personality, that is the person, and that is the state of being spiritually asleep. And that creates an enormous amount of suffering in your personal life, unnecessary suffering, because you don't realize to what extent this unobserved mind, the unobserved mind, this is the mind that you're totally identified with, creates an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. The unobserved mind creates suffering. And this is a very important point. I'll give you two examples of two situations. One is very relatively seemingly insignificant, and the other would be major situation that brings about suffering. A relatively insignificant situation. You always watch out for unhappiness in your. In what form does unhappiness arise in you? Unhappiness is a generic term. It could be anything from slight irritation to extreme anger or deep sadness. All kinds of things. How does it. Let's say you get upset in a situation, you get irritated, you get a bit angry. You're waiting somewhere where people. There's a lot of waiting these days. You're waiting to check in at the airport. But they are so inefficient that the lineup is not. It's just, why can't they have more intelligent people dealing with this? Why can't they train their people better? I've had enough of this and never again I'm going to fly with them. This is just becoming awful, just unbearable. What am I even doing here? Laughing? You become unhappy because you're standing there. Now, the interesting thing is there, if you investigate how does the unhappiness arise and you really look at it, then you may want to ask yourself, okay, where is the unhappiness? What is it that causes it? How would I experience this situation? This is the experiment that I recommend. When you are getting irritated anywhere where you, let's say you're waiting online, talking to your bank, oh, your call is important to us. But you. It's so important that we keep you waiting for 40 minutes. And then you build this. You can feel unhappiness building up even more than the residual unhappiness in the background that almost every ego has that you may not be aware of all the time, but the residual discontent, the residual sense of unease, the residual sense of something missing here, of not having arrived yet. It's always there. No, in addition, there's a more active unhappiness arising. And so why not experiment and say, how would I experience this situation if I did not add any thought to it if I did not add the baggage of thought to the situation. So that's a highly recommended spiritual practice and an experiment, because you're waiting somewhere, so why not experiment? So how would I experience this if I did not add thought to it? Let's say you are standing in line at the airport, okay? Now I'm not. Not adding any thought to this moment, okay? You're dropping the baggage of thought. You're not imposing thought. And suddenly you're just standing there and you're breathing and you're looking around at people. And yes, the people are standing there. Some people are moving there. There are lights, artificial lights and things. You're breathing, or suddenly you realize that you're breathing, oh, I'm breathing. And actually it feels quite good to be breathing. And you might even feel that your body is alive inside. You feel, oh, there's a sense of aliveness inside in my body. Okay? Why do you suddenly feel that? And why is there suddenly a shift in the way in which you experience this situation? It is there because you're not adding unnecessary thought to it. In other words, you're allowing this moment to be as it is. And that immediately brings about an awakening, then immediately brings about a shift in consciousness. So you become aligned with the present moment. You're no longer antagonistic or hostile towards the present moment. It is as it is. You realize the absurdity of arguing with the isness of this moment because it is. But the ego strives and survives on arguing with the isness of this moment. In many situations, this acceptance is enough. And suddenly you feel actually quite peaceful in this. But what is this peacefulness that you feel where before you were irritated, before you were angry, and suddenly you're not adding thought to it? Now this is an important thing, which means for a moment the otherwise compulsive automatic stream of thinking subsided. You have become present. You have become present, and you're in this presence. You accept what is so, what arises when you do not add unnecessary thought to a situation? What arises is a deeper sense of a deeper consciousness, which we could call awareness. We could call presence. And that deeper consciousness is suddenly there. It was always there, but it got covered up by thinking. It was always there. It was dormant, so to speak. It was only a potential. In that potential is in every human being, but in most human beings it remains dormant. And suddenly something comes up and you discover. You may not know in that moment that this is what's happening, but you discover the ability to be so aligned with the present moment, that you don't need to add conceptual judgment to it. And so there's a momentary gap in the stream of thinking. And that is the key. That gap in the stream of thinking is where you access the deeper the unconditioned consciousness or the awareness that is there, that's the awakening.