Eckhart Tolle explains how identifying with your thoughts and emotions traps you in suffering. He argues your true self exists beyond these passing experiences, and that inner stillness is the path to freedom from fear.
And so to look for yourself in this movie show that continuously changes the impermanence of all things is a form of suffering. So wanting to hang on to this, identify with this. And the movie show includes. It's not just all the things that happen externally around you. The movie show is also the thoughts that pass through your mind. That's also really. That's also part of the movie. And they. They come and go and what you. What people get entangled with even more than the so called external world. Ultimately it's all. All the inner world. And but put that aside, the what you get entangled with is the much more so than the every thought that comes. You get entangled in that and look for your sense of self in that you identify with the thoughts that come. Your opinions, viewpoints, likes, dislikes, all you believe. Every thought that comes that tells you what your life is all about. My life. Have to think about my life. It hasn't worked out, not the way I wanted it to work out. Why, why did all this have to happen? And then I failed at this, I failed at that. Maybe I can still make it, maybe not. I need to think harder about me and my life. There must be a solution to the problem of me. Maybe if I see several psychotherapists, psychiatrists, maybe eventually they can help me find a solution to the problem of me. Because I perceive myself as a problem like a knot. K n o t like a knot that wants to be entangled, but it can't. How do I do that? And then the psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, a counselor may help you in one entangle untie this knot of the unhappy me. But it takes a long time and never really managed to do it until you realize that the entire knot is a kind of illusory construct. And on that level you can't do much about it. But if you realize it consists of thought plus emotion that you had identified with, then suddenly not a problem anymore. And suddenly you become aware of who you are beyond that. And then you let it be, as the song goes. And suddenly you are not a problem to yourself anymore because you're not looking for your sense of identity anymore on the level of thought or emotion. And then thought becomes less problematic. Thought loses its capacity to make you unhappy. Because before you might have noticed. Most of the time when you get unhappy, it's because of certain thoughts that arise in your head that you completely believe in. Interpretations of situations, events, people, misinterpretations, very one sided interpretation, as every interpretation is just a Viewpoint. And those things create unhappiness most of the time. That's what makes you miserable. If you become miserable, anxious, regretful, it's believing the thoughts that arise continuously which are part of the movie show. It's not just the movie show out here, it's also the movie show in your head. The. And so if you. If you get dragged along in it, then it's very confusing way to live. Yeah, you. You have no. No central sense of identity. And this is why so many people manifest in different situations. They manifest different aspects of their conditioned mind which are sometimes called subpersonalities, whatever. And you might have noticed people in those people in whom there is little or no awareness. They can change from one moment to the next, from one day to the next, and you have a different person or one situation to the next. When they encounter certain situations, suddenly some other subpersonality comes up. This is still consider. This is not schizophrenia or anything like that's still considered within the realm of what is normal. So I was always amazed for the short periods in my life when I lived communally, how changeable people are. And I always remember every morning I would sit at breakfast in a community where I lived in England for a little while. And I always wondering who is going to come down the stairs from the bedroom? What aspect of their personalities One day it is a wonderful day, isn't it? It's so great to be alive. And then the next day, leave me alone. This is a dreadful place. I'm trying to get out of here. I don't know how can people live in this place? It's so dreadful. And this is only who and other subpersonalities in humans are triggered by specific situations, sometimes involving money or somebody dies and then who is going to get the heritage, the transcendent, suddenly and ludicrous, totally or certain people can do it because one person may remind you of somebody that you once knew, who wasn't pleasant. All these things that you get entangled in with your sense of self. And that does not happen anymore, or if it does still happen occasionally to you, you fairly quickly wake up again and realize who you actually and essentially are. And that is, you are not your thoughts or not your emotions and not whatever arises and happens around you. You are the still center, so to speak. So that's an. It's a way of experiencing the world that frees you from the world internally without leading to a sense of separation. When I say it frees you from a world, it sounds almost as if you felt a sense of separation now, between yourself and the movie show, there is a detachment, yes, but also as you interact with every body, there is more of a feeling of non separation that we interact with because you. It's not your sense of self anymore that you're seeking to reinforce by interacting with other humans so you can allow them to be as they are. And the judgmental mind either subsides completely or you no longer believe in every judgment that comes into your head, every thought that arises. So that's a wonderful way that removes fear from your life because if you're entangled in the, the movie show of your life, it's fearful because nothing, you cannot really hang on to anything for too long and it cannot give you your sense of who you are. And it's fearful because you're ultimately the inability to trust life, which traditionally, for example in Christian terminology is called faith. Faith is the ability to have a basic trust in life. It's not faith in something. In some languages, faith and belief are the same word. But faith basically is a belief is you believe that a certain story that you've been told is absolutely true and it once happened and is absolutely true. Okay? And if somebody else doesn't believe it, then he's going to hell. He's going to hell because he doesn't believe the story. Okay? You don't believe my story, I'm going to kill you. That sounds funny, but it's still many people's reality. That's still many people's state of consciousness. But faith, faith is something deeper. It's nothing to do with any story. Faith is a basic trust in life that can only come from this inner connectedness with that place of stillness within that the absence of fear is trust. The inability to have this basic rootedness in being. Rootedness in being. If you don't have that, you will have fear one form or another. You may not always be conscious of it, but you'll always be somewhere in the background and sometimes very much in the foreground.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
