Can You Overcome Anxiety through Presence? | Eckhart Tolle

What does it feel like to be you at this moment? There is a powerful sense of presence there which has no particular form, and that's you. And at that level, you are connected with something far deeper and more powerful than the little entity.

Hello, Eckhart.

Hello.

I'm so honored to be here. Step closer. And I'm a little bit nervous.

That's fine. Nothing wrong with that.

I really have two questions, and I'm wondering if I can sneak one in really quick. An extra one. I work at the University of New England, and we have a center for Global humanities.

And.

And we have speakers. Come. It's like a public forum for discussion of problems that humans face. And we'd be absolutely honored if you would speak there.

So where is that?

It's located in Portland, Maine.

Oh, University of New England. Of New England.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

And I organize the speakers so well.

Thank you.

And we would just be. We have a really good group of followers who would just be mesmerized by you. So I hope you would consider that.

Okay. Please mention it to Stephen or Greg and give your contact. I can't make any promises, but I've never been to Portland, Maine. I've been to Portland, Oregon, but not to Portland, Maine.

Well, we have some really beautiful places in Maine.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And the next question.

I'm wondering. You talk a lot. Well, you know, being present. And you talk about conditioning and how we are conditioned. And I think about my own negative thinking and how some of that is conditioning. And then, you know, people who. Who they just seem to have this old soul, this spirit. And so I wonder about nature versus nurture and what your thoughts are. Is there like a short gene for anxiety that causes all. I guess for me, being in the present, when you have that fight or flight, like, how do you tame that?

How do you.

How do you tame that? You know, the fight or flight, when your heart is racing and you're. Is it just doing it? And being in the present, when you.

Are anxious, we mean or nervous.

Anxious. And then it causes all that negative thinking.

Negative thinking. How to go beyond that?

Yes.

Okay. Well, there are various ways, which I sometimes call portals into the state of presence. I just. For the previous questioner, we're really similar questions. How do I get out of my mind? For the previous questioner, I talked about feeling the inner energy field of the body. But for you, I will talk about a different portal, and that is a very universal portal. All portals are closely related to each other. So this portal is called the present moment. And present moment awareness, or attention to the present moment more than anything else. It's a redirecting of your attention. As soon as you discover within yourself you realize that you are entering a non harmonious state of consciousness. Through irritation, upset, nervousness, worry, anxiety, anger, subsisting for long period of time. Any kind of dysfunctional, non harmonious state of consciousness, or to describe it in other words, unhappiness in whatever form. Because unhappiness can take many forms. The moment you realize that, and for you to realize that already requires a small amount of awareness. Because the people who are really deeply unhappy, almost as their normal state, and there are many in this world, they don't even know it because they don't know anything else. So there are many, there are millions of people running around this planet in a state of unhappiness. And whatever form this unhappiness takes. And if you ask them, are you unhappy? They say, no, I'm not unhappy. What are you talking about? I'm not unhappy. They don't. It's very, it's like, it's like listening to some machine that goes on, even, let's say a noisy refrigerator that is always running in your room. You don't know it's running until something happens to it and it suddenly stops. And you say, what happened? Suddenly that that dreadful noise is gone. And suddenly it's so beautifully still here. I never knew there was that noise going on all the time. So for you to recognize that you are in a non harmonious state requires already a small amount of awareness, because it's only from the awareness. So we need to presuppose there's already some presence there where you can recognize that you don't want, that you don't want the disharmonious state. Then you go into present moment awareness. The disharmonia state arises usually because you are not. You lose the present moment and believe something else is more important than the present moment. It also often usually implies there's some form of resistance to something. So present moment awareness is a conscious redirecting of your attention away from the thinking mind into the direct perception of present moment reality. And present moment reality starts with you coming to your senses. Coming to your senses means, so let's say, let me act it out, you are trapped and you go and you get more and more unhappy or anxious. You can feel the anxiety and life is, there's a heaviness there. And then you notice, oh, do I want that? Do I need that? Does it have a useful purpose? No redirect attention to the present moment. Okay, where's the present moment? Okay. The present moment always starts with sense perception. You're looking suddenly what's around you. Look, start, look carefully. Then you go, oh. And to really look, you need to just be silent while you look. It's the silent looking. And this is you beginning to enter the present moment and then incorporate another sense. Listen. So you begin to take in what surrounds you in the present moment. Become aware that you're breathing. It's all aspects of the present moment. Visual perception. Be where you are. Be here. Fully be here now. Inhabit the present moment. Be present to. Because that's all there ever is. There is nothing else except the present. The mind will tell you that there are many, many things much more important than the present moment. But it's a lie. It's a delusion. Because there is nothing else. Even when your mind tells you there are many things more important than this moment, it can only tell you that in this moment. So there is nothing. So give more importance to the present moment. And so bring attention to the present moment first through sense perception, through becoming aware of your breathing. And then the next step can be. As you perceive the world around you, also feel the energy field inside the body at the same time. So you're more and more, more and more present. And this is already a shift in consciousness, very different from few minutes before. You were immersed in useless thinking. So there's already a shift in consciousness happening. You can notice the difference in the energy field as the consciousness shifts from being absorbed in thinking to being becoming present. And so that is the waking up. Basically, it's a process of waking up out of. Not out of sleep, but out of what is like sleep, which is being totally immersed in the voice in the head, totally identified with the voice in the head. So you become present through tense perception, feel yourself breathing and feel the inner body. And then you can go one step deeper into what is actually the deeper reality of the present moment. Because the present moment has a surface appearance which is fine. It's often the first step. It's what is around you through sense perceptions. Then you go into the body, and then you go deeper and become aware that as you are perceiving the world around you, there is a presence in you which you can sense as your very own being through which you are perceiving. Otherwise you couldn't. If you were not here as a conscious presence, you would not be able to perceive this room, the plants and the flowers and whatever is in this room. You would not be able to perceive it if you were not here as a consciousness. So whether what you are perceiving is a reality or dream is immaterial. The fact is, whether it's a dream or reality, it requires your presence, the light of your presence in which everything appears. Now, can you become aware of the light of presence or the presence directly in you? In other words, can you sense your own beingness? Right now, as I'm talking about it, I can feel it very strongly in me, the fact that I am, before anything else arises in consciousness, I am. So I know that I am not this or that, not that I am a man or a woman or have particular age or a particular function deeper than that. Before you add anything to I am, the I am is there. Before you add any sense perceptions to it, the I am is there. So another give you another little pointer to point to that place. What does it feel like to be you? In its most fundamental, its most essential way, what does it feel like to be you? And as I said before, don't remember. No need to remember your personal history for that. In fact, that becomes an obstacle. It's nothing to do with anything that ever happened to you. Nothing to do with past or future. It's only to do with this moment. What does it feel like to be you? And it doesn't have a conceptual answer, so don't answer it. What does it feel like to be you at this moment? What is the innermost self? What does it feel like? And you will notice that there is a powerful sense of presence there which has no particular form. You can't say much about it or anything really about it. And that's you. That's the being, the self, the I am that I am. And at that level, you are connected with something far deeper and more powerful than the little entity, the physical entity or the psychological entity. It is there where you connect it to something vast. You are connected to the very core of the universe. And every human is. That's the Atman. In India, it's called the divine within. And the divine within connects you to the soul of the universe, the outer, the Brahman, the divine without. What does it feel like to be yourself? And then you suddenly. Yeah. And you can't say anything about it. It's just a presence. It's the presence of consciousness. It's consciousness. Another way of putting it. As you can see, I give you many different pointers because one, certain pointers work better for certain people. Another pointer, now you become conscious that you are conscious right now. You suddenly realize that you are conscious. That's an amazing realization. And to put it even more accurately, because if I say you realize that you are conscious, it's in that putting it like that. There's still some duality in there. I realize that I'm conscious. No, you realize that you are consciousness. Better way of putting it. You realize that the essence of who you are, your sense of self, is consciousness. Not anything that happened ever or could or will happen ever. And then this as you, at first, perhaps, it comes to you in little glimpses. And then gradually it becomes the backdrop of your entire life. That continuously, no matter what situations you go into, or whether you are thinking or not thinking, there's always a part of you in the background that can. That knows that you are consciousness. You know yourself as consciousness. Consciousness knows itself is another way of putting it. And that is the transcendent dimension that can always be there in the background of your life. And sometimes it will come into the foreground when it obliterates every thought I'm talking from my personal life, the non personal life, it obliterates every thought. And you just go. You are nobody in particular when it comes to the forefront. Then the human, it shines away the human dimension temporarily. And there's only the being. When spiritual teaching happens, the being takes over for me, when spiritual teaching doesn't happen, the human to some extent comes back. But it doesn't obliterate the being. So there's always the being in the background there. When I talk, and I'm talking about this because you will experience the same. And some of you already know exactly what I'm talking about. Then the being talks, the words come, it shines through. So you will observe in your life as you become familiar with dancing between form and formlessness, between the human and the being and bringing them together. You will notice that sometimes the being becomes very strong when you get very still. You may be surrounded by nature. You go. Or somebody comes to you who is in deep agony or suffering. And suddenly you find yourself becoming totally alert and still. And perhaps you start even saying something to that person which is just right for that moment. Then the being takes over. And then in other situations you become the human takes over. And there's just 10% of being in some. And that's fine. There's still some awareness of consciousness, of space in you. This is a wonderful process. And many of you are already beginning to experience that in your life. This shift from the mental self, the usual self, as I sometimes call it, the human form Self to the transcendent self, which the Buddhists call the no self and other traditions call the higher self. These are just words, somebody who has never had a glimpse of it. As many academics who study religions, they say there's a total contradiction between what the Hindus believe and what the Buddhists believe. Because the Buddhists say there's no self, and the Hindus say there's the higher self. Totally different. They don't realize. They just use different words to talk about the same thing or no thing. If they had a glimpse of it within themselves, they would know that. But because they only approach it to the conceptual mind, all they see is the differences. This is the practice. And hopefully, as I have been talking, you and everybody here has at least perhaps to some extent been experiencing what it means to shift from the human to the deeper self. What I call the being self right now. Even if you don't know it mentally, if you are attentive here, if you are not dying from boredom as you sit here listening to me, that means it's working for you. It's that simple. But if your mind is saying, when the hell is he going to stop talking? That means it's not working for you. But you've probably left already by now. If you're here and there's actually. There's something that captures your attention, that's the truth in you, that's the being level in you, that recognizes itself and is coming forth. That's all it is. Because what I'm saying, otherwise, unless you have some access to it within yourself, what I'm saying otherwise would be absolutely boring and meaningless. I'm not saying anything to just the mind. What the hell is he talking about being? So you need to have some access to it in order to find this interesting or makes you feel more alive. Being here means, yes, you have it. It's there. That's it. Even though your mind might say, do I really understand what he's talking about? If you enjoy being here and listening and something in you feels alive, then you understand it. You don't need to understand it conceptually. You can't. You get it.

Thank you.

Sam.