Choosing Presence Every Day | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

You can choose presence in your daily life. One thing, yes, as I said, is notice when presence arises spontaneously. When you can look at a person. Suddenly a person appears there in front of you. And you look at a person, and again for 2, 3 seconds, there's no interpretation yet. And sometimes in those 2, 3 seconds, you can already sense something about that person. You have an intuitive perception of that person. How deep that is, we don't know. Perhaps you can sense something to do with the personality. Or you can sense something deeper. That is, the actual underlying consciousness, the essence of that person. You can sense that when you are present. You can sense often the presence of the other. Before you start interpreting the other, you can sense that their inherent presence or consciousness beyond personality, you're also aware of personality. But beyond personality, you can sense their uncle, say, their beingness. And then the mind usually comes in and perhaps has something to say about the person. And have some kind of judgment or whatever it may be. But if you are able to catch them, always the first moment, catch the first moment before the mind comes in and become aware of that first moment, consciousness. So it's just not. Otherwise you overlook it. So often for people, the presence, Many, many people, most people have brief moments of presence, but they don't know it. It's overlooked. So one could say the most important thing is always overlooked. And so once you know that and you become aware of this first moment, then it actually lasts longer. This is wonderful. For example, with human beings, you another, you meet a human being, you look at him, whatever, and you. And then you become aware that for the first two or three seconds, you're not judging, you're just sensing through your own presence. You sense the presence of the other. And when you become aware of that, it can last much longer. You don't have to immediately compulsively judge the other. And that's a wonderful thing. It changes the way in which you relate to other human beings. If you can refrain from judging, the compulsion isn't there anymore. Because there's something else that's deeper. And that brings about a connectedness between humans. As otherwise would not be there. Because the moment the mind starts judging, separation comes in a sense of separation. And the other, the other, the human being that's in front of you, becomes the other. Now, that's very important. Because the other, if you are operating exclusively from a egoic state of consciousness. Without any awareness of any transcendent dimension within yourself or the other, then the other, you depend on the other as an ego. In the absence of Awareness, you depend on the other to be as other as possible. Because you define your own identity through the other. What it is not the. The. If you emphasize that the other is different from you as the otherness of the other, you emphasize it. That strengthens your own, the boundary around your own sense of identity as an egoic self. So the moment you can, there's the ego. The moment you can criticize another. Gossip is often very well known phenomenon. When you gossip about other people, you criticize them in some way. In some way. They are defective in one way or another because what that does is it strengthens your egoic sense of self. The boundary becomes more rigid and you feel stronger in your sense of self because you have, you are, you are. The moment you judge implicitly you are superior to the person that you're judging. That's implied in judgment. You are obviously superior. It's not fully understood by the conscious mind, but it's an unconscious egoic strategy to strengthen your ultimately fictitious sense of self. So that's a very, very common thing. And it can be done on an individual basis. It can also be done on a collective basis. Then you see that if you identify with a collective conceptual image of who you are, which could be whatever, it could be political. These days, very popular things are gender and race. So you identify very strongly with that. Then the other becomes. The ego needs to make the other as other as possible. It's a crazy process. It's. It happens because you are unconscious, which means you're not awake yet. That's when you're in the grip of these patterns, inherited conditioned mind patterns. You're in the grip of them. They have you in their grip and you don't even know it because you don't. You're so identified with the mind patterns that you are the mind patterns. In other words, spiritually speaking, you are asleep. Who you truly are, the essence of who you are, is not really there. Or very briefly, it has made me live little. Then it's back into the sleep state. Spiritually speaking, the sleep state is total identification with a stream of thinking which continuously compares, classifies, judges, everything it.