Confidence and Trusting in Yourself | Eckhart Tolle

And instead of then creating a thought in your mind and allowing this thought to survive and even proliferate in your mind and start complaining and so on, you can recognize that every human does that. When I lived in England, in the country, I had a cottage. There were two bedrooms, three bedrooms upstairs. And because my income was low, I had to rent out two bedrooms. And so I had a succession of people renting over a period of three years or so. And probably about. It was a place where people would spend, come for a period of time and then move on. I had probably 10 or 11 people. And out of those, eight out of 10, sooner or later developed when I got to know them, lived in the same house with them, relatively small place displayed. There were areas in their behavior that were quite dysfunctional, almost called insane. And I don't just mean quirks of their personality, different ways of doing. No, some more than that. Patterns that led to complete distortion of reality in certain areas of their lives. And that wasn't just one person. It was eight out of ten. And only one person didn't fit into any of these two people stayed relatively displayed higher degree of presence. There were certain variations also in them, but they didn't get taken over by personalities, temporary Personas, subpersonalities. They're sometimes called whatever you want to call them. They didn't get taken over completely, leading to almost total distortion of reality. I had one person, however, that she came, stayed for two or three months and was quite peaceful. And a friend told me that she had told him living at Eckhart's place is like living in a float tank. And. And the moment she moved out, I heard secondhand accounts. She was involved in huge drama, including physical violence with men and other women. And she was known for always generating huge drama in her life. Except when she stayed with me. I didn't know that, otherwise I probably wouldn't have invited her in. So somehow in the energy field of presence, she was able to. To drop into or rise into presence. But the moment she left, the old patterns came back. Now that was an unusual case. Mostly you find humans are not one single being. This is the point of the story. Once you know that you can. You no longer perhaps misinterpret when humans shift. And then to display behavior that is not conscious. And instead of then creating a thought in your mind and allowing this thought to survive and even proliferate in your mind and start complaining and so on, you can recognize that every human does that has that to a greater or lesser degree. Okay, then that's A step forward, that realization. And then you can allow them because you probably are the same. They're different people in you. There's a more conscious you and there's a more unconscious you. And then the more unconscious you has many different facets to it, different sub, different ways of being unconscious. And then you can see, okay, now we know that we can't trust people except in the sense as Byron Katie said, I trust everybody, said I trust everybody to do what they do. So you have to, you can't trust them to display consistently conscious behavior. That would be absurd. So you go to a deeper place and see what the real trust is, is not, doesn't come from people. The real trust is finding that place of depth within yourself that does not. And once you're there, then you can relate to humans from there. And you no longer say, I demand that you are conscious all the time. And if you're not, I'll hold it against you. And then I'll never talk to you again. So it all comes back to that place of dropping down into where the mind activity subsides. And instead of always being trapped in your thoughts and relating to the world and to people through your thoughts plus the emotions that accompany the thoughts, you go to that deeper place of just feel your own presence, let's put it like that for a moment. Feel the presence that you are, the beingness of you, the most, that deep level of I am ness, the presence, the only thing that cannot be doubted, that it is absolutely real, that exists, that is the isness of you. And if that is in the background of your life, then you can allow others to do what they do. The likelihood is when you meet others from that deeper place, their behavior will become a little more conscious. The very unconscious subpersonalities may manifest themselves less because when you erroneously mistake a person's unconsciousness, unconscious subpersonality, or whatever you want to call it, when you erroneously mistake that for who they are and mentally focus on that, you also bring it out more in them every time you meet them, because those are the expectations. And quite often, unless humans are really present, they oblige and they give you what you expect them. If you expect dishonesty, you are more likely to find dishonesty in humans. When you expect violence, you are more likely to find it. So trust, really another word for it in spiritual terminology is faith. Because what is faith? Faith is not belief. Belief means you have a story and you say this story. I believe this story to be true. And of course you have no idea whether it is true. But you say if you knew it was true, then you wouldn't say believe anymore. You can't say I believe in this table. You don't need to. It's here. So belief would be belief in some abstract story or whatever it is. It could be an ideology, something your mind tells you. But faith is very different. In some languages, belief and faith, unfortunately, are the same word. Faith is trust. Faith is a sense of deep connectedness with being. From that deep place of connectedness, you can also manifest things. But let's not talk about that right now. That is the conscious connection with source, the source of life which is within you. And it's so easy. You just become still and direct your attention to what? You direct your attention to nothing in particular. You're just aware of attention, and that's it. So if the attention is looking for your true self, it doesn't realize that it is your true self because it's consciousness. You are consciousness. And knowing that, that's trust. Suddenly, because you're no longer dependent on continuously shifting things out here for your sense of the beingness of who you are. Because not only humans are continuously shifting, but even things around you, they come and go. Situations continuously come change. Impermanence, as the Buddha called it, fleeting. And so as long as you look to externals for any sense of security, including humans. Can I trust him? Can I trust her? That's very precarious. And usually when I would say, no, don't trust him or her, trust yourself. But then you are no longer in a state of distrust. No. Trust then arises, but not from him or her. It's such essential teaching, but not many people seem to realize it yet. Now, at that deeper level, really many things that are different concepts on the external level, they really all merge into one. So when we speak of trust, or when we speak of presence, beingness, perhaps, to put it more accurately, we'd say the connectedness with beingness is presence. And out of the presence flows trust. And out of the presence also flows. And that's also inseparable from trust flows what you could call goodwill or benevolence towards other humans and other life forms. Because when your mind is telling you something about another human and fixes, constructs an identity for that human by selecting the unconscious, one of the unconscious aspects of that human, by selecting that, then manufacturing a mental identity for that human, and then for the rest of your life, continue to relate to that human through that mind form, then there is no goodwill, cannot flow. There cannot be an outflow of Goodwill anymore. It's blocked by the mind pattern. But if you no longer trap the other human and yourself in the mind pattern, then there is an openness for the outflow, let's put it like that. The outflow of benevolence towards the other person, the other human being. Well, you could call it love, but it's not the conventional. Better maybe to call it loving kindness. And that is a wonderful thing to experience in relation. It makes human contact much more pleasant. If you can feel an outflow of goodwill even towards a human that you might not meet very briefly and even there, sense it for a moment. When you're not, there's no thought, there's just a presence. And you're looking at another human and you feel an energetic, one could say also an energetic connection for a moment. And it's an outflow of goodwill. No matter what their function is at that particular moment in your life, there's always then an added dimension. Otherwise you reduce other human beings to whatever their function have, whatever function they have in relation to you. The man who is selling you something is he. Only the man who is selling you something is that. Are you reducing this person to the function that he or she performs at that moment in relation to you? Or is there a deeper dimension so that there is a human being that you recognize? And the way I, as you may, I don't know if you have heard me say that before. The way what I. How I interpret human being is. You might notice that there are two words in the English language. In a way, at first I felt it's a pity that English doesn't have one word for human being. It only has man, and that's supposed to include women. So when you often, when you read people say men, it's supposed to include women too, but it doesn't. But it still means men. So some languages, like German, they have a word that applies to man and woman. Mens. So that would be men's is man or woman. But English language, you need to have two words. You have to say human being. At first I felt, well, that's a pity. But then upon looking more closely at human being, I realized, oh, that's actually quite wonderful. Because there's a deep truth there. You have the human and you have the being come together. The human is a form. It's the physical vehicle and it's the psychological form, including all the imperfections and all the accumulations and the conditioning. The person, basically the person who you think you are, the person who other people think you are. The person that you've been told you are and the person you believe to be the person. Ideas in your mind about who you are. That's the person, and that's the human. Now, most people only know the human. They think they are the human. They don't realize that they are also the being. But you have to know both, really, to have a To be awakened in this dimension. You need to be awakened to the being dimension in you. So that you can be in the balance between form. Physical, mental, emotional, psychological form, the form, who you are, the person, and the transcendent dimension, the essence of who you are, which is the being and your identity. To awaken spiritually means that your identity shifts from the human to the being. And when your identity has shifted from the human to the being, the human becomes a more pleasant human. It's more comfortable for yourself to be this particular human in this particular lifetime. And it's more comfortable for others to be with you as that particular human. And that's because you also know the being, the transcendent dimension.