Do You Know What You Want from Life? | Eckhart Tolle

When these thoughts come instead of being drawn into those clouds and then the clouds get bigger and bigger, you remain the sky and allow the clouds to pass and then to pass away. Well that's a good question. What do I want? I'm 34 years old and have a good job, a good home. I. I'm married to a wonderful man. I have bad anxiety and I have no idea what I want from my life. I have low self esteem and get defensive easily. I'm rarely content or grateful. My thinking is so negative I need approval from others. It doesn't seem to be a question but. But maybe there's a question hiding in there. Now first I'd like to congratulate the questioner on her. Yes, her probably her self knowledge because the questioner is aware that she's anxious. Not everybody who is anxious know that they are anxious. They're just taken over by anxiety and it's virtually their normal state. And you, if you ask them are you anxious? No, I'm not anxious. I have no idea what I want from my life. It looks like the beginning of the place of not knowing. It's good I have low self esteem. Well but you have the awareness to know that you have low self esteem. And I get defensive easily again yes, but you don't just get defensive, you know that you get defensive. The question is do you know in the moment of getting defensive that you are defensive or do you know it afterwards? You can look into that. I'm rarely content or grateful. That's interesting. That's very good self observation too. I'm not content at this moment. I'm not content. My thinking is so negative. Another good piece of knowledge. My thinking is negative at this moment. What are the thoughts that are going through my head? So if you apply the. The awareness that is already there hiding behind all these things if you apply the awareness to the present moment when these things arise. Defensiveness. What is low self esteem? It's something that you tell yourself about yourself. In your mind is certain repetitive thoughts that the voice in the head tells you. Those are. This is self low self esteem. There might be certain emotions that go with it. Emotions and. But really the basis for low self esteem is something you tell yourself about your low worth it's thoughts. Now the questioner already knows that she has low self esteem and if she can know that she has low self esteem in the moment of the low self esteem arising as thoughts she can recognize them as thoughts and not necessarily true thoughts arising repetitive thoughts that condition thoughts. Perhaps this road self Esteem might have started in childhood. It often happens to people whose parents are very critical or parents tell them you're never good enough. This can be one reason. So it might have started there. It's a conditioned way of thinking conditioned thoughts. Now the awareness that's already there in the questioner would need to be there in the moment of those things arising. And then you can see when these thoughts arise, you recognize them as thoughts that are arising and you're no longer completely trapped in what these thoughts are saying. In other words, to use an analogy that we used not long ago, you can. Your sense of being is not in the thought anymore, it's in the awareness of the thought. In other words, if you look at the sky, the vast sky, daytime this time, let's look at the daytime sky. The vastness of that huge expansiveness of the sky is awareness in this analogy. And clouds that come are thoughts. So when the clouds come, why can I never do anything right? Why are other people more successful than me? Or I'm no good at this. When these thoughts come, it instead of being drawn into those clouds, and then the clouds get bigger and bigger, you remain the sky and allow the clouds to pass and then to pass away. And that means you begin to no longer. You're no longer feeding conditioned thinking and you are separating who you are. You're taking your identity out of thinking. Thinking for a while has still a momentum. Old patterns will come again and again, but you're no longer renewing them, you're no longer feeding them by. How do you feed them? By identifying with every thought that comes. There's a self in it. It's in. So you separate your. You are the awareness behind the thought. Same applies to any kind of negative thinking. You recognize it as automatic. It arises and it's a thought. So. But you are the awareness that knows that this is a negative thought pattern. And if that can grow, because it's already there to some extent, if that grows, which means deepens, then those condition patterns will diminish. They get transmuted. So another one point here mentioned, I get defensive easily. Defensive can happen, happens very, very quickly in, in human interactions. The defensiveness can come up so quickly. It's an automatic pattern and you may only know it afterwards. Oh, that was defensiveness again. And defensiveness is of course, these are all ego ways of the ego to protect itself. Ego being, the mind made self defensiveness will just come up with any. Any lie just to keep its ego identity intact. So it'll come up with anything just to Keep. It's automatic. So you can, of course, in miracles has a lovely saying which is, whenever you become defensive about anything, know that you have identified with an illusion. You have identified yourself with an illusion. That's interesting. Is that true? Let's say you say that the distance from here to the moon is 300. I think in kilometers, it's like 350,000 or so kilometers. And that the light takes just over one second to travel from the moon to the earth. And you know that for a fact? Well, I know that. I haven't verified it myself, but it seems to be true. And somebody else says, no, that's completely untrue. It actually takes one minute. It does. Now this is just a difference of opinion or viewpoint. And of course you know very well that the other person is wrong. Now if you, if you say, no, that's not right. Is that defensiveness? Well, it depends how you say it. The question is, are you identified with your mind which has this position which happens to be true, but are you identified with that mental position? In other words, do you derive your sense of self from thought? If you identified with, you will get angry and defensive about the other person who is so completely wrong. And you might say things like, well, if you know that person well, you always doubt me. Why do you always doubt me? You never believe what I say, do you? That's called defensiveness, and that's the ego trying to protect itself. And then the course in miracle thing applies. Know that when you become defensive about anything, know that you've identified with yourself with an illusion. The illusion is not that it takes one second for the light from the moon to travel to the earth. That's not what the illusion is. The illusion is that you identified with a thought, with a mind pattern, and so you are strengthening an illusory identity by identifying, by strengthening the mental position of me. My mental position. That's unconscious. So this is how just a difference of opinion can degenerate into huge conflict. Just a small difference of opinion. Because the ego becomes defensive. So that requires alertness on your part so that you know when it arises. Oh, so whenever you become defensive. So without ego, the same conversation would go, no, it takes one minute. I know that for a fact. The other person says it takes one second. It takes a minute. Well, no, you're wrong. It takes one second. Okay, well, we leave it at that. Then I think it's a second and you think it's a minute. End of the story. That would be without. Without defensiveness or ego. Okay. And then you can go on of where everybody goes on the Internet, and that would definitely solve it. And in extreme forms of egoic unconsciousness, you will say, what it says in Wikipedia is wrong. It's wrong. They didn't get it right. That may bring me to another question. Oh, just to end on this question, the key is your awareness so that that deepens. Then all those patterns that you mention will weaken. And there's already a considerable amount of awareness in this person. The questioner. The awareness, of course, isn't the person, but it's deeper than the person. The thing is to apply the awareness to the present moment when things arise, not in some abstract way. I am a defensive person. Will I ever become a person who is not negative? I can't get rid of my negative patterns. I'm so negative, it doesn't matter. This moment is what matters. So just apply your awareness to this moment. You can't change things into mental constructs. How can I change myself? I don't want to be that kind of a person anymore. Forget it. This moment, this is where you apply presence, as I sometimes call it. I haven't used that expression in a while. The sword of presence that cuts through time. And you go, and then you apply it to this.