Eckhart Tolle on the Importance of Self-Awareness

So you could say that ultimately, and seen from a higher perspective, the fact that humans have to go through the suffering is actually part of the whole, which is ultimately benevolent. But when you look at it from only a lower perspective, it certainly does not look benevolent. When you look at it from a higher perspective, you see that there is a reason why things happen. And why am I. I can say that. And many of you know that you don't have to believe in that. Many of you in your can verify what I'm saying by reference to your own life. If you had not gone through the suffering that you have gone through, you would not be here. There may be a few advanced souls here who may be 20 years old only, or 18 or 25, and you are such advanced souls that you have not experienced significant suffering. Nevertheless, you are here. Though that can have two reasons. Well, maybe more than two. I can only see two at the moment. That can have two reasons. Either you have already gone through intense suffering in many other lifetimes, you don't need it anymore. Ah. Or you have some ego image of yourself as a very advanced spiritual being and therefore you would like to add it to your self image. And you can then post to the world that you are now attending a spiritual conference. Look at me, I'm here. I'm not implying that everybody who has mentioned in their Facebook posts or tweets is necessarily, necessarily a reflection of that stage. It might just be an innocent fact. Why not mention the fact that you are at a conference if there's no self identification with it? It's perfectly fin. But the question is, is there a self enhancement through it? Does the conceptual image that you have and want to present to the world enhanced by self observation is vital? Because the new consciousness arises only if the individual recognizes that you can only change the world by changing human state of the state of human consciousness. That's why all the communists went wrong. All the people who want to bring up, bring in a new government go wrong. All these things will do nothing. If there is not a shift in consciousness, it will only. You will only recreate the same thing again and again and again. So, and that change in consciousness must. There's only one place where it can happen, and that's in you. And that implies that you practice self observation. That is an essential part of the change in consciousness. To practice self observation implies that there is enough presence or awareness in you from where you can self observe. And in almost all of you there is. Maybe not all the time, but there is enough to have brought you Here. And that is quite a bit. So is there enough presence in you so that you can self observe your own motivations, your own thought structures? What are the habitual thoughts that I think so that you are not drawn continuously into every thought that comes and follow it where it wants to take you? One little thought comes in about your life and then another thought and you follow it. Oh, oh no. And then before you know it, more thoughts come and then other conflicting thoughts and no, no, that's not how it is. Yes it is. No, I can't take anymore. And you believe in that thought too, that you can't take anymore. So the ability to observe non judgmentally what goes on inside you, there is awareness. There needs to be awareness. So that is self knowledge. Self knowledge means it's really not so much knowing on a conceptual level what happened to you in the past and trying to understand the past. The story of me. I need to investigate the story of me. There is a place for that. In certain cases you may want to understand what happened, why you acted, or what your parents did to you, and come to an understanding, your limited understanding of that. But ultimately the arising of the new consciousness is not a better conceptual understanding of anything. It's not a better conceptual understanding of who you are. It goes beyond any concept. Awareness in itself does not necessarily imply immediately that you understand more about yourself. In fact, as you become more aware in yourself, the need to understand my life and work it out diminishes. And so the compulsion to also to understand every other human being that you meet immediately formulates certain judgments and conclusions about that other human being. And the urge to immediately form judgment inclusions about any situation that you encounter. And then this is how it is. And then you have a narrative that develops in the mind and then you're telling yourself the narrative about who you are, who they are and how it all is. You've all met people like that, and once you were like that yourself. And just perhaps still occasionally that that comes back and you go. It's good to act it out a bit because then you can recognize it. That's not presence, that's absence. It's called absence. The opposite of presence, of course, is absence. That means you are not there, you are not there. All that's there pretending to be you is the egoic mind, the conceptual mind. And that mind says it's me and my life. So what arises then is the awareness, which means as it arises, it seems at first that you know less than before because you no longer compulsively immediately interpret everything conceptually, every human being you encounter and your own life. You don't compulsory. The compulsion to judge continuously isn't there. And so it seems at first. And the egoic mind may come in and say, oh, wait a minute, you don't know what's going on anymore. If you don't judge it, who knows who that person is? If you don't judge it, he could be your enemy. He could be out to deceive you. You better be careful, you need to judge. But then he said, no, you don't. And so I understood when I was reading Plato, Plato's works, as you may know. I don't know how many people these days read Plato, but he reports in his works what Socrates taught, how faithfully he recorded what Socrates taught, we don't know. But one certain things seem to be because Socrates never wrote anything. Certain things however, seem genuine. And especially one statement that Socrates made that's often repeated by Plato and that is this. When somebody went to the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece and the oracle said, who is the wisest man on the planet or in the world? The oracle said, Socrates is the wisest. Okay, they heard this. Then they went to Athens where Socrates was and said, oh, listen, the oracle at Delphi said, you are the wisest all men. Why is that? And Socrates said, I am the wisest because I'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing. I'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing. On another occasion he said, I am wise because I know that I know nothing. And then people later, they read it over the centuries and most people interpret it as kind of a feigned modesty. And they say, of course he knows what does it. He knows a lot, but he just says it. It's a feigned modesty. In other words, it's ego. But that's not how it is. It describes a state of consciousness out of which his enormously creative teaching, his deep insights arose. It describes the very foundation of the state of what ultimately is the state of spacious awareness or presence. And that state is one of actually cessation of mind activity without loss of consciousness. So every of the so called dialogues of Socrates and the way it's reported by Plato is not absolutely correct because I know exactly, maybe I was there, I don't know. But I know how Socrates always started. He started his Socratic dialogues with just not knowing. And then he begins to ask questions. And through questions the knowing gradually arises. He does not start with already accumulated knowledge, so it starts from the he was comfortable with the state of not knowing. In other words, he was rooted in the state of pure awareness.