Eckhart Tolle on the Role of Consciousness in Challenging Life Events

So if you focus on the awakening, whether you are conscious at any moment, the important thing in any situation that you encounter in your life is the state of consciousness with which you meet that situation. What is the state of consciousness in which you face whatever situation arises in the present moment that determines the next thing, how it's going to go on in the next next moment, in the next. How do you end? What is, how do you perceive, react to this? Whatever is arising in this moment. So whatever is arising in this moment, the situation that arises, they come and go, different situations arise. Is always maybe important, but it of secondary importance. More important is your state of consciousness. Now, if you could remember only that and live that, that's really all you need. So whenever you encounter any situation, realize what's my state of consciousness right now? And there's a situation that perhaps you need to deal with. Perhaps you need to take action right now. Perhaps there's nothing you can do and you have to leave it alone. We don't know. But what is your state of consciousness in the present moment? Vital question. And in order to answer that question, and it doesn't really have a conceptual answer because you immediately know whether you are present or not, that question can help you become present. What is my state of consciousness right now? Maybe are there certain thoughts that are happening that are telling you that something is very wrong? Emotions that are telling you that something is wrong. There are certain thoughts, they are telling you you'd rather be somewhere else. Very common thing. It's so common, people don't realize it. Some people live almost continuously as if they were longing to be somewhere else, but not here. And now to get away from here. Now. This isn't right. There's something not right. Never. And occasionally it seems right. Ah, I have arrived. It's right. Whatever it is that makes it right for a moment, it's an illusion. I'm in love. This is the completion of my life. I've fallen in love. There's a person who's going to complete me. When you go to a restaurant and observe other people sitting at various tables, you can tell. With a couple sitting at a table, you can tell whether their relationship is relatively recent. They haven't known each other for very long. They're in that state that they call falling in love. The way they interact is very different from those who have been in a relationship for longer or are married. The ones that have just met fall in love. They are in a kind of state of delusion. You can see it in their eyes. Everybody's playing their part in it. It's a theatrical performance, but they don't know it. And that comes to an end at the latest when they start living together. So this, then the essence of all this is awakening, the awakened state of consciousness. And as I mentioned earlier, the. Not surprisingly, this term awakening has been used over thousands of years, since the time of the Buddha and before. The essence of the teaching of the Buddha is to waken. The word Buddha itself means to be awake. The one who is awake, this is a Sanskrit root of the word, is to be awake. Buddha is not a. It's not a name of a person. It describes a state of consciousness and then go to Jesus. And there are quite a few parables that talk about not going to sleep, about staying awake. And these are not. These are parables. They're not to be taken literally, obviously. Literally, you cannot tell a person, stay awake because eventually, of course, you'll go to sleep. So we are just using this analogy of awake and asleep in order to point to something that most humans are not yet familiar with. To quote Jesus again from one of the gospels, he said, and this is quite a bit of what we read about Jesus teaching, may not be quite what he said or distorted, but a few things. I can sense absolutely literally what he said, a few things here and there. For example, he said, and what I say to you, I say to all, stay awake. Was that the Buddha or Jesus? No, it was Jesus. Oh, now he's not talking about the normal state of wakefulness. Nobody could stay awake for that long because there's something that pulls you into sleep. So we are not talking about that. We are using that as an analogy. Everybody knows what it means to awaken in the morning when you've been asleep, which is a particular state of consciousness. You're asleep. And in sleep you have dream state and you have dreamless sleep. You have those two. And then you wake up, you awaken in the morning, and there's a huge difference between the state of sleep and the state of being awake. Everybody experience that every morning. And you go, suddenly you open your eyes, completely different world. You've just awakened. It's a different state of consciousness. And so this analogy is used because there is something in ordinary consciousness, normal human consciousness, which really should be called unconsciousness. Normal human consciousness could also be described as a kind of sleep because it's totally conditioned by the past.