This is a YouTube video titled "Eckhart Tolle Shares His Awakening Experience and the Shift in Consciousness" containing a detailed monologue by Eckhart Tolle. In this content, Eckhart Tolle describes his personal spiritual awakening, the distinction between life and life situations, and the profound shift in consciousness he experienced when he detached from the constant movement of thought. The video captures his reflections on presence, awareness, and the nature of self, providing insight into his teachings on mindfulness and inner peace.
The center of your attention always bring back into the present. Because it's first of all, because it's all there ever is. Well, that's a good reason. Because it's life itself, your life situation. Yes, it exists in time. There's a past and a future as far as your life situation is concerned, but it's not your life. I wrote about that a long time ago. But it's so important. People confuse their life situation with something more fundamental, more real, more immediate, deeper, which is called life. Life situation is circumstances and events in your life. And most of your life situation experienced in your mind. And then life situation, relationships, work situation, financial situation, living situation, all kinds of problem, often problematic situations. It's very rare that all of these situations are working smoothly and perfectly. Relationships, family, professional, work, financial environment, living situation, health situation, all working in harmony and perfectly. It can happen for short periods, but usually something, somewhere goes wrong. It has to periodically, frequently. That's normal and that's good. But your life situation always has this element of uncertainty, instability too. Although you might not recognize that when you look at seemingly solid things and your life is your experience of this moment the only thing there ever is. And if you neglect that, you miss the whole thing. And then you reach retirement age or old age and you say, was that it? And perhaps you spend your whole life trying to arrive at some point. And the points change that you want to arrive at, but you always want to arrive at some other point. So when your attention is in the present, yes, you are more alert, which is helpful. You notice things that before you didn't notice. People, objects, all kinds of things around you, natural things. And it's quite. Everything is a manifestation of life all around you. And the deeper aspect of being present is not just being aware of your surroundings. Although that's fine. You are aware of yourself as the aware presence. And that is the secret. That is the key. That is not something that one can easily explain. You can only experience it. What it means to be aware of yourself. Not as an ego self, like having a relationship with this conceptual identity. That's me. I don't like me, or I love me. I'm in love with me. That's happened to Narcissus. And things after that didn't go well for him. Although you hear that quite often in certain people. I love me. Well, it's a little strange. Who are you? And who or what is a me? Oh, I hadn't thought about that. I love myself. I hate myself. Oh, that's worse. Even that's the that's not uncommon either. I'm not happy with myself. But who is that I that constantly says these things? Who is that I that has a relationship with ultimately an imagined entity, mind made conceptual entity. And this happened to me one night as I talked briefly in the power of now when my mind. I can't live with myself anymore because I was unhappy and I couldn't stand the unhappiness anymore. So I can't live with myself anymore. And this sentence suddenly I looked at it and I realized it was a very strange statement. I cannot live with myself. At that point I realized that there must be two of me here. I am the self that I cannot live with. That was an incredible realization. There's two of me, there's the unhappy me that I cannot live with. Who am I and who is that unhappy me? This is almost like a koan, like a Zen riddle that you can't hard to answer or impossible to answer conceptually. But I actually can answer it conceptually. I couldn't at the time. It took years before I realized what all this meant. At that moment, the consciousness that I am that was trapped in the movement of thought and continuously absorbed by the movement of thought. This movement of thought created the entity to the person, the unhappy person, the entity, the unhappy entity, the mind made entity. And it was so active that it absorbed all of my consciousness was always trapped in the movement of self identified thoughts. So it was trapped in there. And when this strange statement arose in my mind and I looked at it and by looking at these statements a sudden separation happened between the consciousness that was trapped in the movement of thought suddenly was able to release itself, to extricate itself from the being held in the stood back and there was was I as the consciousness looking at the unhappy thought movement. So it was a separation of consciousness was withdrawing from the dimension of thinking. And then very quickly thinking subsided. It was no longer fueled. Without the consciousness there can be no thinking. Because thinking is not possible without consciousness. But a thought is consciousness that has taken form. Whereas the realization of I as consciousness is consciousness that is prior to form or unconditioned. So I became aware of myself as consciousness, as the I. And the thought then began to dissolve. Consciousness had been without consciousness, it's nothing. Thought is consciousness that has taken form. And it dissolved. And then I was kind of felt like falling into some hole. But it wasn't not fearful. The next morning I woke up and I was at peace like a new person or no person. I was just contemplating things around me. And everything was lovely and I didn't know why I was at peace and then I went around the city on the buses on buses still at peace the hustle and bustle of London where I was living I was at peace why I was at peace I couldn't understand it of course no the peace that passes all understanding Several years it took me to understand why that's very weird I did not realize that I was at peace for one reason and the reason was that I wasn't thinking that much anymore especially there's no. The whole movement of thought that is imbued with a sense of self self referential thought wasn't happening anymore Occasional thoughts yes but a lot of the time there was just awareness but I didn't have a word for it I just called it peace and so what happened then was the consciousness had withdrawn from its until then it had been impresent in the movement of thought and continuously absorbed by thought and then it stepped out.
