Eckhart Tolle’s Secrets to Stop Identifying with Your Emotions

So there's a huge difference between saying I'm angry and slightly I feel angry or there's anger in me, I feel that there's anger in me, I feel angry. There's a somewhat different I am angry. Because then you equate identity with emotion. So the letting go of any kind of complaining unless something can be done and you talk to somebody about it. And again then not in a complaining way, but in a factual way, that's already a huge shift. And then continuous self observation is part of that also. What are the thoughts that go through your mind and be the awareness of what is happening in your emotional field as you are sitting here? Are you carrying something in your emotional field that is a residue of something that happened an hour ago this morning while you were traveling here yesterday, Some imaginary situation your mind is creating and the emotion reflects that as if it were reality. And again, without the awareness, it takes you over. You don't need to get rid of anything. You don't need to get rid of the emotion. Without the awareness, you don't have an emotion. The emotion has you. And the emotion is an energy form, an energy field. A thought is an energy formation. Everything is energy. And this is emotion and thought are non physical energy formations. So the thought then has you, you don't have it. You are not even there. You are spiritually speaking, asleep. And you're being run by the conditioned emotions, the mental. You are run by the mental emotional conditioning. The mental emotional conditioning says I and it refers to all that stuff, that accumulated stuff I. Everybody says I continuously. Everybody's favorite pronoun is I. And what they refer to usually is that entity, the problematic entity, the ego. That's the word, the egoic self. I. There is a deeper I that is not the egoic self. And the deeper I. This is why we're here, to access that, to deepen that. Most of you already have access to it, but it may periodically become obscured in this world, not surprisingly, when things go wrong, that's a moment of becoming more conscious. Even the smallest things. If you don't react out of the conditioning, the mental emotional conditioning, but be the awareness and then oh, and you observe. If emotions arise, you are there. And you can say, oh, there's the anxiety again. And then you know that there's anxiety without calling it anything. This is a huge difference. To know that anxiety is in you, anger is in you right now, for example, or anxiety, whatever else it may be, or some mood that suddenly gets a hold of you and you're suddenly in A bad mood. Don't talk to me. Don't you, I'm grumpy? Well, to say I'm grumpy is already a little bit step forward because at least you know that you are grumpy. If you're totally calm conscious, the grumpiness is you. And you don't even know that you're grumpy. To say don't talk to me, I'm grumpy, that's already means there's a little bit of awareness there. It's great. So there's a huge difference between saying I'm angry and slight difference. I feel angry or there's anger in me. I feel that there's anger in me. I feel angry. There's a somewhat different I am angry. Because then you equate identity with emotion. So it's not I am angry. That's a huge. You've fallen into a huge trap. If you equate emotion with your identity, or if you equate a thought with your identity or a story in your mind, you equate that with your identity or an opinion which is thought. The world is full of people who don't know the difference between their opinion and their identity. Their opinion becomes their identity. And then they have lots of fights with other people because they are totally confused about who they are. They derive their identity from a set of opinions. Politics, for example. You derive. It doesn't mean you cannot have opinions. Everybody has opinions. But where does your sense of identity come from? Does it come from the opinions? Or do you realize that you have certain opinions which may be valid or not on a human level? You have opinions or viewpoints or perspective mental positions. You have them, they are there. But do these give you your sense of self? Or if they do, then you're continuously arguing with other people, making other people into enemies. Because when you contradict somebody who equates opinion with identity, unconsciously they believe that you are attacking their very self because there's a confusion about who they are. They don't know who they are. So you attack the opinion of somebody who's totally identified with their opinion and you become their mortal enemy. They might even try to kill you up in an extreme form of unconsciousness. So this is why it's so important to transcend that. Transcend doesn't mean you exclude it. It doesn't mean no more opinions. Now I have no opinion about anything or anyone. No, that's not going to work. What do you think of the Republican Party? The Democratic Party? Nothing. But there is a deeper level, you can go to a deeper level. And your sense of I does not come from the movement of thought. It comes from a deeper place. Your identity, who you feel or sense you are does not come from the emotional field or from the mental formations. And that is the awakening that is to be awakened is to discover, first of all, it is to discover that dimension. For some people, at first, it comes in little glimpses, perhaps sometimes in protected settings, environments like here. And I say, are you able to this moment, are you able to let go of thinking without falling asleep, but remaining alert in a gentle way, not through willpower, but just relinquish conceptualization? No need to interpret compulsively this moment? What could you add to it? Interpret. You like it? I like this. I don't like that. Yes, likes and dislikes still exist on the surface of your being. But when you become rooted in the deeper presence, the being of you, then you're suddenly free. And you can sense that in that stillness, if we want to call it that stillness just means the absence of thought. And what remains when thought goes, but you don't fall asleep, is conscious presence. Pure consciousness remains. And that is the deeper I, the deeper I am. So a moment of presence or stillness, in that moment, you have transcended the person, the personal self. Of course, you go back into it after a while, and the question is, are you going to lose yourself in it again? Perhaps. And then you come out of it again. And after a while. This is the aim of spiritual practice, that your connectedness with the deeper dimension is not lost. Even when you're engaged in daily activities or discussions or whatever it may be, that connectedness remains in the background, which may be the case with you now, as you listen to this. And it's not this. Something in you recognizes what the words are pointing to. And that's not the conceptual mind. That which recognizes it as true is the immediate realization of the truth of it. You don't have to think about it. You can't think about it. So you know immediately, yes, I know. There's a direct knowing, not conceptual knowing. Conceptual means knowing through thinking. Most people live through a conceptual reality. Their identity is a conceptual identity. And they conceptualize everybody else they meet. They immediately form judgments that come very quickly. And you form a conceptual identity for the other. You trap the other person in this mental concept, but you do that because you've already done it to yourself. So you live through a conceptual identity, me. And so we step. We go to a deeper place, or you could call it higher or deeper, it doesn't matter. I prefer deeper. You go to a deeper place where the movement of thought ceases and immediately you have transcended the self, the egoic self, if only for a few seconds, one minute. And everybody is longing to be free of this problematic entity. Unconsciously, they want to be free, but they don't want to let go. This paradox here. They don't want to let go and yet they can't stand it. They want to be free. So much drug taking in this world. They want to transcend this heaviness of life as experiencing life as this heavy burden. And their identity is very unsatisfying. So they are longing to be free, but they are going below, thinking the road that takes you below, you fall below thought. And to some extent, yes, you have become free of the self. Before you go to sleep, there's a transitional moment when you're in bed and you're halfway to sleep already. And that moment feels really good. You feel, ah, it feels. You can feel the pull of sleep. And you can feel. You can't think about your problems anymore. Your entire sense of identity isn't there because you're too tired. And then you're pulled into sleep.