This is a YouTube video titled "Finding the New in the Familiar | Eckhart Tolle on Presence & Awareness" containing a monologue or talk by Eckhart Tolle recorded in January 2025. The content focuses on mindfulness, presence, and the distinction between the conditioned self (the person) and the unconditioned consciousness (the being). Eckhart Tolle discusses how nature and alert perception can help one shift from being a troubled person to an aware presence, emphasizing the importance of presence in everyday life.
In your familiar room. It's a wonderful little meditation. But it's not, don't call it meditation. It's just step out of breath. Become more alert of your sense perceptions. The primary one for most people is in the visual and then the secondary one is auditory. And there may even the other sensors make you. Maybe you touch something or become aware of the air that you're breathing. You're coming into the present moment. It's another way of putting it. This is the present moment. And in this moment the burden of your self, the burden of being you. Because being you is a burden. A lot of it is a burden. The burden of being you, the burden of selfhood, disappears temporarily. And instead of being a troubled person, every person is troubled. Some are more troubled than others, but every person is a troubled person. Instead of being a troubled person temporarily, you become the shift. You become an alert presence. Where before there was a troubled person, there's now an alert presence. Until the troubled person returns. It will try to return. It's there in the background, perhaps trying to pull you back, but you stay. And then you notice. Yes, in your familiar surroundings. It's wonderful. Shift can happen for a little while. Even more helpful than your familiar surroundings is nature perception of nature. Don't underestimate how important the importance of nature, Especially in present times when we are going through a period of collective increasing collective craziness. Nature can keep you sane, which ultimately means can help you to be in presence. Anything natural. Now interesting fact is when you look around the world, wherever you live, you can divide what you're perceiving into human matrix and nature. You usually have a mixture of human made things and nature. Now if you're in the middle of. In the middle of Manhattan walking, of course you may find it difficult to find any nature because is just. But you can look at. There's a sky. You may have to look up just to see the sky. Because the buildings are so high. You have to go, oh, there it is. Nature is still there. There's the sky. People would think you're a tourist. The only people who look up in New York are the tourists. Of course, they're not looking at the sky, they're looking at the buildings. So anybody who looks up in New York is either a tourist or has listened to what I'm saying here and is looking for the sky. The sky is nature too. The continuously changing sky. It's wonderful. But mostly you have a mixture. If I look out of my window here, I can see the sky. I can see trees fortunately, quite a few trees, evergreens, and some buildings. It's a mixture of human made things and nature. Giving attention to nature is extremely helpful. It's easier to become present through nature than through human made things. So nature has wonderful healing powers. So I highly recommend that you seek out nature as much as possible. No matter in what form. Whether it's your backyard, if you have there, or whether it's a little park. If you live in a city, there may be a park nearby, or there may be some trees growing in the street there where you live. Or perhaps you can easily reach open nature. Whether it's forest or fields or seashore or whatever it may be. Go there, spend some time there. But not just. It's not. The important thing is giving it attention. Because nature doesn't help you that much. If you just continue to be immersed in your habitual thought activity while you're walking in the forest or in a park, or along the seashore, wherever it may be, you have to give it your fullest attention. Then it can easily bring about this shift and you can sustain it for longer. As you continue to give your attention to nature. You can stay present more easily in nature. But you have to continue to be alert. Otherwise the person will reassert itself very easily. So you keep the person at bay and be there as an. As a conscious presence that is perceiving all that. A conscious presence. Now, this shift from person to conscious presence is another way of putting it. This is the awakening. And then you realize there are these two dimensions in you. There's two of you. This is not ultimately true, but it's a way of putting it. There's two of you. One is you are here as a person. Everybody is a person. You have a past and a future as a person. The who you are as a person is conditioned by the past. Obviously the. Your past, your childhood, the culture you grew up in, everything is conditioned. Your entire mental, emotional, this most emotional entity is conditioned by the past. If you had been. If you had been born in a different time period or a totally different part of the planet, you would not be the same person. The conditioning of your mind would be different. If you had been born 300 years ago, 400 years ago, your opinions about things would be very different. Now, of course, you think that your opinion now is the only valid one. And all the people who once lived, they're all wrong. And of course they would probably think that you are wrong if they knew what your opinions are. So this, if you grow up in a totally different culture, you'll be very different person. The person is a product of conditioning by the past, even childhood. If you had had different parents, different environment when you were a child, you would be a different person. Not so you are a person. This conditioned entity, I call that the human. That's a human part of you. But you're not just a human. Well, most people don't only know themselves as human, but they don't realize that they are human being. They forget the being and it think all they are is the human. They've never heard of being that see? No. Who are you as the being? As the being, you are unconditioned consciousness. And you are as a being. This sounds perhaps a little abstract, but it's not abstract to realize that you. You can be a person one moment and you can be the being in another moment. When you. When there is. When the habitual mind activity is replaced with alert presence. Suddenly you are a. You are the being. There's a depth that suddenly arises, the unconditioned dimension of who you are.
