How To Deal With Anxiety | A Special 3-Part Compilation from Eckhart Tolle

But primary purpose is spiritual awakening, to be awakened, an awakened human being. And this is what an awakened human being is. What is an awakened human? They know at first hand their essential beingness in any situation, in any moment. This is. So you may not be able to immediately you will make a difference whether you become a spiritual teacher or not, in one way or another, formal or non formal, who knows? You may. But the realization when it came to me was not immediately accompanied by an ability to explain anything. I didn't even understand it. I couldn't have explained anything. I was. All I could have said was I was anxious. I've been anxious and fearful and stressed human and depressed human being for years. And suddenly I'm peaceful. Why? Don't know. I didn't understand it. So understanding is not the main thing, conceptual understanding, it may come and there are even there have been. And there are realized humans who never arrive at an understanding. There are people, there are saints in India who just sit there all day long, never say anything, but you can just feel that they have that deep connectedness with being. And all they do is they look at you. And you can sense there's not just a person looking at me, there is consciousness looking. The unconditioned consciousness is looking through that form. And they are happy just sitting there. And usually in India they are recognized. And so people come, even if they don't say a word, people are still happy sitting with them and being looked at. But in the west it doesn't seem to work very well. So it's understand the cause In Miracles, of course, has a nice. A quote from the course in Miracles. Your understanding is not a powerful contribution to the truth. But using concepts and words as pointers can be very helpful, especially in the West. But even in India it's nowadays appreciated. So to use them as pointers. Yes. Not as final, not as any kind of truth. All the words that we use here, when I say what it's like to be you, or when we say who am I? Yes, we are using words, we are using thoughts, but they are pointing beyond themselves to beyond concepts. So you use concepts, but in order to step beyond concepts. And that perhaps the Buddha would. Perhaps he described it as the raft. You use a raft to cross a river, and then when you've crossed the river, you don't carry the raft around with you anymore. So it is. Once this has. You have even had a glimpse of it, you can actually, you can choose to another way of saying it is. It has chosen you. But let's put that Aside, there are many different perspectives. One can look at it from many different perspectives. Once you've had a glimpse, you can then invite it into your life, so to speak. And so that you begin and then another word, we have to use it in quotation marks. You then begin to practice that embodying that presence in addition to dealing with your daily life. And so you start with simple things and then you will be. It will be an amazing revelation when suddenly you find yourself in a situation that otherwise or in the past would have been a conflict situation. And you feel in the background of yourself, you can feel a certain spacious presence even while you are talking and listening to the others. That also means there is a rootedness there in being. That's another way of putting it that is extremely. That removes fear from your life. Nothing else will really remove the fear. That is your lot. When to you, the surface reality of the senses is the only reality there is. You have to live in fear, even if it's not. You don't actually. It may be just hidden underneath the veneer of confidence, but it's there. It may be hidden underneath anger, but it's there. So when you live. To come back very briefly to the analogy of the sphere, the bolt, and we are all faces facing outward. Oh, by the way, this analogy was already used 2,000 years ago by Plotinus, the philosopher. He said we are all like faces looking outward. And people haven't realized the depths of yourself. So when you are living on the surface, of course you live in fear. And it's only by going deeper that that sensing your essential beingness, then you are rooted in, so to speak, you are rooted in being, you are it. Language always creates duality, but that's just how it is. So you are rooted in that being, and then fear is no longer in your life. And fear in its many forms, anxiety, worry, and all those things. Fear, fear, fear. So much fear. Freedom from fear is such a. Humans are longing for that. And that's the only way. I'm not saying my way is the only way, but Jesus. Another saying when Jesus I am the way. You might remember that phrase, I am the way and the life and the truth. If you added one little word, then it would make more sense. And perhaps this is how he used it. I am is the way and the life and the truth of who you are. It's through the I am that God is realized. That which is the greater, the vastness with which you are connected in that I am. So these are all profound statements that he made but been misunderstood, misinterpreted. I am is the way that's the end of fear that is then experienced as peace and a life peace. It came to me spontaneously many years ago and the mind slowed down considerably. And that is another thing that you will notice as you connect with that. Rather than trying to slow down your mind, give attention to the feeling of yourself. And then the mind will slow down by itself. It calms down because the mind the over the hyperactivity of the human mind which is a disease that humanity is suffering from and has suffered from for thousands of years. The hyperactivity of the mind can't stop thinking. I must think about this. The voice that never that for many people is a torture in their. A torturer in their head that never stops. And often aggressive towards themselves or towards others. And critical continuously, sometimes more towards yourself or towards others. And complaining a lot of the time about your life and your situation and other people they're doing. And it goes on and on. 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And you've become so identified with it. Even the question I want to get rid of my mind doesn't arise because you have become your mind. And that's a dreadful fate. So the hyperactivity of the human mind is because the mind has become a substitute sense of identity. Rather than having your identity in being the beingness of you. Your identity is in thought. You derive yourself from the activity of thinking.

The questioner already says there's a lot of fear involved there, there's a lot of worry involved there. That creates the suffering. And that is something that you can tackle. And that is something that needs a more intense presence than an ordinary situation and an ordinary kind of anxiety that many people live with even if there's nothing in particular that they're anxious about. I believe in psychology it's sometimes called free floating anxiety. Free floating anxiety. You're anxious, you don't know why or you think you know why. But one thing can easily be exchanged for another. If the thing you're anxious about today suddenly gets resolved tomorrow you'll be anxious about something else. Free floating anxiety always finds a reason for being anxious and it's part of the egoic mind. But sometimes there is a reason to be anxious. There is a justified reason to be anxious in the case of this questioner. So and there it requires intense presence to see is it possible for me to let go of the worry which is the mind working in you. Excessive thinking, imagining something that might happen to me and the imagination of something and thinking yourself into situations where this has already happened, which you cannot deal with because they are not here now. And this is why it cannot be solved. Because it's an imagined situation. If you were experiencing it here now, it would probably be easier to deal with it than to deal with it as an imagination, an imaginary situation in your mind. So it requires intense presence to step out of that. Because the motivation and the strength to step out of that useless thinking that creates fear is provided by the fear itself. Because the fear itself is so unpleasant to live with that. A moment comes perhaps when you say, I can't stand this anymore. I don't want to live with this constant fear and this constant anxiety, even though it might be justified. I don't want this anymore because that is suffering in the way in which we use the word. And that can dissolve. But you need to have the motivation. You want to be free of it. You can't take it anymore. And then if you truly are fed up with suffering on that level, that provides the motivation for stepping out into intense presence. And it is intense presence that you need. When you are in a situation that, like illness, that could be critical or could lead to a critical condition, or is already critical, or whatever else it may be. It could be another person close to your child, something is going wrong there, physical or otherwise, or somebody close to you, or you lost all your money wherever in some deal. And then you know, okay, this is the last month that I can pay the mortgage. Where am I going to live? What's going to happen to me? I'll have to. Am I going to be homeless? You wake up in the middle of the night seeing yourself as homeless. Awful. And then all the other things that are happening to you or could happen to your family, if you have a family, you see all these dreadful things happening to you. An intense fear arises. You're nobody anymore. Nobody wants to see you anymore. Because you have lost your job and your social function. And some people can't live with that. Some people commit suicide when they lose their social function. Or some scandal happens. And everybody thinks, before they thought you were great and now they think you're awful. Some scandal to you in your vicinity. And it's not uncommon for people to commit suicide. But that is potentially an incredible opportunity for stepping out of the mind, because it is the mind that's creating that. So allow the situation, such as an illness, to force you almost into intense presence where you don't leave the present moment. You. And it manifests as this realization that you want to dedicate your life to awakening, and that everything else is secondary. Not that you neglect your external affairs, but you realize that in every situation, the primary factor is the state of consciousness that you bring to the situation. That determines how the situation unfolds, that determines whether you're reactive or non reactive. It determines your responses. Everything flows from your state of consciousness. So the dedication is. The primary dedication is that the realization that my purpose in life, my primary purpose is awakening. My primary purpose is to live consciously, to be a bringer of consciousness into this world. But when you say my primary purpose is awakening, don't put awakening into the future as a future goal, because that is not helpful. Awakening isn't a future goal. The awakening, the portal into awakening, opens up in the present moment. If you take your attention more deeply into the present moment. So it's easy to forget what the primary purpose of your life is. You might understand what I'm talking about, and there may be an inner voice that says, yes, I know that this is true. And yet, when situations arise in your daily life, you forget it, you react. You don't respond consciously. The ego comes back, you react. And many people tell me they find themselves continuously reverting back to reactivity and to worry and anxiety and so on. So although you may realize now, here and now, what the primary purpose of your life is, you may forget it the moment the phone rings and you get a challenging message. This is to do with integrating the awakened state into your daily life, the most important thing there is. So the school of awakening is designed to help you with that, so that you learn how to not lose presence when you're being challenged, for example, so that you can learn to live in the two dimensions. You live in this world and you are rooted in being or presence. This is the dance of life between the world of form and the world of spirit or the unmanifested. And you, of course, your root is in the dimension of being, in the dimension of the unmanifested, the deep I, as I call it. But that the world will try to pull you continuously out of that deep I back into the surface I, which is the historical person. So practice can be very helpful. And probably the school of awakening will help quite a few people in this essential task of integrating the awakening consciousness into their daily life. That is vital. And learning that you don't need to run away from challenges or to find that, believe that you need a more conducive environment for sustaining and integrating spiritual awakening. But realizing that whatever it is that makes up your daily life can Become part of your spiritual practice, and really that's what you need to learn. The challenges that arise in daily life, all those things become an essential part of your spiritual practice. Instead of demanding that life should give you space and opportunity to practice undisturbed. But if you practice undisturbed, it's unlikely that you will go very deep. You might have deep meditations, but the moment you go back into your life, you'll be pulled out again. If you go to an ashram for a year, not that there's anything wrong, for some people it might be a good thing. But generally speaking, if you go to an ashram for a year and meditate and the food is brought to you, you don't have to do anything. You might even get lovely mass and lovely fresh food. You might go quite deep in meditation, but it will not be really deep because it has never been exposed to the winds and the storms of everyday life. You will be like a greenhouse or hothouse plant that grew very quickly. But the moment you take it out of the the greenhouse into the open, it can't stand the assault by the elements and it withers. So you don't want to be like that. So use what you have. That's part of the teaching of the school of awakening, the dance, the dance between being and doing, between the unmanifested and the manifested, between the deep I and the surface I. So that's the. To achieve mastery of this is really the purpose of your life.