This is a YouTube video titled "How To Invite Presence Into Your Everyday Life, with Eckhart Tolle" created in May 2025. The content features a talk or lecture by Eckhart Tolle discussing the practice of presence, the impact of modern devices on mental clutter, the nature of ego, and ways to cultivate awareness in daily life. The speaker provides insights on transcending thought and maintaining mindfulness despite distractions from social media and technology.
You need to practice presence in non challenging situations. Invite presence into your life in non challenging situations, because otherwise there may not be enough presence for you to arise when challenges come. So whenever you are waiting somewhere, be present. Where is your attention? When you are present, your attention is taken away from thinking. And you can initially, if you cannot directly become present, like step out from thinking into presence. And this is a more advanced thing. Some of you may be able to do it where you can just say presence and then you're just. There's no thought anymore. And this is an amazing achievement, the greatest achievement perhaps in your life. If you could step out of thinking when you want to, when you realize it's pointless. I don't need thinking, I can just be aware. And then you step out of thinking into. So in other words, you transcend thinking. You could say you stop your mind, but that sounds a little bit too, as if you were pushing against it. You transcend the mind simply by deciding to transcend the mind. And that's an amazing achievement. If your whole life is, let's say everything you did in life ended in total failure. And then all these total failures took you to this point of realization where you're able to transcend thinking. It means your life has been a total success, even if you're in prison for the rest of your life. So invite presence into your life in normal situations, when you're traveling, when you're alone, don't always. And this is important for modern contemporary humans. These devices that we have came, they haven't been around for that long. All these smartphones, computers, iPads and other pads that constantly occupy your mind, that constantly stimulate mental activity, a lot of which has no useful purpose at all. But it seems to be also important. It's not. So you need to be careful that your mind is not taken over by these devices that simply amplify something that was already there in humans, has already been been there in humans for thousands of years, this incessant stream of thinking. And now it's stimulated by these devices and amplified by these devices. So it's what's going on my Facebook page. What's happening there? What's going on? No, there are. This has become part of people's ego. So that you have an external externalization of ego. Ego. Ego is living through a mental image of who you are. It's not being yourself, but being who you think you are. Having a mental image. The ego is Narcissus, the ancient Greek mysteries. The young man who looked before there were mirrors or selfies the young man looked into a pool of water and saw himself there for the first time. And he was very beautiful. And he fell in love with his own image. That's the myth of Narcissus. He fell in love with his own image. And from then on things went downhill for him. Now he fell in love with his own image. He's not talking about real love. He became obsessed with his own image is really what it was. He became and says, I am so beautiful. So he started to develop and self imaged. There he was he here. And there's the image me. And that is. This myth describes the beginning of the arising of the human ego. Of course, nowadays it's not the pool of water, it's the. And then of course, the important thing is it needs to be posted. And then you carefully constrain. Young people do it a lot. My generation, perhaps less so because for most of my life these things didn't exist. But the younger generation, they live, many of them live through their Facebook. A lot of their life takes place on social media and Facebook and they have a carefully constructed image on their Facebook where they post the things that they think people would envy and people show how great their life is. And so you construct this Facebook image of who you are and you can live through that. That adds another layer to the ego. And because it's ego, of course, whatever comes into your Facebook, I don't even know how it works. Somebody tried to explain it to me, but I just. It must be very simple because even apparently people with low IQs can use it, but I can't. It just. I can't. How does. There was a time when I sent things to my office and I wrote a few things for patients and that was lovely. And I haven't done that in a while. I may do it again and I may attempt one more time to master the use of Facebook so that I can post things. Not selfies to enhance, but more useful things. Because these things can be used for consciousness too. In most cases, unfortunately, they keep people in unconsciousness. So be careful with these things. You need to keep spaces in order to practice presence in your life. You need to keep spaces in your life when you're not interacting with the devices. One good thing, for example, is in your bedroom. This is recommended by Arianna Huffington. That was her idea. She said, there's no device ever in my bedroom. I have books there, but there's no television, there's no. No phone, nothing. That's one good thing. And then when you go for a walk in nature, not be constantly at the mercy of any signal that says some incoming message or email or need to check this or that, because they can clutter up your mind totally. The social media part of it, the message, the text messages, the emails, can lead to totally cluttered mind. The human mind was already cluttered before these devices were invented, and now potentially is even more cluttered. And clutter means. But the word clutter means complete lack of spaciousness. There's always some noise going on in there. And so if you do that for years, then you can see it in people's eyes. That complete lack of aware, the field of awareness is lacking, space is lacking. It's not that they don't have it, but it's totally obscured. And so when it's totally obscured, then you can see it. After some years of living like that, then there's this absent look in their eyes, because the intention is never there. It's always there. It is so important. They're thinking. And even when they're listening to you, they're not really listening. They're. They're listening to their thinking. And often there's an emotion behind it too, some kind of resentment. Things are not going the way I expect them to go. So this is the unawakened signs of the unawakened state, unconscious state.
