How to Keep Yourself From Complaining All the Time | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

So Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian sage who lived in the first half of the 20th century in India, said that the most important, the most effective criterion to judge your progress on the spiritual path is the degree of absence of thinking. That's pretty simple. So this is your practice beyond any meditation, formal meditation practice that you make do is very helpful, but it needs to. The spaciousness needs to become part of your everyday life. Your daily life needs to be interspersed with spaces, and in every hour there need to be spaces until a time comes when the spaciousness never leaves you. So you will be able to use your mind without always in the background sensing your own presence. I call it your own, although it's not your own, because nothing is your own in the background. You sense your own presence, your spaciousness. While you listen to someone and even while you speak, you are not your entire. Not 100% of your consciousness is drawn into the mind stream through which words are formulated. Because then you are lost, you are lost in the conditioned mind and you go. The stream is coming out of your mouth and strengthened by the emotions behind it. Because your thinking activates the emotional body and then the emotional body participates in that outflow of stuff. And it's not, it's. There's no wisdom in it, you're just contributing to the problem. You might be discussing how to solve all problems, but then you get angry about this. Because if people just cannot see the truth, but you know it, but they can't. So accessing that in daily life, and I've already given you a few little hints as to what good portals are to enter that state, one I just mentioned, detect in yourself when you have a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. And that could be quite a lot of times a dysfunctional present means you dislike what is, you hate what is you criticize what is. You complain what is. You complain about other people, you complain about those people there. You complain about my life, complain about my ex wife, complain about what they did to me, complain about the. Whatever the mind can. It loves complaining, but the body doesn't like it. Because when you complain what you feel, it feels good to the ego, because the ego strengthens itself. When you complain about another person, the ego has enhanced itself because I'm now superior to this person or group of people that I'm complaining about. That's how it operates. The ego feels superior when it can judge another negatively. Therefore it compulsively judges other people, situations, places negatively. It loves that. But if you are vigilant, you will See that that actually is not the body doesn't feel good in the body. It feels good in the fictitious psychological entity that we call the ego. But if you could examine the physiological function in the body, you would feel the energy flow through the body becomes interrupted, decreases when you get angry. They've observed that your stomach lining becomes red and all kinds of secretions happen in negative states. So detect dysfunctional relationship. And when you find it in yourself in the moment, you say, oh, there it is. At that moment you have a choice. You can say, okay, I want to continue to be in this dysfunctional state. And then you can. But that's unlikely because dysfunctional state ultimately only survive as long as you are unconscious of them. You do not recognize them as dysfunctional states, then they survive. The moment you recognize as a state as dysfunctional than you realize you actually would be better off without it. When you feel upset about having to wait somewhere for too long and you suddenly discover you're upset and then you're vigilant again, you say, why am I upset because of this situation? No, I'm upset because of what your mind is saying about this situation. That's an amazing realization. But you have to do it in the moment it happens at first. Perhaps the realization will come just after it happened and you look back on it and say, oh, that's what happened. It's amazing. There's so many situations in life that are upsetting what people say to you, but shouldn't have said or failed to say or do all kinds of things. And when you look closely, you see it's a mental commentary that judges the situation, that causes the emotion that causes the upset, not the situation in itself. When you've realized that situations are neutral, then you no longer have. You no longer personalize things. And then this is then the ease of accepting the isness. You accept that humans are often unconscious. They often say things that come out of their unconscious state and that's fine. That's why they're at so becoming friendly with the isness of this moment. If action is required, it will be more powerful when you it comes out of presence, not out of resistance. And there will be wisdom in it, as Buddhists call it, right action or skillful means or skillful action. So you discover dysfunctional states. That's vital. Then you can become friendly with the present moment. When the present moment is no longer obscured by the dysfunctional state of consciousness and you suddenly go, oh, well, that's what is so is there anything I need to do now? Is there anything I can do. Then you take action. There's nothing I can do. Then just accept it.