How to Plan a Great Future—Consciously | Eckhart Tolle on Conscious Life Design

But it started when I was writing the New Earth, and then I couldn't focus on anything else while I was writing. And then things started to accumulate and now I still get all these manuscripts and books sent and some of them are taking up more and more space at my place. So let's not go there. Well, the anxiety about not taking care of the future is of course losing the present moment. That's the real loss of the present moment. But taking care of the future by doing some planning, constructive planning, even constructive thinking, not useless thinking and worrying and toxic thinking in the middle of the night things what I should be doing or haven't done, or if I do, it might go wrong. Not that kind of totally useless thinking, which is losing the present moment. Then there is the applied thinking, which is, oh, I need to work out what I'm going to do, whatever, a schedule for the next thing. I'm going to do a plan for next year when I will have to do this or that, whatever. And you may find that if you do focused thinking and apply it to whatever it is that you need to work out, is not losing the present moment. It's only useless thinking about the present moment that mentally projects you away from the now and doesn't get you anywhere, detracts from the quality of life and detracts from your sense of aliveness. So planning you can do in the present moment. Let's say I plan. Where am I going to go? I'm going on a tour somewhere. I was on a Europe tour late last year and that had to be planned almost a year in advance. So already at the beginning of last year, and before then, we were already talking about the Europe tour. And so what then? Look at the calendar cities, geography of places where they connect, all the other factors that you need to look at. You're not really losing the present moment because you're not projecting yourself mentally over there and imagining how it's going to go, or imagining that when you finally give that talk in London, then you're really going to feel really fulfilled. Or projecting yourself to that talk in London when nobody's going to like what you're going to say and half the audience are going to leave. Am I going to be inspired when I reach London to give a talk? It's just losing the present. This kind of thinking happens. It pretends to be useful and constructive, but it's not at all. And it's not taking responsibility for anything but applied thinking. And for applied thinking, it's good to give yourself a time limit. Of space. You sit down for an hour, or you talk to people and say, what do we need to do here in order to do this? That. That. That you're not losing the present moment. Some people, often this is not uncommon for people to have this question, thinking that I must never think about the future. But when you apply that, you're not really thinking about the future. The planning is now. You're not projecting yourself away from the present moment. So it's applied and constructive thinking. The same with the past. Sometimes you need to think about something that happened in the past. You need your memory for certain things. And then you need to kind of go back there in your mind. And then you talk about, well, but there's a reason why you bring it into the present, because you need that kind of memory or the knowledge. Perhaps you learned something there at the past Europe tour. Those things went very wrong. The people had to line up for an hour, and I was an hour late starting. It was disorganized. What did we do wrong? That's fine. You have to go there. But if you. In the middle of the day, you think how dreadful that was, or you're blaming yourself or others about what went wrong, then you lose yourself in the past. So you can use past and future without losing yourself in them. And then really, you remain present even while you refer back to the past or while you make plans for the future. So that's really how it works.

Is there a way that you can, if you're happy, you can trust the universe that you're on the right path?

Oh, yes.

Is that just.

That is an underlying thing. Is, of course, the sense of connectedness with the deeper level, the deeper levels of your being, the awareness, the presence, the stillness, whatever you want to call it. And that gives you a certain rootedness. You're rooted in being. And then what happens on the outcome of things that you do is no longer the factor that determines your state of consciousness. So when things go wrong, sometimes they do. You're not devastated. You don't. Oh, you don't feel you're going to die because it went wrong and you didn't get there. You tried so hard. In the end, it didn't work out. And it's so awful. You beat yourself up mentally. No, that's very dysfunctional and creates a lot of suffering. So you are less dependent on the. You welcome a good outcome, of course, but you're not dependent on a good outcome for feeling peaceful and really complete in yourself and that sense of completeness in yourself, because There are two levels, as you know, that one could say the two dimensions. You are the person, but you are also the vast consciousness. So there's the ripple, there's the ocean. The person lives in time. There is a development. The person learns things, gets better at certain things and so on. At the deepest level, there is already that sense of completion. You don't need to become anything. When you are connected with the depths of who you are in that depth, you don't need to become. You are already complete. On the level of the person, you are never really complete. And there are always things that could be called imperfections. Not once when you're connected. Not huge things that create a lot of dysfunction in your life and make your life and other people's lives unhappy. Not that kind of thing. But there are things that are certain, personal things that are limitations on you can't be. I have. My place at the moment is untidy. I'm not perfect there. So there was a time when my place was tidy. So I'm not an untidy person continuously. But it started when I was writing A New Earth. And then I couldn't focus on anything else while I was writing. And then things started to accumulate. And now I still get all these manuscripts and books sent. And some of them are taking up more and more space at my place. So let's not go there. That's an imperfection on my part. If somebody had an idea of somebody who's fully awake, he must live in certain way, and then he comes, how can you. This is not tidy. How do you live? Occasionally I have a cup of coffee, one a day. And occasionally people see me having a cup of coffee somewhere and say, why do you need coffee? You've written all these spiritual books and now you still need coffee. I don't know if I need it. I just enjoy a cup of coffee and I drink a glass of wine or two occasionally with dinner. You drink alcohol? Well, if my state of conscience is so fragile that a glass of wine would upset it, then can't be worth very much. So the addictiveness does not come in because the addictiveness would be something else. If I were addicted to coffee and couldn't live without six cups of coffee a day, or if I were addicted to alcohol and wouldn't know when to stop drinking, that would be something else. But you can enjoy things. People might interpret it as an imperfection, and perhaps it is. But allow yourself to have your imperfections as long as they don't create suffering for others or yourself become comfortable with things where you are not perfect. Some people are habitually. It's not a nice thing. It's not my problem. But they are habitually laid. Some people just have that. It's almost in their genes. I had a Filipino friend. I recently met her again after many years in London, at university in Cambridge. And it must be in the Filipino genes to be late all the time. And apparently when I talked to her, she said, yes, everybody's late. Nobody expects people to be on time. And so. And that maybe she may not be able to get rid of that, because in her genes it says be late or you don't need to be on time, or that. And that's fine. That's how they live. It's not a problem in the Philippines. It might become a problem in the west, but not to them. To other people who might say, there's something wrong with you. If somebody. Some things can change, and that's good. And as consciousness awakens in you more, the awareness arises. It does tend to dissolve those patterns, as I said, that really F up your life.

Okay, thank you.

It.