I Have A Desire To Share My Realization

A spiritual talk on why teachers should live their realizations before sharing them. The speaker argues that authentic teaching comes from presence and intuition, not method, and warns against ego's role in the desire to teach. References the Dalai Lama's approach to wisdom.
I can see the beauty of life after reading one of your books. There's a very strong desire or wish to share this realization. Did you also feel such feelings after understanding what happened? Does this come only from ego? A strong desire to share what you know, what you've read? Now, hopefully, it's not only what you have absorbed through reading the book, but something that you also know in your life experience. If you've only absorbed it through reading the book, then it is, generally speaking, premature to share too much with others. Except when a special occasion might arise, when it is helpful to tell somebody, well, what. I have a nice quote for you from what I read. And it might help somebody, but on the whole, you need to at least begin to live it before you can show the way to others. And it's not always ego, the desire. There is a desire built into spiritual realization. It wants to spread, of course, it wants to reach others. But the way it happened to me was just organically, spontaneously. After a while, people would sometimes come and ask questions, and I didn't know the answer beforehand. The answer only came after listening to their question. And that is the true spiritual teaching. You don't teach what you've read in a book. You teach what you know for yourself. Never attempt to teach anything that's not part of your own life experience. And it's not a true teaching. And others may even resent it. Or you may get into trouble because you're trying to convince others that you are right and they are wrong. And if it's. You can recognize ego. If you want to get in there when nobody has asked you, there's not an openness. And yet you want to get in there and change somebody's life because you know the answers. That is very probably your ego trying to control somebody else's life and telling yourself that this is a good thing. So, on the other hand, anybody who awakens as you begin to live this spiritual realization, this awakening, the way in which you interact with other people changes. And the way in which you interact with other people begins to affect other people, even if you do not specifically say anything about anything spiritual. So you cannot not teach. When you begin to become transformed and you go through the shift in consciousness, gradually you begin to teach in a wider sense. Not in the narrow sense of me teaching you. No, but the presence spreads, and sometimes no words at all. Sometimes it can just be being with a person and listening to them in presence. And perhaps you don't say a single word. It could be sitting with a dying person and Just being there as a still presence. And you haven't uttered a single word because you didn't need to. And yet it was wonderful. Your presence was vital for that moment and that person. So the teaching can come in many forms, not necessarily verbal. The teaching can come in a moment of non reaction when somebody is unconscious around you or attacks you verbally. And the teaching will come when there's absolutely no reaction in you. And then the passing horse, what's happening, not feeding my ego, not feeding my pain body. Or the person wouldn't even know that, but they can. So in many. So it can take many forms. And some of you are already engaged in a more formal teaching. I know that some of you are already practitioners of this or that where you meet with people and that the presence flows into whatever you do. And others, many others will become here will become teachers. If not formal in some other way, it may just flow into what you do or the people you meet in your everyday life. Who knows? Or it could be a total shift. That life takes you out and puts you somewhere totally different. So there is this desire to teach is you have to be watch within yourself to see, make sure that it's not your ego that wants to change others and get in there when they haven't asked for any help at all and don't want to know. But you may also find that as you teach and the teaching again comes when people ask a question, you say something as happened to me and perhaps is already happening to you or will happen to you, you find yourself saying things that arise spontaneously because you were listening in presence. Then suddenly you say something that you didn't know yourself beforehand. It is helpful for this person in this situation. And you go, oh, I said that, where did that come from? And that's wonderful. You discover your own, the source of wisdom within yourself. And that happens to certain therapists after several years of therapy. At first, when you're a therapist, you apply your particular modality of therapy. And if you do it for long enough, after a while you just begin to just if it's really working, the modality that you have learned to apply to the therapeutic situation becomes less important. And then after a while you're just there as a presence. Then it's then that you become an effective therapist. At that moment your therapy becomes empowered. And then you find you are suddenly of real help to another person. But why? Because you have gone into the state of not knowing rather than being in the state of I know the answers because look, my degree certificate is on the wall. I know the answer. You have gone into the state of not knowing, and that's where wisdom suddenly arises. So there have been therapists, some famous ones who worked in that way, and then other people came and tried to make a method out of it. I believe that was the case with nlp. There were certain therapists, if I remember correctly, that worked very effectively. And then some people came in. How do they do it? How do they move their hands? What is their body movement? And then they discovered things like they mirror the other person's body movement. The client or the patient sits there. And then the therapist goes, if the client does this, the therapist does this, or the client sits like that. But the therapist did that intuitively. He didn't even know he was doing it. And I discovered I often do that. I did that when I sat with people. It just didn't. There was no decision around. It just happened. Because you tune into the other person on every level and it just happened. Does it still work if it becomes a technique rather than arising out of an intuition? I don't know. That's my favorite quote of the Dalai Lama, by the way. I don't know. He often says that because he's comfortable but not knowing. And often after that, he says interesting things. But first he says, I don't know. Sa.
More from Eckhart

Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle









