If you have ever thought that was not really me, watch this | Eckhart Tolle

Some people are interested in practicing all kinds of psychic powers. For example, lucid dreaming could be one of them. But okay, well, you can practice, but I recommend a much better practice, and that is lucid living. The skill is to use the future for practical purposes and always return to the present moment when you've done that. Don't lose yourself in the future. That's why I said, don't think about the departure now. It's not happening now. But he was right when he said, you need to know a few facts about the departure. Okay. And then you let— that's it. Hmm. Otherwise, you're never here. You're never in the now. Always one step ahead, or 3, or 100. Unable to appreciate the present. And since the present is all there is, this means unable to appreciate life. Unable to realize the essence of who or what you are, because that is inseparable from present moment awareness. So the inability to be present means you're not in touch with yourself. Ultimately, you could say you don't know yourself in the deep sense. That was the ancient dictum of the ancient Greek philosophy, know thyself. That has 2 levels. Level one is the ability to observe your own patterns, mental-emotional patterns, to be aware of what your mind is doing. Mm-hmm. To be aware of the script that you act out that's called me, the person, the conditioned script that's acted out, to be aware of that, that's all, that's level 1 of knowing yourself, which means knowing the various ways in which the unconscious conditioning manifests itself. In your thoughts and in your words and in your behavior. Very important part, and it's not that easy. Always much easier to recognize the unconsciousness in others and talk about it and complain about it, as if you were the only enlightened one and all the others are very unconscious. So self-knowledge, know thyself, starts there. And that's an interesting job, and it requires awareness, the light of awareness, consciousness. When you lose yourself in the script, you are unconscious again, spiritually speaking. This is why the term awakening is used as an analogy, because everybody knows what it's like to awaken from sleep in the morning. A huge difference, a shift in consciousness from That's awakening in the morning. So that's— spiritual traditions often use— have many, over many millennia, have used the term awakening because the step from being identified with thinking, immersed in the stream of thinking, being it, totally identified with the person that is kept alive by the stream of thinking, inseparable from the stream of thinking, that's— one could call that also a state of sleep. And stepping out of that, suddenly becoming present, is very much like waking up in the morning out of the The dream state, the sleep state into the normal wakefulness. But normal wakefulness really is mostly, for most people, a state, another state of spiritual sleep or dream. And so then there is another awakening out of that. And so we could call it spiritual awakening, suddenly. You step out of the conditioned mind patterns that made up the person and, oh, wow. And you can see when you observe people, as I said, it's easier to see it in others. When you observe people, how often they're totally immersed, they are, in that stream of thinking and It speaks through them, it acts through them, it reacts through them. Something is living in you, pretending to be you, and then it's talking. And it's emoting, if that's the word. It could be— don't challenge it, it could become very aggressive easily, very defensive, feels threatened by all kinds of things. A weird entity. So to be aware of that is part of the awakening, because as you become aware of it, something else is— another dimension of consciousness has come in. That's the beginning of the awakening. You're aware of the dream. You know the term lucid dreaming, which means the actual dream at night when you dream. Lucid dreaming means You're in a dream, but you know that you're in a dream. So you're witnessing the dream, but knowing that it is a dream. Usually that doesn't last very long because, I don't know, some of you may have experienced it, because the dream state and the lucid part of it, which is awareness has come into the dream, Mm-hmm. They're not compatible, so it very quickly puts an end to the dream. Some people are interested in practicing all kinds of psychic powers. For example, lucid dreaming could be one of them. But okay, well, you can practice, but I recommend a much better practice, and that is lucid living. So that's the ultimate practice. Lucid dreaming, okay, you can experiment with that, but what does that help you? Because when you wake up from sleep, you're completely identified with that weird entity again. So that's self-observation, is self-awareness, is part of the awakening. And then the Deeper the level, the deeper level of awakening is when you, when the stream of thinking subsides, but what remains is just lucid consciousness, a simple sense of presence, stillness, presence. There, the person has temporarily disappeared, and there is just that you cannot say much about it, although I seem to be doing it. And That is, presence is emerging. And now presence itself is timeless, but presence is emerging into this dimension where we have time. It doesn't— it is not— it does not originate in this dimension. It emerges into this dimension. Therefore, sometimes when we talk about it, it seems to be paradoxical because we say that gradually you become more present. That means here in this dimension, your ability to stay present grows. You can stay present for longer periods of time. Mm-hmm. without losing yourself again in the mind, in the person. And gradually here, the— what I sometimes call presence power grows in you. So it becomes stronger. In itself, not, but it shines. The light gets stronger here. The light itself is eternal already. But as it gradually comes into this dimension, and here it becomes part of the time dimension, the temporal dimension. So that's why, although it seems paradoxical, we often say that it takes time to become really present. Well, on the other hand, it doesn't take time. It's just we have present. You're either present now or you're not present now, you could say.