Inviting Presence And Building Good Karma | Eckhart Tolle

So this, you need to work on this everyday life. Invite presence in ordinary situations that are not particularly challenging. For some people, even a red light, a traffic light is challenging. Having to wait in line somewhere is challenging. Why not use this precious moment and bring, oh, invite, become alert, feel the energy field in the inner body and just be there as an observing presence. And then you have the two dimensions. You have sense perceptions, hearing, and you have the formless presence. So you have this light and that which appears in the light. It's always the same, the light of consciousness. So then you grow in presence power as you use all those situations that before were never good enough. You're always on your way somewhere. Better use those situations to bring presence in. And then that power grows in you. And if that doesn't, it's only then if that power grows in you, of presence power that you can deal with the heavy, let's call it, use an eastern term, the karmic stuff. Those accumulations in you that are old patterns, some of which originating in your present lifetime in childhood, but in many cases, patterns that go back a long way in time. Your ancestors acting out patterns that your ancestors acted out 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, instill the same conditioning. Or you can look at it in terms of whether you look at it in terms of genetics that you think that come, or in terms of past lifetimes. Whatever approach you want to use is fine. The fact is there are accumulations in you. There are patterns of unconsciousness that have been there a long time. We could call them karmic, karmic meaning unconscious patterns that you identify, usually identify with as yourself, that take you over completely. And the truth of the real karma is not the external events in your life. The external events in your life really trigger the karma that you carry inside. And they become your reactions. And your reactions determine how you experience your life. So in a way, you could have the same thing happening to one person creating a certain response, and the same event happening to another person, creating a totally different response. I can have, for example, you have. When I first, when I had just written my first book, the publisher said, why don't you sign some books for some famous people? They might give you an endorsement. So I did, and they were sent out and almost nobody replied. And I didn't realize at the time that those famous people, how many books and manuscripts they get sent every week and every month. Now I'm getting them. And now I'm the one who doesn't reply because you just can't it's impossible to read it all. Even dipping in, they pile up. There's a backlog. I have now already several months of backlog to get through. So it's very hard, if not impossible. But I didn't know that. But fortunately I was not. I didn't take it personally without having read the Four Agreements. I already knew this is not a personal thing, so it was not problematic. But I read some instances where people have sent me books and they got extremely upset because they didn't get a reply. And they get more and more upset and the letters became more and more angry. And then I became some great. The worst dreadful person in the world. And those are old karmic patterns that people carry. The external event triggers the pattern for some people. What becomes a huge drama for one person is an insignificant event for another. So how you experience your life is not really so much to do with what happens to you, but it's how you react. Because every reaction determines the next thing that happens. So something goes wrong, you make drama out of it and that creates more stuff. And this is how more karma gets created. How you react to a person determines how that person reacts to you. And so it's a reflection. In other words, you kind of. You create to a large extent your life, not to a large extent completely your life experience unconsciously. And so to break the old patterns that create so much suffering, unnecessary baggage I sometimes call it, that you carry around with you, that you. So you meet it, you interpret situations and people through the unnecessary baggage in your mind that for that to be transcended or dissolved, that requires presence, power. The presence needs to be there when the old patterns arise in your life. And that is there. So you don't wait for the challenge when hoping that you can stay present because you won't use it when you're not being challenged and invite presence into your life. All those moments that are really precious and that generates more than you. It's like almost like a. The equivalent on the physical level would be working out. You get stronger, so to speak. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. Sa.