Is There Always Something Wrong in Your Life? This Might Be Why! | Eckhart Tolle

There are thousands or hundreds of thousands that you go on every day. They look on their screen waiting for the next thing to be offended by. And the ego loves it. The transcendence of thinking means the transcendence of the egoic mind. It means that you are able to spend part of your time relatively free of compulsive thinking, certainly free of self serving thinking and destructive thinking that continuously creates unhappiness for yourself and the people around you. How many people live the compulsive narrative in your mind that for many people is very negative, constantly critical, constantly complaining, never at ease with what is. There's always something wrong, fault finding. Because the ego grows through constant opposition, constant antagonism. Never at ease, always looking for the next thing to complain about. And it strengthens the egoic self the more you complain. Oh, offended is a new version these days. It's very popular on the Internet. I'm very, very offended. Outrageous. How dare you. There are thousands or hundreds of thousands that you go on every day. They look on their screen waiting for the next scene to be offended by. And the ego loves it. And for many of them it's the only way they can inflate their ego by sitting on the screen and sending out tweets. The transcendent of thinking is not any kind of regressive movement. We are not regressing to the state of somebody who is. Whose mind is relatively undeveloped and who does not have a problem with egoic thinking because there's very little going on in their minds. What used to be called, before it became politically incorrect, idiot or fool. The fool was there were always, you could see happy fools. They there's not enough thinking to make them unhappy. So they are below egoic thinking. In medieval times, every village had at least one village idiot or fool and none was accepted essential part of the community. And even the royal courts had a fool very important figure. Although that figure probably was just pretending to be a fool. And that was one of the most, sometimes very influential position in the royal court. But also one of the most dangerous jobs you could have because you could lose your head at any moment. But only the fool was able to tell the king or queen what was wrong. Making it into a funny story. But the fool is more deeply connected, as we know from mythology. The fool is more deeply connected with the source. Still hasn't gone as far out as a normally developed human. He's more simple. He, the fool, for example, relatively speaking is a simpleton. It's like the hobbit in Lord of the Rings the Hobbit is a simple guy, doesn't think in complex terms, loves the simple things of life, loves eating and enjoyment. But why the fool has to go on this important mission that nobody else can carry out. That's a mythological motive. That's often the case because the fool has a connectedness still with sour that the more developed humans don't have similar motive. In Forrest Gump the movie the fool does great things. This guy, Forrest Gump. But he's. Because he's. And life always supports him. If you watch that movie again, he always. He saves people in the war, he does heroic things. But he doesn't claim credit because he doesn't have much of an ego yet. And all his life gives him the next thing and the next thing supports him. But we don't want to go there. When I say cessation of thinking, I'm not talking about regressing to the stage. It is the pre thinking stage of humanity. I'm thinking about rising above, pointing to the possibility of rising above thinking. So you stop thinking, which is normally associated with diminishment of consciousness and transcendence of thinking is an intensification of consciousness turning up the light. This is why the term attention and alertness. Those terms are extremely important. They are also used in Zen very frequently. The Zen teachings could be described. If you wanted to summarize Zen, you can just say simple things like pay attention. There was one Zen teacher who would. Whenever they asked him a question to explain Zen, he became quite famous. He would always raise his finger. Please explain Zen to us. What is Zen? I haven't quite understood yet. He was calling people to attention. Now this attention. There's a state of attention that sometimes people experience when they are engaged in dangerous activity. You can climb a mountain. Do you think you're doing much thinking when you're hanging on this wall? No, you can't. You have to be absolutely present in that moment. You have transcended thinking and the situation has forced you is forcing you into complete presence. This highest degree of alertness. Without it you slip and you're gone. And so this high degree of alertness, however, has no tension in it. In the case of somebody practicing dangerous spot, yes, there is physical tension, but the state itself has no tension in it. And you do not need to engage in a dangerous activity in order to enter that state. We are entering it here because even as I talk about it, I hope. Well, I don't really hope anything, but I trust that as I speak about it simultaneously through listening to it you can verify in yourself this state of attention, which is a state of very high alertness, but there's no tension in it. It's not the alertness that sometimes goes with fear. And you go, but it's not, ah, that's really a contraction of the entire body. It's not really alertness. So that's not it. It's a relaxed alertness. There's both yin and yang in it coming together. And it's that I also mentioned the other day, when you first look at something for the first few seconds, a new vista, a new landscape. You enter a room or you step out of a room into the open or whatever it is, or suddenly something new comes into your field of, into your perceptual field. In the first two or three seconds, you don't know what it is. You have to first take it in. There's a moment of alert presence, but usually you're only aware of the sense perception. You're not aware of the background of the alert presence itself, but you can be aware of the alert presence itself as you take it in. And that's the key. So you're not just alertly present. You're aware of the field of alert presence in yourself, so to speak, as yourself and the awareness of it and it are the same thing. Sensation of thinking. Now you can try it even now. I would suggest that as I'm speaking, you may find you may not know this yet. In the moments when I'm not speaking, like now and now and now, if you're alert, you're not thinking, you're just present. And now it's just an alert field of presence. So some of you may not be able yet to be totally free of thinking, but I believe that most people are able. They have short gaps of pure awareness or no thought, just a short. And then you look around. In that moment, your whole, your personal sense of self has receded. In the moment of pure presence, which is just this, you have no memories and you have no expectations for future because you have no thought. But you haven't fallen asleep, you're very awake in that moment. You're not a person anymore. What are you? Just a field of consciousness, conscious presence. Something has emerged from within you and has taken place of the person. The person is still there, it's just gone, receded. If the only thing you achieve in life is this, that you are able to be free of compulsive and addictive thinking, if you are able to, almost one could say, to choose not to think when there's nothing in particular to think about. When you can just be present. In other words, you can step out of thinking into aware presence, that alert space, then that is the greatest thing you could achieve in this lifetime, that any human could achieve in this lifetime. And yet there's nobody left to say, I have achieved it. That's the problem for the ego. The ego would love to say, oh, I have achieved the state of presence. So it's not an achievement. I'm just saying it's an achievement, but it's not really, because you didn't do it. You got out of the way and then it happened. It.