Is Your Inner Monologue Destroying You? | Eckhart Tolle on Self-Talk and Negative Internal Dialogue

And then you look at reality through the lens of the little story. It's not just one story, of course, it comes another one and another. And some stories are not little. They may be big stories about yourself. Be aligned with the present moment rather than carry in your head this huge amount of mental content about your past and your future. Because the mind is primarily concerned with past and future. So while you're walking here, you're already thinking about, in a week's time I'll be home again. And then I'll have to do that, and I have those phone calls to make. And then I'll have to do that. And then those problems will be, I shouldn't have come here because I've got so much on my plate at home. Why did I come here? I should have dealt with my things there. I should have waited, gone to next year's retreat. I said, that's the self talk in the head. You will may encounter it here too. As you walk from here to there, you will encounter the self talk in the head. So how do you get out of the self talk in the head? One, you need to know that that's self talk in the head. If you don't know it's self talk in the head, you become the self talk in your head. You become the voice in your head. You don't know it, you are it. So you have to the vital step, and I cannot tell you how to do that. That minimum of awareness needs to be there where you know that there's self talk happening in my head and is telling you some kind of story. It could be the briefest of stories, like I shouldn't have come here or I don't fit in here. All these people are too spiritual for me, or I'm so spiritual. These people are not spiritual at all. It's all little stories in the head. Even every fragment of self talk is a little story in the head that goes around. And then you look at reality through the lens of the little story. It's not just one story, of course. There comes another one and another. And some stories are not little. They may be big stories about yourself and your life and what's gone wrong with it or what's gone right with it. Even that's a story more pleasant than if it's gone wrong. So you need to know when the self talk happens in the head. The knowing is not part of the self talk. The knowing is just an awareness that there is self talk. The moment there is an awareness that there is self talk. The possibility of freedom from the self talk opens up. If that awareness is not there, there's nothing you can do. You have to wait until life knocks you over the head so that finally some awareness comes in and you go, so you might have to sleep on a banana skin or something, because suddenly you go, oh, life told you to wake up. Awakening, which is a term that's been used for thousands of years in the spiritual context, not in the conventional context. To awaken means to come out of sleep in conventional language terminology. But in spiritual terminology, to awaken means to awaken. One could say basically to awaken out of the self talk in the head. Because the self talk in the head is a form of hypnosis, self hypnosis. You are hypnotized, have been hypnotized by society, your surroundings, the surrounding culture, even the language that you were taught to use. That becomes a large part of the self talk. Although some of the self talk is also accompanied by images. But a lot of it is language and all that. You've been conditioned, and this is, you are possessed by that which is an energy formation, and humans are possessed by that and mistake that conditioned entity which consists of thoughts. They're so trapped in it, they're so identified with it. They believe in every thought that comes into their head. It's absurd, but normal. Well, another word rather than absurd. I could say it's mad, but it's normal. It creates incredible amount of suffering, unnecessary suffering that humans create for themselves and for others. You can't create suffering for yourself without making others suffer who are close to you and whoever comes into contact with you. An enormous amount of suffering is created by not realizing that large percentage of your problems consist of self talk in the head. That's amazing. And once you see that, okay, and then you can have a little bit of awareness and say, who am I? Am I that story? Or am I the one who sees that, who recognizes that there's self talk. And in order to recognize that there's self talk going on in you, that's not a thought, there's just an aware presence. And then the compulsive nature of self talk lessens somewhat because some awareness has come in. The light of awareness has come in. And then you realize you are that light of awareness. You are the awareness. And there is a shift. The head may not immediately stop. It'll want to carry on. The self talk wants to carry on. There's a momentum to it. You can observe that momentum. If you can't do it in yourself, you can observe it in others. Once they have a story and they're telling you their story, they can't stop. They want to go on and on and they don't want an end if they're talking about their problems, they don't want an end to their problems. They want a continuation of the story, which is the problem. They don't know that that's why we call it unconscious. They don't know that their primary thing is they want the continuation of the story because that's the continuation of the fictitious person that cannot live without its story, its storyline. And so those people do they want an end to their problems? Of course they will probably tell you, yeah, I'd love. No, they don't. They don't want an end to their problems because that would be an end to their story, which is their identity. They don't want an end to their sense of identity. I need my story. All the things that I've been telling myself in my mind about myself and other people and my parents and my relatives and my co workers and my ex wife and my ex husband and what people did to me or what I did and shouldn't have done, failed to do. Who am I without? I can't let go of that. I need to think about this more. So it becomes a habitual place, the habitual place of the mental noise where you feel, that's me. And so every therapist knows that you always reach a point with your clients, patients, whatever, depending on the school of therapy, depends. Whatever you call your clients, your patients, whatever, there comes a point when you hit that resistance. They don't want to be free of their problems. And the big challenge is there is this person going to overcome that barrier because that barrier is not just becoming free of my problems, but also becoming free of a very limited and ultimately fictitious sense of identity. The me. So that is what I've described is the next step, one could say in the evolution of human consciousness is stepping out of self talk, which is the conditioned mind, and realizing there is much more to who I am than this conditioned content of my mind. And that is the beginning of awakening. It's not those words, not that you need to believe that there is much more to who I am than the self talk in my head, because that is still self talk in the head. I believe there's more to who I am and you better believe it too. No, that needs to be. And most of you are here because you already have had or not only had a glimpse. Many of you are already deeply been able to transcend the person. Because the person, the exclusive personal sense of self, wouldn't want to be here. It would feel threatened by being sitting here. It either would feel threatened or it would feel extremely restless and irritated. I need to get out of here. Or suddenly your legs start twitching. It is quite normal, by the way. Many humans have twitching in their legs all the time. Or they go. So if you have somebody here who is going like this and you know their person, the personal self would becoming uncomfortable with being here, doesn't know it, but goes twitching. And that kind of twitching is very normal for humans. But if it happened to your dog, you would take your dog to the vet.