Eckhart Tolle explains how most people mistake their thoughts for their identity, creating an unconscious egoic self. He describes a simple technique: focus on your breath to create a gap where thinking stops, producing an alert stillness that signals awakening. This presence is always available now, not something to achieve later.
I don't know what to do with my life. I don't know if my life is going to get much better. I think it's going to get worse. My life, my life, my life. It's all conceptual stuff in your mind. My life. Oh, so not realizing that all that is not your life at all. You are here because you're already going through the awakening process. You recognize that there is a truth to what I say. You already— that which recognizes this truth is the awakening part in you. That, that which has brought you here is the awakening consciousness in you that recognizes the importance of these words. But they're only words, they're only pointers, but they point to a very deep reality. Jesus also taught the same thing, but it's not recognized in most churches or any churches. Jesus spoke often about the importance of awakening, of staying awake, in parables. A literal quote from Jesus, for example, is, I quote, 'And what I say to you, I say to all: stay awake.' This is literally from one of the Gospels. 'What I say to you, I say to all: stay awake.' So awakening was also His teaching, but mostly not, unfortunately, not recognized in church. And even if they read it in the church, it would still send you to sleep. And what I say to you, I say to all: stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Okay. And now sometimes you have the term enlightenment too. You have in various traditions used different terms to talk about the same thing: awakening, liberation, salvation. Liberation, by the way, obviously means liberation from yourself, from the egoic self, from an ultimately fictitious sense of identity. So that's liberation, and the awakeness is awakening out of the trap of the thinking mind. You awaken out of that. Now, why do they use— why do you use awakening? Because everybody in ordinary life, everybody knows what awakening is in a conventional sense of the word. Every morning, obviously, you awaken out of the sleep state into a different state of consciousness, you're asleep, and then suddenly in the morning you go— you see the shift from one state of consciousness to another, you awaken. That's conventional awakening. Now, these ancient spiritual traditions are saying that in the same way that you can awaken from sleep into the state of normal wakefulness, you can awaken from normal wakefulness, which is also a kind of sleep, they say, or truly, the normal is also an unconscious state. In the same way that you can awaken from sleep into the normal seemingly awakened state, you can awake from this normal awake state of wakefulness into the true awakening. So, and this can easily be demonstrated. Let's say the human, a human being is identified with the thinking mind and thinking about me, my problems, my life, says, you know, let's say it's nighttime, you're 3 o'clock in the morning, you wake up, 'Oh my God, it's so bad, and then what's going to happen with that? This is just disastrous. This is not going to go well, it can't go— what am I going to do if he does that? Then I can say that, but it's not— I'm going to lose it all, I know it. And then yesterday, that, that— why did he say that? I should have said that, but why didn't I say that?' I should have— I can't stand, take any more of this. My life is just pointless. What's the point of it all? What's the point of it all? This person is awake but not spiritually awake at all. He's totally unconscious, spiritually speaking, because he's completely identified with the stream of thinking. Which creates a fictitious identity, a narrative. He continuously tells himself this narrative, and he calls this narrative 'my life.' My life. Oh, my life, it didn't go— my life didn't go as well as it should have gone. Things went wrong with my life. I don't know what to do with my life. I don't know if my life is going to get much better. I think it's going to get worse. My life, my life, my life. It's all conceptual stuff in your mind. My life. Oh, so not realizing that all that is not your life at all. It's a story in your mind, and the story becomes an identity, and the story becomes a person. Me, I, person. So let's say then, go back to this moment, you're awake in the night thinking, and then perhaps suddenly remember the possibility of stepping out of this continuous stream of thought plus the emotions that reflect the thoughts. If the thoughts are fearful, think bad things are going to happen, then you feel the corresponding emotion. So you have both things— thought, emotion. Suddenly you remember it is possible to step out of this by becoming present. And you may remember having read in a spiritual book somewhere, perhaps it's a book called— it was called The Power of Now, weird, weird title. You read that by But by taking one or two conscious breaths, you can step out of the continuous stream of thinking by directing your attention simply to your breathing without necessarily saying, "I'm going to do a breath meditation now." No, in a more relaxed way, Just take your attention to your breath. You notice that you're breathing, and your attention follows the breath into the body and out of the body a few times. And you will notice you can't do much thinking anymore, because you can either follow the breath with your attention or think, but not both. You cannot think and be aware of your breathing at the same time. The moment you start thinking, you lose awareness of your breath. So what happens is, even with one conscious breath, a little space opens up within you. So a space where before there was just the clutter of thoughts, suddenly there is a space of stillness, but not the stillness of sleep. It's an alert stillness. Just— and the thought subsides briefly. A moment of just awareness without the interference of useless thought. Oh. And that is the beginning of spiritual awakening. And that is— so breath is one of the ways in which you can enter that state of presence. It's not the only way, but it is one of the ways, a very good way of entering the state of presence. And even here, if I may suggest, while you are listening to these words, it is possible, but you may have to find out in your own experience whether this is true. It is possible to be aware of your breathing and listen to the words at the same time. And so one could say you have presence or awareness in the background, and the words that you are listening to and what you are seeing with your eyes, a man on a chair talking, that's the foreground. The foreground is whatever is happening. You begin to notice then that within you there is another dimension of consciousness that you had not been aware of, but it's always been there. So you, you don't need to struggle to achieve it, because many people say— think they need to achieve enlightenment. They need to somehow It's there somewhere to be achieved, some future.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
