School of Awakening: Become Free from the Overthinking Mind with Eckhart Tolle (Part 2)

What else is absolutely essential that you don't learn at school? Well, it is also connected with awareness, and that is awareness of your thoughts. If you do not learn that you can be aware of your thoughts, then you are trapped in your thoughts and by your thoughts. And that is the fate still of many millions of humans on the planet. The they are so identified with their thoughts that that's all they know of the world and of who they are. So there is a dimension of consciousness in every human that is beyond the thinking mind. And why don't they teach that at school? It's so basic and simple. You can think. A lot of the time, you think. Many humans think almost without interruption. They have a voice in their head that never stops talking, in other words, thinking. And yet there's the possibility of realizing another dimension of consciousness. That's, one could say it's behind all your thoughts, or it's a canvas for your thoughts, or can say it's the space in which your thoughts arise and into which your thoughts subside. Whatever you call it, it's the dimension of awareness or presence. And we live in a civilization that has been, one could almost say, being completely taken over by thought, by mental concepts. And there's been a loss of, tragic loss of that deep dimension that is in every human being. In that sense, you do not need to achieve it, you only need to discover it. There's a big difference between achieving and discovering. To achieve something you need time, obviously, but to discover some discovery is of something that is already here. So you discover that dimension of consciousness in you, that is awareness in between two thoughts. For example, at this moment when I stop speaking and then I speak again. So there was a gap, and that gap was you were just aware and it happening again in that gap. If you are alert, you are not thinking in these, these gaps, you notice you're conscious, but you're not. There's no conceptualization. And again now, and this is so natural and so, so vitally important to have to be in touch with that dimension, to be rooted in that dimension. It's amazing that it, it is not common knowledge that this is the most vital thing that there is in any human life. The great teachers pointed to it. Let's see the emptiness of the Buddha, the kingdom of heaven, of Jesus that is within you here, now, different words. And it can happen naturally. It's perhaps more likely to happen when you look at something natural again. A tree, the sky. In the first moment of looking at the sky, in the first moment of looking at a Landscape or at a tree, or at a flower. You may find in the first moment of looking, you're not conceptualizing it. There's two or three seconds when there's just sense perception and an awareness of the sense perception. Look at the sky, 2, 3 seconds. Then usually the mind comes in and says something about conceptualizes it. That's fine. But capt, if you can catch, so to speak, always the first moment when something arises in your sensory field, sensory perception, catch the first moment. Until then, you will notice for brief 2, 3 seconds there's no conceptualization. You just. There's a perception. But what is behind the perception? Awareness, the light of consciousness, without which there would be no perception. So whenever you look at something new or you begin or there's a sound that suddenly arises and you may not know what it is, so you have to listen carefully. A sound is arising. The mind may want to interpret it, but in order to first you need to be alert and listen. And there's a sound. And for the first two or three seconds the mind is not saying anything about it because there's only the perception of it. Then comes the interpretation. Now, if you are completely trapped in the conceptualizing mind, these moments are so short when you're just perceiving, you're hardly aware of it. And whatever you're almost immediately labeling it, or you're not even aware of it or just peripherally aware of it because all your attention is absorbed by the voice in the head, by the by mind activity. So the. There's a consciousness. You are this consciousness. The consciousness gives rise to thought in the same way that the ocean gives rise to a wave. And that's fine. It's been. It's an incredible thing that conceptualization happened in human beings. It was an evolutionary step forward. But there's great danger associated with it. And the danger is that you lose yourself in it. There's a power that came with focused thinking is a great power. Being able to memorize and anticipate and all these things are amazing. We could make amazing things. Then science developed just as an extension of the. Of the human mind, the focused application of human mind. And that created new incredible things. But then something dangerous happened. We got increasingly. We got taken over by that which ultimately is only an instrument. And we got taken over by it completely. So that many humans are basically imprisoned. Imprisoned in their minds, which is the conditioned mind, which is all the content of your consciousness. Conditioned of course by the past. And most humans are still completely imprisoned in that. So you derive your identity from the Movement of thought. So you don't know who you are beyond the move. Whatever thought is telling you about yourself, whatever the story of you is telling you about yourself, that's where you derive your sense of self from. And that's normal in this world. But it's extremely limiting. And then it happens that quite often certain thoughts invade your mind. Can easily happen. So you, Your mind becomes colonized by certain thoughts that take over sometimes almost the totality of your mind. Obsessive thoughts. It can happen to individuals where one obsessive thought suddenly takes over. And then you perceive the whole world through the veil of one obsessive thought which has all the answers. But it can also happen to collectives. It can happen to a collective civilization that collectively certain thoughts arise in the collective and they invade every individual's mind and take over the way in which you perceive. They perceive the world. That can. That happens, for example, with totalitarian regimes when wonderfully described in the Writer who Took it to an extreme, Orwell described in 1984, where you get completely taken over. You have a thought police. You're only allowed to think certain things. It's a collect. Collectively, the collective mind becomes completely possessed by certain thoughts. Now, thoughts are. It's perhaps helpful to look at thought as they are little beings. They are energy forms. Everything like you are. Everything is an energy form. And thoughts that arise are energy forms. Imagine them as little entities. You can't see them. They have a relationship with your physical brain, but you can't see thought. There are little entities that arise and there they come. And one entity can act like a virus acts on a physical level, which can invade the body and take over the body and live there as a parasite can even kill the body. You can also have a mental virus that enters your mind and then begins to proliferate and create thoughts that are in alignment with those with one central thought, which may be a total delusion. But you have one central thought attracts other related thoughts and you have suddenly grows this. You have a viral infection on a mental level. Now, this can happen to individuals in one case. And when it reaches a certain point, this infection of a mental virus can be recognized as clearly disease, disease, insanity. But until it reaches this point in an individual, we may not even recognize it as a mental illness, a complete mental dysfunction. Then it reaches a certain point and you can suddenly, when you listen to this person saying let's, for example, in the case of paranoia, then everything's interpreted as enemies are everywhere. They're following me. They're listening to Me, they're listening devices and they're going into my mind and the entire world is conspiring to, to destroy me and follow all these. It starts with one thought and then. So your mind gets totally infected by thought. This can happen to an individual. It can also happen to a collective. When the minds of millions of people, or whatever number it may be become taken over by certain thoughts, opinions, viewpoints or opinions. And sometimes they can be very much divorced from anything that's real, any reality. But once you've taken being taken over, you don't even know it. You cannot, nobody can question it, because you have. You are not really there anymore. Only the conditioned mind is there pretending to be you. And so you cannot question it. Nobody. If you believe. If somebody came to me with a delusion and said they are, what's, what's a common delusion, I am Napoleon. So their mind has been taken over by a delusion. I wouldn't. It is not wise to tell this person this is a delusion. You are not Napoleon. Or it's better to just to be present and to listen to that person, not to say yes or no, just listen. That's how you experience the world. And it may be possible to connect with that person so that a little bit of awareness comes in, then that there's a possibility of healing and a little bit of awareness comes in. But if you deny a delusion, then there's immediately a disconnection. So I don't talk about things that I perceive in this contemporary world as collective delusions. There's no point. The most important thing is to bring about the discovery of the dimension of awareness in humans. And then that is how they become immune to the viral infection on a mental level. So the only way you can become immune to being infected by all kinds of strange thoughts that come at you in these days through the devices that you have, the media, mainstream media, social media, and all these kinds of things. Or you're being flooded with thought forms continuously if you're not careful. I highly suggest you reduce the amount of time you spend there and look at a plant instead or at a sky. So the immune, the only immunity you have is awareness so that you're not taken over by thoughts. And the otherwise the, the ability to think, even although you're still thinking, but the ability to think rationally. And it diminishes the more you get taken over by, by dysfunctional mind patterns. You can no longer deal with situations rationally, and so you're on a downward slope. So the important thing Then is the realization that apart from thinking, there's something more vital in you. And that is the dimension of awareness, of presence. From that dimension you can know what your mind is doing. And the likelihood that you, that you get taken over by certain thoughts decreases the more where you become. You still have thoughts, of course, you still have opinions, which are thoughts. You still have viewpoints, political viewpoints, whatever viewpoints, you still have viewpoints. But this. But they do not give you your sense of identity anymore. They are viewpoints. And you may believe that this is the truth when the other viewpoint is not true. But your identity is not no longer invested in it, your sense of self, because your sense of self has shifted to awareness. You are consciousness. And then you know the other. The other human who holds a different viewpoint is no longer your enemy. Because your identity is not derived from your viewpoint, your opinion, your thoughts. If your. If your thoughts give you your identity, then others who hold opposite thoughts or very different thoughts become your enemy. It's. It's mad, but that's how it is. It's the basic human dysfunction which operates on a personal level and on a collective level. So the most vital thing that to learn, which again should be the very foundation of all everything that is done at school, is that there is this dimension of consciousness in you that you can access and discover. You can access it by becoming alert and observing your thoughts. Become aware of frequent thoughts that frequently go through your mind. But most importantly becoming aware of yourself as conscious presence rather than as a mind made entity. So very often the practice to be engaged in is to realize that a lot of thinking that happens in your mind is not only unnecessary, some of it is necessary and great, but a lot of it is not only unnecessary, but is actually destructive to your health, your well being, your happiness. A lot of thought is destructive of happiness, of well being, of the your ability to feel alive, your ability to feel joy, your ability to be creative. A lot of mind activity is destructive. So whenever you are engaged in worrying, boring is completely purposeless. Nobody has ever found a solution to a problem by worrying about it. Worrying means that you don't even want a solution. You want to worry. But when I say you at that moment, you are your mind. The mind has its momentum. The momentum wants to carry on. The worrying thoughts don't want to cease, they don't want to die, they want to continue to be worrying thoughts. So. Or other destructive thoughts. When you have very. You're deeply negative, let's say you are trapped in deeply negative thought patterns and Every therapist knows that often in therapy you reach a point where human being. There's a possibility of going beyond and then the enormous resistance arises. They don't want to go beyond because there's. The thought patterns are. They don't, they don't want to die, they don't, they want to stay so boring. Destructive thoughts, useless thoughts, thought to take you come always out of the present moment that make it impossible for you to even appreciate beauty and aliveness around you. That's always there. So you need to have minimum of awareness to realize that this is what's happening to you. In the middle of the night, you wake up three o' clock in the morning. Anxiety rises. Why does it arise? Are you confronted with the problem? You're in bed, a relatively warm bed. Anxiety rises. Not being confronted with a problem, but the mind is creating it. The mind is creating the anxiety. And so when you realize that, you can then learn to let go of thought that is recognized as not only unnecessary, but actually bad for you and everybody else around you. You don't want it, you don't need it, but it, but it has a momentum. So how do you break the momentum of the thought? It doesn't seem to want to get go away once you recognize it that you. It has no useful function except to make you miserable. So you've recognized that this thought pattern has no useful function. But it's making me miserable. And all the function it has, it's pretending to be useful. Worry always pretends to be necessary. But worry is not necessary. It's unhelpful, focused thinking. You become still. Then you begin to think. What is the situation? What can I do about it? This. And this and this. Okay, if I do that? Focus thinking, that's straight worrying is something very different, completely unhelpful and self destructive. Once you've recognized it, you become free by first by recognizing its dysfunctional nature, then direct your attention elsewhere. It's a conscious choice and that's. That's possible and it's not that difficult. So you withdraw energy from the thoughts and energy in this case is consciousness. You, you withdraw the lifeblood of the thoughts, which is consciousness, and you direct consciousness somewhere else. For example, sense perceptions, especially things of nature or breathing. You become aware of breathing and breathing makes you aware of the inner body, the alive presence that pervades your body. But the moment you become aware of your breathing, you've taken the lifeblood from thought and place the attention, the conscious attention into the inner bodies. You connect with the aliveness within and Immediately thought begins to subside. It cannot survive if you take away attention. Consciousness from then will try many times it will try to get consciousness back. And so it will come up again. The moment you, you, you, you lose connectedness with the inner body or your breath, it will try to start up again and then you have to catch it again. So you, and then you learn to keep thought at bay, but not by suppressing it, simply by being so alert and directing your attention elsewhere that, that it begins to subside. So vital practice is to keep thought at bay. When you don't you real, you recognize it as unnecessary, dysfunctional and creating that it creates a lot of unhappiness. That's a wonderful practice. Just take your attention into your breath. You breathe into the body, even down to the abdomen and out. And breath awareness means you're no longer trapped in your mind. You have taken attention away from the mind. Simple practice of breath awareness and breath awareness can take you into body awareness and the two can go together. Your awareness of your aware of your breathing and you're aware of that your body is alive. And that becomes a single thing. The breathing and the awareness of the inner body. And so when you discover that you have that power, that you are more powerful than your mind, it's a wonderful liberation. The discovery that is not actually that difficult. But you just have to know that you have that power to become free of dysfunctional thinking. Just breathe, be, feel it, Feel the aliveness. That's who you are. Not the narrative in your mind. That's consciousness. The consciousness, the intelligence that pervades your body. That is consciousness that keeps the molecules of the body together for a while. That's the consciousness. That is the totality of who you are. That's who you are, not the story in your mind. It doesn't matter. On the level of the story, that becomes secondary. You can try to improve your story. That's fine, make your life a bit better. On the surface of things, it's a good that has its place too. But not to ultimately to look for your ultimate identity on that level of this better story. That doesn't work. Your ultimate identity is here and now when you step out of the thinking mind. But you don't become unconscious. You become more conscious of the essence of who you are, become one with the essence of who you are. And so the, the power of awareness grows in you. It's so to speak, you become more aware of it. The power of awareness of presence grows in you and then can still your thinking then becomes more Constructive, more focused, and it's no longer important thing. I sometimes put it like this. The mind loses its ability to make you unhappy. The mind loses its ability to make you unhappy. Because then you realize a lot of your unhappiness did not come from the circumstances of your life, but from the way in which your mind, the story, your mind told you about the circumstances of your life. A great deal of unhappiness comes from the narrative in your mind and not from the circumstances. And so that's enormous liberation if you've been. Whenever you're unhappy. Right. Where does the unhappiness arise? Where does it come from? Is it actually the actual situation or is it the story that I'm telling myself about it? And in most cases, you'll find it's the story. The unobserved mind creates the unhappiness. The unobserved mind creates the unhappiness. The unobserved mind also creates what we can call evil in this world, because the unobserved mind is the mind of very unconscious people. Unconscious means the unobserved mind. And the evil in this world is perpetrated by deeply unconscious people. Complete lack of awareness. And so our step now is to go beyond that dysfunctional state, humanity, and so that we begin to awaken to that higher or deeper level of consciousness. And the possibility is here now. The possibility is here now. Because if we don't awaken, things will get worse and worse. We have reached a critical point. And humans only evolve when they reach a critical point, when there's no way forward in the old state of consciousness. So change happens when it actually absolutely needs to happen, and it needs to happen now. And that's why it's happening.