Eckhart Tolle explains how to stay present without relying on willpower, and how presence connects to spiritual awakening. He discusses overcoming reactive episodes and the nature of consciousness, offering practical guidance on managing the mind's constant activity.
Sam, you don't have to be as slow as I am to be present. I'm not always slow, but often it interesting thing to find out for yourself if you've reached a stage in your spiritual evolution where you're able to choose to be free of thinking without exerting willpower to suppress thought and without stopping your breathing and without engaging in a life threatening activity which could easily stop your mind. Walking on a tightrope will certainly stop your mind for two seconds before you fall off. Now, some of you are able to do that when you're not being disturbed by anything or anybody. Everything is fine. You're sitting quietly in your room or outside and then you just go. There is an intensity of awareness, but there is no willpower. You are not willing it to happen. You are not willing, you are not suppressing thought. So if you are not yet there, that's fine. You can choose other ways of taking attention away from the stream of thinking by placing attention on sensory perception into your body, the inner body, or on your breathing that's happening naturally. So as the Buddha said when they asked how to attain enlightenment, said, just be aware that you are breathing. Is that all they said? He said yes. I don't know if that's in any of the scriptures though, but I'm sure that's what he said. He did recommend highly awareness of your breath. The rest was me adding something to it, which I do believe is. He did say, because every spiritual teacher is very simple. Now, as long as you're aware that you're breathing, you can't be thinking. So he didn't say don't think. He said, be aware of your breath. So your attention moves away from mind and goes. You feel the inflow and outflow of the breath. You even feel every subtle movement of the breath where it enters your nose, then it flows in and then it flows out and you follow it with your attention. And while you're doing it, you're not breathing, you're not thinking. And then at some point you could let go of that too. Then you're just not thinking. The important thing is you're above thinking. We're not talking about falling below thinking. It's easy to tell the difference, but it's possible. If you try to sustain the no thinking stage for too long, it's possible that without you noticing it, you're going, and then that means you're going from it can happen very quickly. If you go to Buddhist monasteries where monks spend a long time meditating, you can observe how it Happens to the monks. They start off and then they go after 20 minutes, half an hour. Especially if it's 4:30 in the morning. And then you are able to be in that state of pure awareness or presence even while things happen. That's next step, so to speak. Even while you're talking to your attorney, there's a court case coming up. Are you able to be in presence while you listen to what he has to say or there's an obnoxious person in your vicinity? This is not an uncommon occurrence since a greater part of humans, if not are obnoxious, but periodically become obnoxious, in other words, very unconscious. Humans move into different levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. It's not always the same person that you meet. It's a delusion. Do you think once you have become acquainted with somebody that this is going to be the same person you're going to meet the next day? Because he or she may be in a very different state of consciousness the next day. Or when an event happens to trigger that person into diminished consciousness. And then one of the sub personalities that is associated with that diminished consciousness is suddenly there and talking to you. Who are you? And that's even more shocking if this happens after you've signed a contract that says you're going to live with this person for the rest of your life. And then the mind comes up with strange conclusions. I won't trust anybody anymore. He really let me down. He's a liar. He's just pretending to be nice. He was so nice when that. I know now I know he was just pretending. No, he was nice. Perhaps he was at a relatively more conscious stage at that time. But now he's not nice because something that you said triggered him and another subpersonality emerged, so to speak. Or somebody mentioned the word money you owe me. And you can observe it in yourself that you're sometimes more conscious than at other times. You're sometimes very present, even in a challenging situation. At other times, a challenging situation or person pulls you into unconscious reactivity. Then you wake up a few minutes or an hour later, or a day as more consciousness emerges through you. The time period between unconsciousness and waking up again out of an unconscious reactive episode is shorter. You don't stay in it for a week complaining about people and what they did to you. Your mind never stops replaying a situation in your mind, different versions of it that could have happened if you only had said the right thing. And then you can imagine next time you're confronted with this person, how it's going to unfold and you feel angry and can't sleep at night and you don't even know what's happening to you until something suddenly it actually is like waking up out of it dreamlike state. What was that all about? So as far as trusting other people is concerned, can you trust people? Yes, trust everybody to behave. You can trust that they will behave according to their level of consciousness at any given time. Complete trust. No more is possible now to be more integrated, to be a human being that is no longer taken over by reactive episodes to such an extent that virtually another person emerges temporarily. There needs to be more awareness that there still may be remnants of these subpersonalities surviving for a certain period of time in you, but they no longer take you over. You can still feel the energy behind it when certain things happen. But what awareness does? It integrates all that. It no longer is no longer one entity that takes you over completely. And of course especially the pain body as the most powerful sub personality. And the pain body may even have two or three aspects to it. So it could be divided into two or three other sub. But let's treat the same body as one huge subpersonality. When it comes out up to have that no longer controlling you that requires that energy field of awareness around it, presence around it. Then you know it's still there, but it doesn't take over anymore. Or if it does, then immediately after you know, oops, there it was. So eventually awareness, then you become an integrated being with still a few energy flows here and there, but not a big deal anymore. Sam.
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