The Challenge of Presence in the Face of the Ego | Eckhart Tolle

The conditioned thought processes never stop. They go continuously. There's a voice talking to you, or you're talking to yourself, or you're having a monologue or you're having a dialogue. Some people argue with themselves. It's all the voice in the head never stops for most people. And that is spiritually speaking, that is a state of unconsciousness completely identified with the conditioned mental emotional patterns which make up the so called person, personality, the ego. So if you are completely identified with it, every thought has you in its grasp. Every emotion that arises has you completely in his grasp. And you, and you're thinking, you think, you're thinking, but you're not thinking. Thinking happens to you. There's no, you don't have a choice. If you're unconscious, there's no choice. Your thought processes happen to you. You're at the mercy of your thoughts, the conditioned thoughts in your head and all the reactions that come with it. Every situation you encounter, there comes a conditioned reaction to the situation. It's the person or the personality that reacts. And you don't even have a choice. Why don't you have a choice? Because you're asleep. Spiritually speaking, this thing has taken you over. It's a dreamlike state also. And you can see often people are completely up there. They're never really, they're not really here. You can see sometimes the complete absence in a person's eyes. They're not really here, they are asleep, but they're thinking very hard. So. And even at night when there's nobody around to talk to you, still this voice is going on and it's telling you, I have these problems. What's going to happen to the next awful sigma? God, I can't take any more of this. What's my life come to? I imagined something different when I was 20 years old. I imagined something very different. Why did it all go so wrong? Well, that's a. Well, many people actually have that feeling that something that has gone drastically wrong in my life. And with others it's a mixed bag. Some things went okay and others didn't. It depends what their mind. And your mind tends to focus more on the negative than the positive. Much more memorable than negative than the positive. If you go on vacation and everything goes perfectly fine, okay, you remember some nice moments and sunsets. But if something went drastically wrong, you remember that for the rest of your life and you talk about it continuously. You tell the story of what went. If everything went fine. You don't talk about you be at a wonderful holiday. Oh yeah. Okay, so that's the end of it. But you know what happened? We went into our room and there was these cockroaches crying on the floor. And then the water was coming through the ceiling. And then, and then they stole all my bags. Oh my God. So interesting. And then you know what he said to me? He said, how dare you? And I said, how dare I? What about you other? You are the one with the biggest ego. I said, and then he started hitting me. And whatever end the story, stories go on and on. And so a lot of things, the negative things are much more memorable that the ego focuses on that it loves its enemies. And every negative situation is the ego's enemy. And then it can claim it can enhance its fictitious identity through the more enemies you have, the stronger your fictitious sense of self becomes. Entire nations do that too. They need their enemies. Except Sweden, so peaceful. All the non peace loving people have left Sweden. A long time ago they were called the Vikings and they occupied other lands. So then we have. In Indian spiritual philosophy of psychology, there's a word that's been around for a long time. It's called turiya. Turiya means the fourth. First, second. Third. Fourth. Turiya is the force. The force is. It refers to state of consciousness. They divided the human consciousness into these four parts. There is dreamless sleep, There is the. The dream state in sleep is the state of wakefulness that is ordinary human consciousness. And turiya is the awakened state of consciousness. That's the fourth state of consciousness. They've been talking about that for hundreds of years, thousands of years. The possibility of this dimension of consciousness arising in humans, the fourth state. This is what this is all about. And it is not some distant possibility that you may achieve in some future lifetime, as many people still believe that. Many Buddhists. I've met Buddhists who say, I think I'll need another 15 lifetimes. And then in fact, my teacher told me, they say, he told me 15 more lifetimes and then I'll be enlightened. Oh, wow. Okay. That's right. You have plenty of time. So you can stay unconscious now. It's okay. But the strange thing is the awakened state of consciousness is already there within you. It's just covered up, hidden.