The Hidden Anxiety Most People Live With | Eckhart Tolle

You are the slaves of the conditioning in you. The mental emotional conditioning. You are completely in the grip of that conditioning. In that sense you are slaves. Unsatisfactoriness. Always something not right. Always something missing. That's a mild level of dukkha, not mild level of suffering. An underlying sense of dis. Unease. An underlying sense of something not right. I haven't arrived yet. I don't feel at home in this world. I don't feel at home in this moment. I need to get to some other moment. This is not the moment that was meant for me. There was. There must be some other moment that is meant for me. I haven't made it yet. Funny expression in the English language. Making it. Making what? I don't know. Whatever narrative they have in their minds. I didn't make it. Etc. So there's always that. The. A mild level of suffering is the underlying unease and an underlying anxiety. There's always some level of. Sometimes it becomes more acute and then it's not just a certain bit of anxiety in the background. Nervousness, restlessness. And that at times it becomes more acute and then it becomes actually fear or even panic. This could happen in the middle of the night. You lie in your bed, you wake up or you can't go to sleep. You wake up, it's three o' clock in the morning and there's fear. Can hardly breathe. What's going to happen to me? And do you think of all the bad things that are going to happen? Not realizing that in that moment there is no problem whatsoever. Because you're in a bed. Warm. It's warm. And the mattress is okay too. And you're. But. But the mind creates something else. And that's all part of the dysfunction of the human mind and an inability to be present in that moment in which there is no. Not a single problem. But for you in that state, that present moment does not even exist. It is not acknowledged. It doesn't exist. It's not there. You are in. Immersed in the problem making anxiety inducing stream of continuous incessant compulsive thinking. And you're completely. All your consciousness is absorbed in that stream of thinking. When you. You can sometimes see it when you observe a person who is very much in that state. You can see in their facial expression and also sense in their energetic emanation that they are completely absent. They are not. This is the opposite of present. They are absent. They are completely trapped in the unconscious thought processes. Compulsive unconscious thought processes. So they look like. And if you talk to Them, there's hardly anybody there even. And they don't really see you. They don't. They're not. You're not really there for them because. And if they see you, they see you through the veil of their conditioned thinking, which is all kinds of judgments that they immediately have about you. So all. They don't see you. They. They see an image behind the veil. But most of the things that they relate to is their conditioned mind. And all that is part of the dysfunction of human consciousness. And it's a terrible state. And so that's what the Buddha calls dukkha. And of course, other traditions use other terms for it. Jesus talked, said, you are trapped in a state of sin. Or he said, you are the slaves of sin. No, sorry. At first he said to his disciples. He pointed out to his disciples the possibility of becoming free, of becoming liberated. And then his disciples said, what are you talking about? This is a paraphrase. I can't remember Scripture. They said, what are you talking about, free? We are free already. And Jesus said, no, you are the slaves of sin. Now, sin needs to be understood beyond the church context. Sin is that very dysfunction that we are talking about. As you may know, the original word that is used in the New Testament, which was written in ancient Greek, the original word for sin that was used in the Old Testament is the same word that is used for missing the mark. When you, in archery, you miss the mark, the arrow misses the mark. Missing the mark is really the literal translation of the words that is used in the New Testament for sin. So what is that mark? Ultimately, it means missing the mark of human life, missing the very purpose of human life. So that's the deeper meaning of sin. And so Jesus said, you are the slaves of sin, which means you are the slaves of the conditioning in you, the mental, emotional conditioning. You are completely in the grip of that conditioning. In that sense, you are slaves. And he spoke about the possibility of becoming free of that. And also the Buddha talks about the possibility. He points out the fact of suffering that is created by that dysfunction. And he points out the possibility of transcending that state of suffering through awakening. Very important term, awakening, the awakening of consciousness. That's the term used in Buddhism. The word Buddha itself, as you probably know, means the one who is awake. Buddha wasn't his name. It was. It's a title given to him, or he's supposed to have said when people asked him, who are you? Then he said, I'm Buddha. Which at that. At that time simply meant, I'm, I'M awake. That's all. I'm awake. And so there's a possibility of awakening, which, by the way, is also Jesus also used that uses that term quite often. There are parables in the New Testament about staying awake, of not going to sleep. And literally there's a He says at some stage, this is one of the few lines I actually remember. Literally he said, and what I say to you, I say to all stay awake. That's what Jesus is supposed to have said. Many things that you read in the New Testament are kind of regurgitations and misunderstanding of what he actually did say, or even additions. But a few things are there that I can feel actually are genuine. That's what he actually said that. So he said what I say to you, that his disciples I say to all stay awake. So awakening is really what this is about.