The Power of Attention in Daily Life | Eckhart Tolle On Attention and Awareness (Part 2)

Whenever you are upset about situations and people. Oh, it's a reminder then that there was a confusion about importance, what matters and what is secondary and what is primary. Secondary is the external situation. Primary is your state of consciousness that you bring to it. So when you are the moment you become upset, you've forgotten that. Well, that in itself can be a sign to become present again. So if you are vigilant about getting upset about things, then you can use it as an alarm clock. Any kind of upset in any situation, oh, I must have confused primary and secondary. And okay, and then you can bring your invite the alertness in and this is I sometimes compared to turning up the light with a dimmer switch and which is really what it feels like is from the mind identified reactive state. And suddenly those nerves have been still a remnant of awareness from where you can notice, oops, I'm upset about this. And then you can, at that moment there is a choice. Okay, there's a confusion about what is really important here. And then you can invite in presence attention. And at that moment there's a shift from the mind identified reactive thinking state. You might have just been talking to somebody about how dreadful somebody else is, what they just did. Why can't they ever get it right? And why. And suddenly there's still a remnant of awareness in you. Oh, and so you begin to witness that inside you. And that moment you have a choice. You can say, okay, you recognize you've got confusion of primary and secondary. And then you go, okay, let's become present. A deep breath might help. Looking around you might help. Anything that brings you into the present moment brings up, okay, you step out of the mind identified state. What that means when I say you step out of it means your consciousness removes itself from its, from the thinking. Your consciousness was in the thought forms. You then reclaim the consciousness. The consciousness reclaims itself, so to speak. You reclaim the consciousness from its incarnated form in the thought or emotional form it had incarnated into this form. This is the dream of consciousness. You reclaim it or it reclaims itself because you are ultimately it. And so consciousness then is withdrawn from the form, the thought form, the emotional thought. Well, let's say, let's say this is consciousness and this is thought. Then it goes. Consciousness was trapped in that thought. It had become lead thought in the same way that water can become, can become ice. So this is just so consciousness is out of it. And then the thought collapses because it was only consciousness that had been frozen had become hardened, so to speak. So consciousness is withdrawn from the thinking. And then it is in its pure no form. And that is the amazing. It's an amazing thing when that consciousness is suddenly there that before was trapped in thinking, that and that you experience at a heightened sense of aliveness suddenly. And that is the entire vibrational frequency shifts to, one could say what it feels like, a higher frequency. So this is why we call it waking up, because waking up is awakening. Spiritual awakening does not mean to suddenly see angels or talk to God. What do I do? Tell me what to do. That's not spiritual awakening. It's fine if you see angels, it's a beautiful thing. But it doesn't mean that you're spiritually awakened. It just means you're seeing an angel. Or even if you're channeling a spirit entity, it does not mean you're spiritually awakened. You're just channeling a spirit entity who may have a big ego. And then that ego gets added to your ego. So the amazing process then is consciousness disidentifies from what it had incarnated into. And that leads to an enormous sense of intensified aliveness suddenly. And that is part of that, what we call alertness that arises. And so we call it awakening. It's a term that had been in use for thousands of years, awakening. And it's for good reason. The Buddha, of course, means the awakened one. Ut comes from the root, Sanskrit root to awaken. Now there's a reason why this has been used because it is very much like somebody who awakens from sleep. And you know how that happens. You're asleep and then suddenly you go. There's an enormous shift from a very different state of consciousness. And some and the same thing happens. Then again from the normal state of consciousness, which is the mind identified state, which is from the point of view of the awakened state, is another kind of sleep and another kind of dream. You might think you're totally awake, but you're not. You're totally in your thoughts. And then suddenly the second awakening happens and you go from suddenly you complete shift, that's why it's called. And you can feel the entire energy field suddenly shifting. And that is may have to happen many times in you. You lose it. It doesn't mean you necessarily stay awakened once. It can happen. And then the momentum of the egoic consciousness may of course reassert itself and you are in another wave of reactivity and story making and mind identification until you begin to notice again you're upset again. In fact, you've been upset the last five hours, but you didn't even know it because it was so normal, by the way. And you may have. You may people in your own life. There are humans who are upset on a continuous basis. It's almost their normal state now. They don't know that, because if you live with something all the time, you can no longer know it. I compare it to a noise that you hear in a room generated by some machine or air conditioner or the fridge. And after a few hours you no longer know that there is a noise. You don't know it. You only know it when suddenly it stops and you say, kunst. Has that been going on for all these hours? And suddenly it's so peaceful here. And this fridges must have been on for weeks. And the same with inner state. Many humans still exist, whose normal state is basically a state of contraction, tightness, which is a form of upset. And even when there's nothing much happening externally to upset them, they are still upset and they don't know it. But really they are looking for. When even there's nothing happening externally to upset them, they are looking for an excuse out there to justify their state of upsetness, so to speak. So they're looking for something that they can get upset about, because they're already upset inside, there's already that energy field and they're just waiting for. It's a bit like this is how a dream, by the way, happens. People believe that when they have a nightmare and they feel fear, or whatever they feel in the nightmare, they believe that the images in the dream cause the what? The fear. But actually it's the other way around. There is a state of fear in them which the mind attempts to explain. And it creates images that then correspond to what they feel. And this is how a dream arises. The mind creates the dream to explain the underlying feeling of fear. But of course, when we look back at the dream, we think that we felt fear because we saw those images in the dream. No, the mind created them because it needed some explanation. Well, they'd feared, so it created that.