The Universe Wants You | Eckhart Tolle on Discovering Reality (Part 2)

But life gives you what you need. The universe wants to evolve, and it will give you what you need because the universe wants to evolve through you. And if it's being blocked by certain things, it will give you what you need to unblock. And that's for a while. That's called suffering. Now, your challenge, of course, is first of all, as you sit here, it's enormously satisfying to actually realize that you are this sense of presence apart from your personal history. You are a deeper and underlying sense of presence without which there could not even be a personal history. Your presence allows your personal history to be, but far goes far beyond your personal history. My favorite analogy is, as you know, your personal history and the conditioning of your mind are the ripples on the surface of the ocean. Or you are the ripple, and the ripple is not separate from the ocean. But while the ripple is deluded, it seems to be separate from the ocean. The ripple takes its attention a little deeper. Then the attention goes from being trapped in the ripple form, which is the human mind. And so the attention goes suddenly, and then it goes. There is a spaciousness, a vast spaciousness there that is far deeper than the person. So it is that where the person is connected with something vast. That's your connectedness with being. And maybe that's the wonderful little happy song we listened to yesterday, which, as Oprah said, came to him kind of inspiration. Every orc, things that have certain aliveness, power come to you from the greater consciousness. It has a line in it. If you feel like a room without a roof, where does that come from? A room without a roof? Okay, you're no longer confined. My interpretation, I'm sure Pharrell Williams may not know where that came from. It was inspired. So you're usually confined in your identity. And suddenly I just gave you this image of something opening up here, but you might as well say up here. So suddenly you open up into spaciousness, room without a roof. And then, of course, your sense of aliveness deepens. And some people may call that happy or joyful or deeply peaceful or still. So I just said, there's two of you. It's not really two. It's just a brief way of looking at it. There's the personal me, the personal self, and the vaster. And your challenge is not to fall back in your daily life into complete identification with the personal. The mind, the stories, the reactivity, the matrix trapped in the matrix. The challenge is to remain to stay aware of the spaciousness within you. And then you go about your life being A person? Yes. Functioning as a person? Yes. Still knowing. All the knowledge you have acquired as a person in this lifetime has its place and useful. Whatever you know or expertise or talents, all wonderful, but you're also connected to something faster than that. And that's where your true sense of self comes from. So you no longer need to be on the lookout all the time to defend or strengthen your egoic sense of self, the ego. Otherwise, if you're only there as an ego, you're always trying to protect it and add something to it. Because you never feel, you're never quite enough, you're never quite. There's always something missing. You may be familiar with this feeling that something is lacking still in your life. And of course, on that level there always is. That's why we practice here, walking around this beautiful space on campus, surrounded by nature. And we practice being primarily the presence, so that you don't walk around carrying the heavy burden of the person, the heavy burden of your life situation by continuously reviving it in your mind, your problems. Then it's heavy. You walk around with that heaviness here, but no, you don't need it here. Be the presence, the spacious consciousness, and see how light, everything, lightness comes into your sense perceptions and beauty is discovered where before you didn't see it. So as we sit here, your little. The enjoyment of being here right now is in realising how pleasant it is not to think and yet be totally here. Just encounter that little. The little spaces. The little space inside, bless you, the little space inside, like now, here's the space I'm not thinking, but the essential I is here. And then you practice, so to speak, or you just enjoy looking at things as you walk around the campus or beyond. You enjoy your newfound ability. Or for some of you, it's not new anymore, you're already living it. And for quite a few it may be relatively new. You enjoy your new found ability, which is amazing, that you can perceive things, you can look and listen or even use other senses, and no longer are no longer compelled to continuously mentally interpret or name whatever it is that you are perceiving. In other words, the running commentary in your mind subsides and that brings a depth and an aliveness to your perceptions, like a renewal of your very self. And occasional thoughts, of course, will pop up, but they are no longer considered very important. Sa.