There Is Another Way | Special Teaching from Eckhart Tolle

There's a line in Shakespeare, I don't remember which play it. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. There's a very important lesson here. An essential part of spiritual awakening, or we could call it the awakening of consciousness, is to learn to become aware of the difference between the situation that you find yourself in and what your mind says about the situation that you find yourself in. Particularly challenging situations. Many of you at this time are perhaps confined to a small space, perhaps a small apartment, not allowed to go out except to buy groceries or other essentials. Perhaps you have to share that space with several people, or there's nobody else and you're feeling lonely. Or you may be experiencing that money is becoming scarce because you've been laid off, no more income, or you're feeling sick and there's a fever, this cough. Now, all these things that many of you are experiencing now would conventionally normally be called bad. And yes, I suppose on a conventional level they are not pleasant, particularly if you're sick. So what does it mean? What does Shakespeare mean when he says nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so? So your very essential spiritual lesson is to be able to differentiate between a situation that you are experiencing and your mental commentary about the situation that you're experiencing. The thoughts that you have concerning the situation that you're experiencing. Now for most people, anybody who is not sufficiently aware for most people, whatever they experience and the mental commentary that they have about their experience are a single phenomenon they cannot separate them from. So let's say you are cooped up in a small space, have been there for already a week or two weeks, and you're thinking about how much longer and you can't stand it anymore, this is just too awful. And the self talk continues. It's telling you how awful and unacceptable this situation is. And you might. This self talk may generate self pity, it may generate anger, it may generate depression, and or certainly will generate fear. Because a lot of the self talk is about how bad it is. It's not just how bad it is now, but how bad it's going to be. It's going to be worse. That's what the mind is often saying. And then when the mind saying that it's going to get worse, then basically for you it is already worse and it gets worse and worse. So since many of you have spare time these days, I suggest experimenting a little bit and becoming aware of the difference between the situation you find yourself in and the mental commentary about the situation. So when you feel unhappy Basically suffering where you are. And you're saying, I can't take much more of this. Whatever the mind is saying or the mind is saying, it's going to get worse. I can't take another three weeks of this. How could I? What am I going to live on? And so on. So the commentary concerns certain things that are happening now. It may concern certain things in the so called future. So you become aware of the self talk. Basically, most humans talk to themselves a lot, or you may also be talking to others. If you share space with other people, then the self talk becomes the dialogue that you have with others. And as an experiment, I would suggest that you ask yourself, how would I experience this situation if I did not add any unnecessary a thought to it? How would I experience this moment, the situation that I'm finding myself in, without the addition of an interpretation of the mind? I sometimes call that in most cases, this addition, this interpretation. In many, many cases it's negative. There's usually not that much that the mind can comment on. A very pleasant experience, it just experiences it, but the mind loves it. When there's a difficult situation, then the mind can really get going and has a long story about it. How would I experience this moment without the addition of unnecessary thought? That's a strange question. I sometimes say that this addition of thought is excess baggage in your life. And many humans don't realize that they are making themselves unhappy for years and years, and sometimes a whole lifetime, because they never learn to differentiate between situations they find themselves in and that which the mind adds to the situation. So they experience the situation through the narrative of the mind. They cannot say, here's a situation and here's the narrative. But this is what I'm asking you to express, experiment with now, because you have plenty of time, or many of you have. How would I experience this moment if I refrained from interpreting it, calling it either good or bad? Okay, now this question doesn't have an answer. On a conceptual level, this question directs your attention into the present moment, the aliveness of the present moment. And if you don't add any thought to it, but just an experiment, you can. If the experiment fails, if you don't like it, then you can continue with adding, continuously adding narratives to the situation, and continue to experience the situation through the veil of the narrative that comments how awful it all is that your life is falling apart, the world is falling apart, it's also dreadful. That's a narrative. So how would I experience this moment if I did not add, okay, let's do it or let's refrain. It's not a doing, it's a refrain from doing something that is normally an unconscious mind process. Okay, what am I left with? Here I am, I'm sitting here looking around, breathing whatever is here in this room. Look out of the window, see a bit of sky, tree light coming through the window, furniture in the room, whatever else is happening here, sensory perceptions and your breathing. And you are alive, presumably, although you may not actually experience being alive, but you can experience it by feeling the inner energy field of the body, which is alive. It's all part of the experience of this moment. And there you are sitting there and you have dropped the narrative and all you are left with is the bare isness beingness or isness of this moment. That's interesting. And you may suddenly feel a kind of weight lifting of your shoulders, the weight that you habitually probably carry, which is the weight of. This is why I call it excess baggage. It is a weight of unconscious thinking, reactive thinking, the mind creating unhappy narratives. And then what you then experience is the body is reflecting back to you the unhappy narrative in the form of an unhappy emotion. That's called normal living. That's what when you watch a movie or everybody's doing it, that's just normal. Not to very few people question it. But there is another way, and that's the way of awareness or presence. So this is perhaps one of the most, or the most fundamental spiritual practice, is to be able to separate the narrative from the situation and if possible, as much as possible, let go of the narrative and just be present with this moment as it is. And of course the amazing fact this moment is all there ever is. Your entire life unfolds in and as this moment. In other words, it's always now. It's never not now. Your entire life is now. Whatever happened in the past happened in the now. And when you remember it, you remember it now. Whatever will happen in the future will not happen in the future. It will happen in the now. Because when the future comes, it's no longer future, it's the now. And when you think about the future, it's a thought in the present moment in the now. So life and now, your life and the now are in sample. And there's an enormous power hiding in the now, which means hiding in you, and a deep sense of aliveness and beingness that goes far beyond what we conventionally call happiness. It's not happiness, it's deeper. But you need to be challenged by life to find, find it. And this is what's happening for millions collectively. Now, on a personal level, everybody gets challenged periodically also. But now collectively, we're being challenged. We need to wake up, wake up out of unconscious thinking, out of complete identification with the thinking mind, which is conditioned by the past. And we need to realize that there is in us, there is in you, another dimension of consciousness that has always been there, but habitually, one could say, overlooked. And that is the dimension of awareness, which is consciousness without thought. You probably have experienced it on many occasions, briefly, for example, when engaged in an activity that requires you to be absolutely present. Climbing up a mountain sometimes, perhaps engaged in some kind of sport activity, requires you to be absolutely present. And then there's an awareness there, but there's no conceptual thinking, there's no time for thinking. And the strange thing is this awareness is a deeper identity. The awareness that you are frees you ultimately from yourself, the self, the limited self, the conditioned self, the mind made sense of self, that for most people, that's all they know. But there's more to you. And there is a deeper identity in you. And that identity is awareness itself. It is consciousness itself. It's the unconditioned consciousness itself. And it's not difficult to experience that, to realize that. But humans don't. They need the challenge to be driven there. And this is why what we are going through right now is potentially very helpful. So the practice is, how would I experience this moment without the addition of thought? And then you come to experience the pure isness of this moment in which there is no suffering, there is only the isness of this. Because all the unhappiness ultimately was not created by the situation, it was created by the narrative. But you didn't know that, as most humans still don't know that, because they cannot separate the situation from the narrative. And so whenever you feel unhappy, you feel fearful, you feel depressed, you feel resentful, what's happening? Self pity, whatever it may be, use that as a little wake up call. Say, okay, how does this arise? Where does this, how is this feeling of unhappiness in whatever form, how does it come about? And then you become more and more aware of what goes on in your thinking mind. The awareness is deeper, a deeper dimension of consciousness. We can say higher or deeper, it doesn't matter. It is a deeper dimension of consciousness than the activity of thought, which is also consciousness. Every thought is a form that consciousness takes. But underneath that there is a vast realm of consciousness. In the same way that a ripple on the surface of the ocean let's say that's a thought, but the ripple is only a temporary, fleeting expression of a much deeper reality underneath it. And so you wake up to that deeper identity by realizing the fundamental difference between what is and what the mind has to say about it. And then more and more, you're able to experience situations with the power of your presence. You're facing a situation with the power of your presence. It's not your presence, but let's just call it yours. You face it with the power of your presence, which is true intelligence. Instead of being reactive and complaining about what it is you're experiencing. A lot of that unnecessary mind activity, the narrative, the excess baggage, a lot of that you might have noticed, is complaining. You can complain about life, about other people around you. You can complain about the unfairness of it all, how life has treated you, or whatever it is. You can complain about whatever the politicians and all kinds of the infinite things you can complain about. And so a lot of that narrative has an element of complaining to it. And it's not pleasant, but the false sense of self, the ego, the me. It loves complaining because then it feels it has a stronger sense of identity, fictitious identity. It loves to make somebody wrong, another person. You can make a whole situation wrong. And this should not be happening. It should not be happening. It's a travesty, but it is happening. This should not be happening as the narrative. And that what makes you unhappy in most cases, perhaps all cases, is the narrative in the mind, not the situation. The situation is as it is. And when you realize that, then more and more are you able to face every situation which is in the present moment, the only place where any situation can arise. You face it as it is in the now, with the power of your presence. And if action is required, you take action. If nothing can be done, you leave it alone. It is as it is, and you are not unhappy about it anymore. You rise above it, so to speak. You're no longer at the mercy of whatever is happening or not happening around you. Yes, it's nice when nice things happen, and it's not so nice when unpleasant things happen. But that's. It doesn't touch you that deeply because you have access already, a deeper dimension within yourself. So you're no longer at the mercy of conditions, because as long as you're at the mercy of conditions, life is very frustrating. Because conditions or situations you find yourself in are never satisfying for very long. And a lot of the time they are unsatisfying. A lot of the time they are challenging because life is not here to make you happy. The world isn't here to make you happy. It's here to awaken you, to make you conscious. How does it do that? It does that by challenging you. And it's doing it now. So. And as you are able to let go of the unnecessary narrative that makes you unhappy, then you automatically become present to what is. And then you understand, perhaps what Shakespeare meant when he said, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Thanks. I will talk to you again soon. In the meantime, please try it out. Practice and see what happens. Thanks, Sa.