Transforming Fear and Anxiety in the Process of Conscious Manifestation with Eckhart Tolle

Welcome to the second part of this special video series on Conscious Manifestation 2020. In this second part, Eckhart Tolle addresses how once we've developed a level of presence and awareness of thoughts and emotions, how do we work with anxiety or fear that keeps erupting, that we keep feeling in our felt experience? Here's part two of Conscious Manifestation 2020 with Eckhart Tolle.

Now, what about the fear? What about the anxiety? The anxiety that has been in you? For many people, it's in the background most of their lives. Some fear, some anxiety. And when they're being challenged, as now, the anxiety that is a kind of background, distant background noise for some people is almost always there, what sometimes obscured, but in a second that suddenly becomes very pronounced, this anxiety in the face of a challenge, the anxiety that had already been there in the background, the fear now comes out fully. You are in the grip of it. And now you become aware of the link between your thought processes and your emotions. And you realize that your unconscious thought process, such as Bori, actually fuel the emotion that we call fear or anxiety continuously. So a vicious circle arises. And then the emotion that you feel, which you feel it, tend to feel it in your stomach in this area here. You feel it a contraction, almost a painful, painful thing dwelling in your, in your stomach or solar plexus area. But it can affect the whole body. The whole body can be, can be tense. It interferes with the harmonious functioning of your body. So it's very. This anxiety lowers your immune system on the physical level that even, even mainstream medicine recognizes the fact that what they call stress, which stress is mostly fear and anxiety, makes you much more, lowers your immune system and you're much more susceptible to illness. It doesn't mean if you're not anxious, you will never catch an illness, but you are much more susceptible to being sick when you are in an almost continuous state of stress or anxiety. So then the fear, of course rises up back into your mind and creates more emotionally charged fearful thinking, which is not just fearful thinking, it's now emotionally charged fearful thinking. And that creates even more of that emotion. This is why it's called a vicious circle. The fearful thinking feeds the fearful emotion with energy. One could say the fearful thinking vibrates at the same frequency as the fearful emotion. So it is food that the emotion loves, so it wants more of it. Once you're on the grip of worrying, anxious thinking, you don't want to stop. Well, you might want to stop, but you're not even there when you're completely Identified, it does not want to stop. So you are trapped in a fearful, this fearful vicious circle of emotion. Fearful, fearful thinking. Creating fearful. The emotion of fear and the emotional fear rising back up into your mind and creating emotionally charged fearful thinking. And when you are in that state, you cannot think clearly, whatever thought that arises. What do I have to do now? What can I do now? It's very unlikely that you will have a creative and useful thought. Whatever your action you take on the basis of fearful thinking is likely to be not wise, not effective, probably wrong, and leads to more suffering. Whatever, whatever. In whatever way you interpret the world through the veil of fearful thinking, in whatever way you interpret the world when you're in the grip of fearful thinking is going to be a complete misinterpretation. But to you, when you identify with it, it's the reality. So the first thing is to become aware of thoughts and emotions. And then so let's. That means the awareness is, has arisen. It's there. Then once you recognize the futility and destructive nature of certain types of thinking, you are able to increasingly let go of it and replace it, not immediately necessarily with positive thoughts, but it's better to, because you still have the negative emotion there. So if you immediately replace the unconscious fearful thinking with positive thoughts, there's a conflict between the emotion that is still there, which is the fear, and the thoughts that are floating on top there. And so. And you will feel that there's something not right because the emotions says you're in a critical state and your mind has a thought that all is well. The life, life is good. I'm going to be abundant. It's unlikely that this will be effective. So again, realize what kind of thoughts go through your mind. Recognize the futility and destructive nature of these types of thought and then replace these thoughts not immediately with positive thoughts, but with awareness. Replace instead of engaged in negative thinking. Be more present as much as you can be more in the present moment. Because after all, that's all there ever is. The mind doesn't seem to know that all there ever is is the present moment. There's nothing else ever in your life. So you might as well give it some attention. You might as well make it the focus of your life because that's. That is it unfolds in this now moment. Everything future never comes. It's always now. When the future comes, it's a now. When the past happened, it was the now. When you remember the past, you remember it now. When you think about future, you think about it now. There is only now. So you might as well give it your fullest attention, make it the focal point of your life and then see what you can do with the so called future. But first you need to come into a relationship with the now that is helpful, sane and that is friendly. Become friendly with them when, when you, when you enter the now. You see the now is not really that. It's not a threatening place most of the time, except when you is an emergency happening. Then you have to do something, an immediate emerge, life threatening or whatever it is. But the now is actually a much more benign place than the mind would be able to recognize. But you need to have your awareness there. You have to, you need to be aware, you need to be present in the now in order to recognize that the now is actually, can actually be your friend and not doesn't it's not your enemy. The now is your friend. You become friendly, friendly with the present moment. And that's however, so you begin to cut the link between your thought processes and the emotion. Because you let go of these fearful thoughts, you recognize their futility. Instead you're much more present. Thoughts will occasionally still come in and then you recognize them. Let go, be more present. However, in that presence, the emotion of fear may not and probably will not immediately disappear because it's been there for a long time. So even if you no longer fuel the emotion with your thinking, you become present. And you may notice, yes, I'm aware of, more aware of sense perceptions, the aliveness of this moment. You can see perhaps beauty in things where the things that you didn't even give any attention to before. However, you can also still feel this anxiety of fear living in you, still there. Even when you're no longer feeding it with your thoughts, you can still feel it. There it is. And that becomes part of your experience of the present moment. That anxiety now, what do you do with it? The normal tendency would be to say I want to get rid of this, I shouldn't be feeling this, I don't want to feel this. And some people just cannot, cannot tolerate the anxiety. So they need to, they might go to their doctor and say please do something about this anxiety. The doctor will then you give you a prescription. In some extreme cases, those things may be temporarily helpful. In some extreme cases, but a lot of the time you would have missed an opportunity. And that is the opportunity of evolving through facing pain or suffering. If you face the emotional pain that you feel that it's anxiety or fear and not even not try to run away from it or Say, I can't become so uncomfortable. Being in your own skin can become so. So unpleasant and uncomfortable that you just want to run away. Or say, please give me something. I don't have to feel this anymore. But actually it doesn't help to want it, to want to get rid of it. It just creates another layer of anxiety or problems on top of the. On top of the emotion. Now, I suggest, as an alternative approach is to make the emotion that you feel that still lives in you part of your experience of the present moment and accept it in the way you accept the totality of the present moment. And that's a new way of living, a very powerful way of living, a very powerful way of connecting with a deeper level of consciousness in you, of finding enormous power that dwells in you if you can accept the present moment as it is internally, externally and internally. So it's not going to kill you. The anxiety is there, but it's not going to kill you. It might kill you if you react to it and create further anxiety. And you then allow the anxiety to be there as it is completely. Is almost like saying it sounds a little strange. It's almost like saying, I don't mind being anxious. Sounds very paradoxical. It's, it's. It's a. But it's a very interesting experiment. You can conduct any form of unhappiness. Of course, some, some unhappiness is telling you that something is wrong in your life. That's a. It's a different story. But habitual unhappiness that arises in you no matter where you go and what you do. Unhappiness arises in you no matter where you go and what you do. Fear and anxiety are there. And this applies to countless humans on the planet. Now as an experiment, as I said, what happens when they say, I don't mind being unhappy, I don't mind being anxious. But of course, you're not fueling the anxiety with your thinking. You're aware of your anxiety. So you've reached that step where you're no longer giving it further fuel or food and you're becoming aware of the anxiety and then become what? There is an. As you place your attention on it, which is part of the attention that's in the present moment, you become aware that it's actually this very intense energy in that feeling, fear, almost a burning energy in that fear. But the energy is not a flowing energy. It's. It's trapped energy. It's like being in a. Like a boiling kettle. You're holding the lid Down. It's a. The energy is trapped. But there is intense, there is enormous life energy in that fe. And if you can completely accept your fear at this moment without feeding it any longer with your thinking, just being aware of it, that's what it is. You may find in a very subtle way a change happening. And the change is. It's a transmutation of this energy fear when you accept it completely, a transmutation of this energy into intense presence. So the same energy that before was fear, when it's completely accepted, it suddenly goes. And there's enormous power that was in there trapped. And suddenly it becomes fuel for your consciousness becomes transmuted into presence or awareness when it's completely accepted. And then it's no longer fear, it's just in suddenly intense awareness. And that intense awareness is like a. One could almost say a higher intelligence that suddenly begins to operate in you. You're no longer just reliant on your. The conditioning of your mind. There's an. There's an intense presence there. And it can now, it doesn't mean it happens once and then it's never fear again. After the that experience, you have to experiment. It may not last very long, the initial transmutation. Then you may fall back into fear. And the fear make repeatedly try to rise back up into your mind and make you think fearful thoughts. And from time to time it probably will succeed. Again you fall back into the same pattern, but then more, more and more at shorter and shorter intervals, you. You wake up again and you realize that this is what's happening. And so. And then again you come to a place of just acceptance. And then notice that the transmutation happens again. And this is how it is not just fear. It can be with any kind of suffering in your life. When it's completely accepted, a transmutation begins to happen. And that is the how. Suffering is actually an essential part of. Of the evolution of human consciousness. Because if you reach a point where suffering can be transmuted into a higher consciousness, awareness of presence, it becomes fuel for presence. Sa.