What changes when a bad thought finds nobody home | Eckhart Tolle

Lucid dream means at night you're dreaming, but the moment comes when you're aware that you're dreaming. Lucid living is when you— life around you unfolds, but there's an awareness in the background. There's an awareness while life unfolds, so you don't lose yourself in the unfolding life, the succession of events and people and experiences. There's always— there's a presence behind it, and that's lucid living. You continue to think, of course, thoughts still, but something, an important change then happens or is happening to the way in which you think. Most importantly, Thoughts lose the capacity to make you unhappy. That's important. Next, of course, is that thinking still happens, but your sense of self or your identity, you, you no longer look for it in the movement of thought. So Thought still happens, not as frantic as before. It slows down quite a bit, but thought still happens. But thought is no longer imbued with a sense of self. That's important, a huge difference. Whereas before, before presence arose, before awareness arose, You looked for yourself in every thought, that is the identification. So thought is full of self, there's self in thought. And then thought still happens, but there's no self in it anymore. And it— no thought makes you unhappy anymore. You don't believe when you thought, what a terrible situation, I can't stand this anymore. It's just a thought. And then after a while it subsides, and this situation, every situation is as it is. You no longer argue with the is-ness of things, which is the present moment, because continuously internally or externally arguing with the is-ness of the present moment is To use a simple term, crazy. I hope crazy is not politically incorrect, but all right. To argue with the is-ness of what is, is dysfunctional. Let's put it like that. Makes you unhappy because you have a conflict. So thinking Also, you do less thinking because a lot of the time you don't need thought. Increasingly, you're able to spend moments when you are just aware but not thinking, especially maybe in nature. Eventually, you can be anywhere and you don't have to think if you don't want to. That's a great liberation to be able to relinquish thought when it's not needed. Or if it does come back, fragments of thoughts come, float in and out of existence in your screen of your mind, it's fine, it's not problematic. But something else happens now as far as thought is concerned, and that is thought is— Yeah. When thought is no longer the master, Because you've mistaken it for who you are. Thought becomes the servant of awareness, and then thought becomes a very potentially extremely powerful tool for creating whatever it is that wants to be created, not by your ego, but by the indwelling Presence, the intelligence, the indwelling unconditioned intelligence may use you and use your mind to create through you in whatever form it might create. So that even without access to that dimension, thinking becomes self-serving and completely devoid of any creative impulse. You can just repeat things. Any creativity, any creative impulse, intuitive vision, idea comes only from the connect— connectedness to the vertical dimension in the deep I. So any creative person must have some access often just in the limited area of their creativity, some access to that dimension. And, and these creative people who otherwise have not awakened spiritually, they may have that access in the area of their creativity but not in the rest of their lives. But that's not enough. It's much more important to have it in the rest of your life so that your life becomes a Lucid life. I'm using the term lucid because lucid is often used in connection with dreaming. Lucid dream means at night you're dreaming, but the moment comes when you're aware that you're dreaming. That's a lucid dream. Awareness has come in, but the dream is still there. That can happen to some people. Usually, shortly after you wake up, because awareness and the dream are not really compatible for very long. But it's a wonderful thing when it does happen spontaneously in the dream. You're dreaming and suddenly you know, oh, it's just a dream, I could do anything. Even the monster isn't that threatening anymore, it's just a dream, so I'm just going to be friendly to the monster. And suddenly the monster becomes something else. So that's lucid dreaming, but more importantly, this is an analogy you can use for lucid living, is when you— life around you unfolds, you use your mind, or the deeper I uses your mind, but there's an awareness in the background. There's an awareness while life unfolds. So you don't lose yourself in the unfolding life, the succession of events and people and experiences. You're— there's always— there's a presence behind it, and that's lucid living.