Eckhart Tolle explains how the ego creates an addiction to problems and drama. He describes two layers of consciousness: the surface mind where thoughts appear, and deeper pure awareness. Life becomes effortless when you practice presence repeatedly until it becomes your natural state, not something forced.
You want your problems. You don't want an end to the drama. You don't want an end to your problems. You become addicted to the problem making tendency of the egoic mind. You become addicted to problems. You. It's a decision just be present right now and become familiar with the state of pure awareness, even if it doesn't last very long. Maybe just it's a timeless state, so it doesn't really matter, but the more familiar you become with it, the longer it lasts from the point of view of time. And then because at first that stillness is experienced perhaps as an absence of thought, just an absence. But it's not just an absence, it's also the presence of presence. And as you go there more often it lasts longer and it deepens. You become more deeply rooted in it. And then you have basically two dimensions of consciousness within you. You have a choice. You have the surface self or the surface I, the person. And you have the deep I. And then sometimes you go into the surface I. And then you draw into the deep I. Other terms I sometimes use instead of surface I and deep I are object consciousness, which is the surface I, which means you only experience consciousness as objects. I mentioned that last night. You only experience consciousness as objects in consciousness. Sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, they are objects, they are formations that arise in consciousness, energetic formations. They are objects that arise in consciousness. So all that are called object consciousness. And then you have space consciousness. That's another word for the deep eye. That's what in other ancient traditions would be called the Atman, the Buddha nature and so on in Indian terminology from a term that goes back a long, long time. They've known about it for thousands of years. The term for presence is samadhi. Samadhi is the pure awareness without intrusion of. I hadn't, I didn't, I've been talking about presence for years. And then I realized, oh, that's when I picked up a book about Indian spirituality. Yes, that's what it is. And then I have also been talking about at first, yes, you become familiar with that. It lasts not for long at first in your normal environment, from the point of view of time, and then gradually spend a bit more time in it. But for a while it's still a question of you're either in object consciousness or you're in space consciousness. And for a while the tendency is for people to be hybrids, so to speak. You're partly in the deeper dimension, partly in the more external dimension. You're a hybrid. And often, initially, often you lose yourself again in the Outer in the object consciousness, in the ego consciousness, you lose yourself. And then, ah, any form of unhappiness that arises in you can become an alarm clock that says wake up out of your identification with that and step back into the present moment. And so you go back and forth until you become a bit more deeply rooted in presence. But you have to, it's a kind of. Until it becomes your natural state, it's a practice. And after a little while it's no longer a practice, it becomes your normal state. You have then that connectedness with being. And then the next stage is that you don't lose yourself. You don't lose this conscious connectedness with the being dimension even when you're engaged in dealing with the world. And in Indian spirituality there's also a word for it. It's called sahaja samadhi. That is the one could say a more advanced stage when you're able to be present, even participating in everyday life, even while you're speaking, doing, and even while you're thinking, you're not completely lost in the stream of thought. It doesn't drag you along, You know, its emotion comes into. And then it can go on for a long time. And then at some point you realize what's going on here. You become aware of your inner state. That means, oh, some awareness has come back, okay? And then you can choose to return to presence. But the more advanced stage it comes after a while. You can be present even while dealing with having conversations, doing things, getting things going from here to there. You know where you have to go to. You know your destination, you know your goal, but at the same time you are fully conscious of the step you are taking at this moment. You are present in every step. So that would be sahaja samadhi is to be able to bring the two together. And that's your destiny, is to embody that state of consciousness that's the awakened state. It's not. Well, is it difficult? Some people say it's really difficult. Or is it perhaps the case that what is easy looks difficult to you and what is difficult truly looks easy? In other words, being absorbed in egoic consciousness looks easy because that's conditioning that goes back thousands of years for humanity, for human beings. And the reality is your life becomes much easier the more present you are and it becomes hard in the absence of presence. But from the point of view of the egoic self, being present is difficult. And when you are identified with the surface self, then if you are really identified with it, you want your problems you don't want an end to the drama, you don't want an end to your problems. You become addicted to, to the problem making tendency of the egoic mind. You become addicted to problems. Your entire sense of self or sense of identity or a large part of it is then derived from a problematic sense of self. Then you go to psychologist or psychotherapist or psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. You basically, you are a walking problem. You would consider yourself to be a problem that needs to be solved. And then you start, you talk to the psychoanalyst about it. And that can go on for several years. There's more and more that comes up. Oh, my God, Sam.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
