What Your Dog Knows About Living in the Now | Eckhart Tolle

When you are trapped in your mind, it's a hypnotic state. And in spiritual terms, you are actually asleep. When you are completely identified with every arising thought, you are in a state of spiritual sleep. You're dreaming a kind of dream. The dream that you're dreaming is conditioned by your past. So humans dream different kinds of dreams. If there's no awareness, then you are, in spiritual terms, unconscious. Spiritual unconscious is very different from conventional unconscious. In conventional terms, when you're unconscious, obviously you are. You're knocked out, you go. But in spiritual terms, when you're unconscious, you're completely identified with the stream of thinking, plus the emotions that accompany the stream of thinking. That's unconscious. And then you don't look like that. You look like you're not present, you're not here. You're somewhere in your thought world. And even if a person that looks at you, they see you through the veil of their thoughts, their conditioned mind, they're not really seeing you, not really. There's a huge sense of separation. Always this becomes a huge veil through which you look at the world, which is your mind, your conditioned mind. And you look at yourself in the same way. You become a stranger to yourself. You become alienated from yourself. You become an object in your consciousness. This is a purely human thing. Other life forms don't have that because other. It arises through thinking, which is a wonderful evolutionary step forward, a wonderful advance. But there was a huge price to pay for the development of the ability to think. There's always a price to pay. And the huge price to pay was loss of awareness of the essence of who you are. Now, what about all the life forms that haven't arrived at thinking yet? Well, the dog, the dog, your dog, or somebody else's dog. Everybody knows some dogs. A dog does not live through a mental concept. The dog has not arrived at the Narcissus thing. Even if the dog might see himself in a mirror either he begins to realize that's a mirror or gets very excited. But it doesn't translate into a mental image of. The dog has no mental image, has no self concept, it doesn't have a conceptual identity. The dog has no opinion about you. There's a consciousness there, but it's not abstraction, it's not conceptual, it's not thinking, it just is. And it looks at you. And there's no ego there, except very few. And there are some neurotic dogs that show the beginnings of an ego. But the reason is they've lived with humans human neurotic ego for too long. But Otherwise, it's a miracle how sane often the dog is compared to the owner of the dog, and how joyful the dog is able to appreciate the present moment, how it greets the owner even after an absence of half an hour, as if he hadn't seen him for 10 years. Such joy. Wow. He hasn't created a lot of past in the mind. It's just so the dog exists prior to thinking what's happening to us. We are rising above thinking. That is a state of presence. So it's not that you no longer think after that. You transcend thinking. You're no longer in the grip of, of thinking, you're able to think, but you no longer look to thinking for your identity. You no longer look to a sense, to a story in your mind and derive from it your sense of who you are. So if you are not the story, who are you? Ah, well, you are not an object that arises in your consciousness. This is why when they asked Jesus, show us where is the kingdom of heaven? We talk about it all the time, where is it? Show us where it is. And he says, the kingdom of heaven does not come with signs to be perceived. It does not come with signs to be perceived, because it's already here. It's within and without. It's already here. It's already here. So the consciousness that you are is not something you need to attain because you are already it. It's not something that you can look for, because the very act of looking, the consciousness that's looking for yourself is yourself. I'm looking for my true self. Or you can say, I'm looking for God and you're expecting God to arise as an object in your consciousness. It would be very limited because any object that arises in your consciousness comes and goes. So can you become aware then? And here's the key. Can you become aware that in addition to who you are as a person, and not so much in addition, but transcendent to who you are as a person, you are consciousness. Because this is the one thing that is beyond any doubt in your so called life. I'm saying so called because you don't have a life. You are life. You don't have it because we say I have my life. You separate, you see me and my life. You are life, and life is the essence of life, is consciousness that manifests in various vibrational frequencies. So the one thing, even if we are dreaming this, perhaps this is your dream. Let's imagine for a moment that you sitting there listening to a man on a chair, let's imagine for a moment that this is a dream. And if it is a dream, there still needs to be something about this dream that makes this dream possible. And that which makes this dream possible is the light of consciousness in which the dream appears. So the consciousness is prior to everything. The consciousness is the ocean. The thoughts and emotions, the surface of the ocean. They are not separate. So you are the ocean. What does that mean? You are consciousness in essence, which is timeless. How can I know that I am consciousness? You cannot know it conceptually. You can only know it directly in the gap between two thoughts. For example, now and now. In this. Now, let's just experiment with this. Now, you don't need to remember anything. What for? I mean, you don't. Anyway, you don't unless I ask you right now. You don't think of your name, you don't think of your email address, you don't think of your telephone number or your entire past unless I ask you, and then you retrieve it from somewhere. But right now, you don't need any of this. You don't need. Let's see what happens to you if you don't remember anything from right now. Just let's pretend all that exists is this moment and that nothing ever happened. Wow. All that exists is this moment. Nothing ever happened and nothing ever will happen. And all that's left is this moment. And in this moment, you don't remember your story, don't remember your name, and yet there is something here that you cannot define. And what's left when you let go of past and future, which are thoughts, what is left is just a strange sense of presence. This is the undoubted fact that you are. And when you say it, you will say I am. This you cannot doubt. Everything else may be some kind of illusion when you add something to this deep sense of beingness. Because when you say I am, it's the sense of being. If you're not familiar with English grammar or you've forgotten about it, you might have forgotten that I, when you say I am, it's the first person singular of the verb to be. It sounds like totally different. Well, why don't you say I be, but for some reason you say I am. But I am is the sense of being. The sense of being, the sense of. I don't call it the sense of existing, because existing is existence, comes out of being. Existing X is Latin for out, so it stands out, which means anything that is manifested is existence. Your body exists for a while. Every object exists. Sense perceptions exist. Thoughts exist. They are manifested. But they can only exist because there's something that is formless is a vast space. That is the unconditioned consciousness prior to the arising of form. And you can sense it. This is the great realization. You can sense it within yourself. When for a moment, you're not thinking, but you're not falling asleep, you're not thinking. And yet what remains in this gap between two thoughts is a sense of beingness. You undoubtedly know that you are that, can't question that is the light of consciousness. You are that it's not an object. It's the eternal subject within which everything else arises.