Eckhart Tolle Presence: Why You Are So Lost in Thought!

The usual mistake or dysfunctional way of living, unconscious way, is, as I've mentioned before, is devaluing the present moment and overvaluing the next moment. Ego lives always with reference to past and future. Mentally, you're always somewhere else instead of giving fullest attention to this because this is the most valuable moment. Why? Because it's the only one, the present moment. Give your fullest attention to this moment because it's not true that the next moment is more significant because it never comes. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's get some incredible motivation from the one and only Eckhart Tolle. Enjoy. So there is a way of being totally present in the planning for the next, for the future. It's all little things. And even the, whoever, if you're the Pope or the president of a huge corporation or the president of a country, it's still the same. The present moment in its richness is usually overlooked because you're looking for something more significant. It's not— it's fine to achieve things, especially if they are beneficial, but for humanity and the totality on the planet, it's lovely to to have that, but they don't— even that doesn't make up your identity. The more you honor the small things, the more likely it is that you'll experience more good things in the so-called future because you have such a good relationship with the present. The gratitude is an underlying state of consciousness which is giving your fullest attention and honoring what is. The power to manifest is in experiencing the fullness of the present moment, the undifferentiated fullness. So when you don't complain about not only other people, but also about your life, then you can't be a victim anymore. I is the light of consciousness in which these feelings are being experienced right now. The victim is a huge, a huge prison. It's not, it is not who you are. And remember, thanks for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever. So there's this wonderful stillness here. And let's acknowledge it. The power is not just in you, it's all around you. Most of the time there is a voice in your head that comments and has opinions and viewpoints and interpretations about what's going on in your life. I call that the voice in the head. For most humans, that is completely involuntary. They don't even know that they have a voice in the head that never stops talking. Most of the time silently in your head. At other times it may even shout something out. So it wants to be heard. And so if you walk in the street, you will find most people look fairly sane. They're not talking to themselves, it seems, because they're not talking out loud. But if you listened into everybody's head, you would be amazed of how noisy the inside of every human is. It's like a radio, you know, these radio stations where the people talk in an excited voice. They go on and on. If you go to a foreign country and you don't know what they're talking about, you might think this must be extremely important. But if you can understand what they are saying, you realize it's completely meaningless. It's just noise. So a significant part of what happens in your mind, the larger part, is actually just superfluous noise. This thinking is a wonderful ability, a wonderful tool if used rightly. It is an instrument that causes dysfunction and misery for millions on the planet. Unhappiness for millions on the planet if thinking is not used, but if you are used by thought. So when humans say, "I think," in most cases, that's actually not true because they have no control over their thinking. It's compulsive and involuntary. And they are so identified with these thought processes They don't even know that they are in the grip of their thought processes because they are so identified. They become their thought processes. So whatever comes into your head, you completely believe in it. And then you— yeah, that's how it is. Whenever you feel unhappiness, this is a generic term, unhappiness in whatever form, unhappiness can arise as Irritation can arise as anger, can arise as even boredom is a form of unhappiness, sadness, all kinds of states that are not— they don't feel pleasant, they're unhappiness. And usually they are attributed to a life situation, something that's going on in your life. So for example, waiting at the airline counter and of course how Often things don't go well there. Let's hope they don't drag you out of the plane, but that could happen too. Whenever you feel irritation arising, anger arising, upset in whatever form, ask yourself, is this caused by the situation, or is it caused by what my mind is telling me about the situation? And in 95% of cases, you will find that the mental commentary that argues and complains about something that's going on but should not be going on, but it is, but shouldn't be, and the gap between what is and what the mind says should be or should not be, that gap is the arising of unhappiness. And misery, or as the Buddha called, suffering.

A powerful transformation can happen when you— and this is one way of approaching it which may be helpful to you— is not to desire any thing within you to be different from the way it is now. So that would mean complete acceptance of whatever it is that you experience at any given moment. At the moment, there are these energies in you, but you don't really want them, so there is a, there's a conflict between what you want and what you have. Now, if you approach it in a different way, instead of having what you want— you perhaps you want stillness, you want peace, you want that deeper sense of aliveness, perhaps that's the yearning, you want to be fully yourself— and what you have is you perhaps you feel contraction in the body, you feel excessive mind activity, you feel an almost semi-physical energy field blocking you. So you have the two. You have what you want and you have what you have. Now, as a practice, I suggest that you do away with the conflict between what you have and what you want, and you want what you have. Instead, which means whatever your inner reality or outer reality— but we're talking mainly about inner now— whatever your inner reality is right now, as it's always now, of course, it's not a big thing, it's only the reality now, accept it totally. This is what is. And so bring that Acceptance is a strange thing. When you really can say, well, that's what is, you might as well accept it because it is a reality of this moment. So if you bring that acceptance through, no matter even if it feels not pleasant, if it might be a contraction in the body or my mind is just so active, okay, let my mind be active. Bring the allowing to it and The strange thing happens, you may find, when you do it, you will already have a little bit of space around the condition that you dislike, but now you accept. And so you accept the condition that you previously disliked, but now you say, well, that's what is, and so I allow it to be. And what you then can sense, if you're inside of you a little bit of space around the condition. Not much at first, just a little bit. So let's say you have a contraction here and say, "That's what is," and this acceptance brings space. So here's the contraction, then here you have a little bit of, "That's what is," and then it may grow a little bit, the space around it. And then you find you become more interested in that little space around it than in the condition. So you give more attention to that, the spaciousness that around that comes with the acceptance of what is, and you can sense that space a bit more. And then it's— what I'm saying is not literally true, but I'm just saying it grows. It seems to grow, and then there's a bit more. The condition is still the same, but it has receded somewhat. It's no longer the center of your attention. You're more aware of the space. You become the space for it.

The transcendence of thinking means the transcendence of the egoic mind. It means that You are able to spend part of your time relatively free of compulsive thinking, certainly free of self-serving thinking and destructive thinking that continuously creates unhappiness for yourself and the people around you. How many people live the compulsive narrative in your mind that for many people is very negative, constantly critical, constantly complaining, never at ease with what is, there's always something wrong, fault-finding because the ego grows through the constant opposition, constant antagonism, never at ease, always looking for the next thing to complain about. And it strengthens the ego itself. The more you complain— 'offended' is a new version these days, it's very popular on the internet. 'I'm very, very offended.' 'Outrageous!' 'How dare you!' There are thousands or hundreds of thousands who go on every day, they look on their screen waiting for the next scene to be offended by. And the ego loves it. And for many of them, it's the only way they can inflate their ego by sitting on the screen and sending out tweets. The transcendent of thinking is not any kind of regressive movement. We are not regressing to the state of somebody whose mind is relatively undeveloped and who does not have a problem with egoic thinking because there's very little going on in their minds. What used to be called, before it became politically incorrect, idiot or fool. The fool was— there were always, you could see, happy fools. There's not enough thinking to make them unhappy, so they are below egoic thinking. In the medieval times, every village had at least one village idiot or fool, and it was normal, it was accepted, an essential part of the community. And even the royal courts had a fool, a very important figure, although that figure probably was just pretending to be a fool, and that was one of the most sometimes very influential position in the royal court, but also one of the most dangerous jobs you could have, because you could lose your head at any moment. But only the fool was able to tell the king or queen what was wrong, by making it into a funny story. But the fool is more deeply connected As we know from mythology, the fool is more deeply connected with the source still, hasn't gone as far out as a normally developed human. He's more simple. The fool, for example, relatively speaking, is a simpleton. It's like the Hobbit in Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is a simple guy. Doesn't think in complex terms, loves the simple things of life, loves eating and enjoyment. But why the fool has to go on this important mission that nobody else can carry out? That's a mythological motive. That's often the case because the fool has a connectedness still with source that the more developed humans don't have. Similar motive in Forrest Gump, the movie. The fool does great things, this guy Forrest Gump, but he's— because he's— and life always supports him. If you watch that movie again, he always— he saves people in the war, he does heroic things, but he doesn't claim credit because he doesn't have much of an ego yet. And always life gives him the next thing and the next thing, supports him. But we don't want to go there. When I say cessation of thinking, I'm not talking about regressing to the stage that is the pre-thinking stage of humanity. I'm thinking about rising above It's pointing to the possibility of rising above thinking. So you stop thinking, which is normally associated with diminishment of consciousness, and transcendence of thinking is an intensification of consciousness, turning up the light. This is why the term attention and alertness, those terms are extremely important. They're also used in Zen very frequently. The Zen teachings could be described, if you wanted to summarize Zen, it would just, you can just say simple things like, "Pay attention." There was one Zen teacher who would, whenever they asked him a question to explain Zen, he became quite famous, he would always raise his finger 'Please explain Zen to us. What is Zen? I haven't quite understood yet.' He was calling people to attention. Now, this attention, there's a state of attention that sometimes people experience when they are engaged in dangerous activity. You can climb a mountain, Do you think you're doing much thinking when you're hanging on this wall? No, you can't. You have to be absolutely present. In that moment, you have transcended thinking and the situation has forced you, is forcing you into complete presence, this highest degree of alertness. Without it, you slip and you're gone. And so this high degree of alertness, however, has no tension in it. In the case of somebody practicing a dangerous sport, yes, there is physical tension, but the state itself has no tension in it, and you do not need to engage in a dangerous activity in order to enter that state. We are entering it here because even as I talk about it, I hope, well, I don't really hope anything, but I trust that as I speak about it, simultaneously to listening to it, you can verify in yourself this state of attention, which is a state of very high alertness, but there's no tension in it. It's not the alertness that sometimes goes with fear, then you go, "But this not, uh-huh." That's really a contraction of the entire body. It's not really alertness. So that's not it. It's a relaxed alertness. There's both yin and yang in it. Coming together, and it's that. I also mentioned the other day, when you first look at something for the first few seconds, a new vista, a new landscape, you enter a room or you step out of a room into the open or whatever it is, or suddenly something new comes into your field of into your perceptual field, in the first 2 or 3 seconds you don't know what it is, you have to first take it in. There's a moment of alert presence in this, but usually you're only aware of the sense perception, you're not aware of the background of the alert presence itself. But you can be aware of the alert presence itself as you take it in, and that's the key. So you're not just alertly present, you're aware of the field of alert presence in yourself, so to speak, as yourself. And the awareness of it and it are the same thing. Cessation of thinking. You can try it. Even now, I would suggest that as I'm speaking, you may find, you may not know this yet, in the moments when I'm not speaking, like now, and now, And now, if you're alert, you're not thinking, you're just present. And now, it's just an alert field of presence. So some of you may not be able yet to be totally free of thinking, but I believe that most people are able to where they have short gaps of no thought, pure awareness, or no thought, just a short— and then you look around. In that moment, your whole, your personal sense of self has receded. In the moment of pure presence, which is just this, You have no memories and you have no expectations for future because you have no thought, but you haven't fallen asleep, you're very awake. In that moment, you're not a person anymore. What are you? Just a field of consciousness, conscious presence. Something has emerged from within you and has taken place of the person. The person is still there, it's just gone, receded. If the only thing you achieve in life is this, that you are able to be free of compulsive and addictive thinking, if you're able to almost, one could say, to choose not to think when there's nothing in particular to think about, when you can just be present. So in other words, if you can step out of thinking aware presence, that alert space, then that is the greatest thing you could achieve in this lifetime, that any human could achieve in this lifetime. And yet there's nobody left to say, "I have achieved it." That's the problem for the ego. The ego would love to say, "Oh, I have achieved the state of presence." So it's not an achievement. I'm just saying it's an achievement, but it's not really, because you didn't do it. You got out of the way and then it happened. Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

You know that you get defensive. The question is, do you know in the moment of getting defensive that you're defensive, or do you know it afterwards? You can look into that. I'm rarely content or grateful. That's interesting. That's very good self-observation too. I'm not content at this moment. I'm not content. My thinking is so negative. Another good piece of knowledge. My thinking is negative at this moment. What are the thoughts that are going through my head? So if you apply the awareness that is already there hiding behind all these things, if you apply the awareness to the present moment when these things arise, defensiveness— what is low self-esteem? It's something that you tell yourself about yourself in your mind, a certain repetitive negative thoughts that the voice in the head tells you. Those are, this is self, low self-esteem. There might be certain emotions that go with it, emotions that are, ooh, but really the basis for low self-esteem is something you tell yourself about your low worth. It's thoughts. Now, the questioner already knows that she has low self-esteem, and if she can know that she has low self-esteem in the moment of the low self-esteem arising as thoughts, she can recognize them as thoughts and not necessarily true thoughts arising, repetitive thoughts, conditioned thoughts. Perhaps this low self-esteem might have started in childhood, It often happens to people whose parents are very critical, or parents tell them, "You're never good enough." This can be one reason. So it might have started there. It's a conditioned way of thinking, conditioned thoughts. Now, the awareness that's already there in the questioner would need to be there in the moment of those things arising. And then you can see when these thoughts arise, you recognize them as thoughts that are arising and you're no longer completely trapped in what these thoughts are saying. In other words, to use an analogy that we used not long ago, your sense of being is not in the thought anymore, it's in the awareness of the thought. In other words, if you look at the sky, The vast sky, daytime, this time let's look at the daytime sky, the vastness of that, the huge expansiveness of the sky is awareness in this analogy, and clouds that come are thoughts. So when the clouds come, why can I never do anything right? Why are other people more successful than me? Or I'm no good at this, when these thoughts come, instead of being drawn into those clouds, and then the clouds get bigger and bigger, you remain the sky and allow the clouds to pass and then to pass away. And that means you begin to no longer— you're no longer feeding conditioned thinking, and you are separating who you are you're taking your identity out of thinking. Thinking for a while has still a momentum, old patterns will come again and again, but you're no longer renewing them, you're no longer feeding them by, how do you feed them? By identifying with every thought that comes, there's a self in it. So you separate, you are the awareness behind the thought. Same applies to any kind of negative thinking. You recognize it as automatic. It arises and it's a thought. So, but you are the awareness that knows that this is a negative thought pattern. And if that can grow, because it's already there to some extent, if that grows, which means deepens, then those conditioned patterns will diminish, they get transmuted. So another one point here mentioned, I get defensive easily. Defensive can happen, happens very, very quickly in human interactions. The defensiveness can come up so quickly, it's an automatic pattern. and you may only know it afterwards, oh, that was defensiveness again. And defensiveness is, of course, these are all ego, ways of the ego to protect itself, ego being the mind-made self. Defensiveness will just come up with any lie just to keep its ego identity intact, so it'll come up with anything. Just to keep— it's automatic. So you could— A Course in Miracles has a lovely saying, which is, whenever you become defensive about anything, know that you have identified with an illusion. You have identified yourself with an illusion. That's interesting. Is that true? Let's say You say that the distance from here to the moon is 300— I think in kilometers it's like 350,000 or so kilometers, and that the light takes just over 1 second to travel from the moon to the Earth, and you know that for a fact. Well, I know that. I haven't verified it myself, but it seems to be true. And somebody else says, "No, that's completely untrue. It actually takes 1 minute." "It does?" Now, this is just a difference of opinion or viewpoint, and of course, you know very well that the other person is wrong. Now, if you say, "No, that's not right," is that defensiveness? Well, it depends how you say it. The question is, are you identified with your mind which has this position, which happens to be true, but are you identified with that mental position? In other words, do you derive your sense of self from thought? If you're identified with it, you will get angry and defensive about the other person who is so completely wrong, and you might say things like, Well, if you know that person well, you always doubt me. Why do you always doubt me? You never believe what I say, do you? That's called defensiveness, and that's the ego trying to protect itself. And then the Course in Miracles thing applies. Know that when you become defensive about anything, know that you've identified yourself with an illusion. The illusion is not that it takes 1 second for the light from the moon to travel to the earth. That's not what the illusion is. The illusion is that you identified with a thought, with a mind pattern, and so you are strengthening an illusory identity by identifying, by strengthening the mental position of me, my mental position that's unconscious. So this is how just a difference of opinion can degenerate into huge conflict, just a small difference of opinion, because the ego becomes defensive. So that requires alertness on your part so that you know when it arises. Oh, so whenever you become defensive— so without ego, the same conversation would go, no, it takes 1 minute, I know that for a fact. The other person says it takes 1 second, the other person thinks it takes a minute. Well, no, you're wrong, it takes 1 second. Okay, well, we'll leave it at that then. I think it's a second and you think it's a minute. End of the story. That would be without defensiveness or ego, okay? And then you can go on where everybody goes, on the internet, and that would definitely solve it. And in extreme forms of egoic unconsciousness, you will say, what it says in Wikipedia is wrong. It's wrong. They didn't get it right. That may bring me to another question. Oh, just to end on this question, the key is your awareness so that that deepens, then all those patterns that you mentioned will weaken. And there's already a considerable amount of awareness in this person, the questioner. The awareness, of course, isn't the person, but it's deeper than the person. The thing is to apply the awareness to the present moment when things arise, not in some abstract way. I am a defensive person. Will I ever become a person who is not negative? I can't get rid of my negative patterns. I'm so negative. So it doesn't matter. This moment is what matters. So just apply your awareness to this moment. You can't change things into mental constructs. How can I change myself? I don't want to be that kind of a person anymore. Look at it. This moment. This is where you apply presence, as I sometimes call it. I haven't used that expression in a while. The sword of presence that cuts through time, and you go, pssht, and then you apply it to this.

You need to realize most humans have this inbuilt dysfunction. They cannot acknowledge the present moment. Unconsciously, they regard the next moment, whether it's a minute from now or an hour from now or 2 years from now, always regarded as more important. Whenever you are impatient, trying to get somewhere, waiting for something impatiently. What's the next thing I have to do? And I have to do that. And you're pulled in all kinds of directions. What's now? Oh, now I have to do that and that and that. And there's always the pull to the what's the next thing. That is, I call that sometimes you lose yourself in doing. Doing is necessary, obviously, you need to do, but to lose yourself in continuous doing is a serious dysfunction, but it's so normal that nobody realizes it. So what if you lose yourself in the doing? There's always another, and this is how stress arises. What stress is, the gap In the gap between now and later, the projected then, now and then, in that gap arises the stress arises. So the mental projection towards future creates the stresses between where I'm here, but I want to be there. And for many humans, that is their predominant state. They are always— they are here, but they don't— they really want to be there, either there in space or time. It's amazing. And even you awakening beings may still sometimes or often find yourself in that state where you suddenly realize that the whole day you've been stressed about this, that, and that, and that. The world makes so many demands upon you. You need to deal with this and this and this, amplified by the gadgets that we now use, which is an amplification of the dysfunction through this. And you lose yourself in the doing. You become completely uncentered. And basically lost. There are many— it happens even to children already at an early age these days. And many children are suffering from attention deficit disorder and so on, which means their mind is being pulled always away from the present moment. So lost in doing. Lost in doing really comes back to lost in thinking. Thinking underlies doing. So you are lost in your thoughts about the world, and then you engage in all kinds of activities propelled by thought that, "Now I need to do this, now I need to do that." So the basic condition still for most humans on the planet, so fundamentally, yes, they are lost in doing, they lose themselves in doing, but basically it means they are lost in their mind, in the movement of thought. What now you identify then, they identify with every thought that arises, and many thoughts are about future or the past, not that many thoughts are about the present moment. And if they are about the present moment, then it is an interpretation of the present moment that is completely determined and colored by your past conditioning. So very interesting to observe in oneself this tendency to deny, devalue, disregard, reduce the present moment to a means to an end. It's always a means to an end, but it's never recognized for what it is in itself. And often it is not, it is more than a means means to an end. For many humans, this is a very dysfunctional way of being. For many humans, the present moment is actually regarded unconsciously as an obstacle that they need to get beyond. There's a continuous underlying unease. And what's the next thing that's going to go wrong? I know it's going to happen. Lost, lost in the mind, lost in thought. There was an Indian teacher who described the essential human condition as lost in thought. And of course, that's how it is. This is then, this movement of thought gives you your sense of identity, the unease, the uneasy narrative, the problematic narrative of me and my life. I have to think about this when I wake up in the middle of the night, and I carry this heavy burden of my problematic life. For many humans, their identity is unconsciously regarded as a problem to be solved. I am a problem that I'm looking for a solution to this problem that I am. And of course, then you go to a therapist. Now, if the therapist is good, he might be able to take you beyond that. Depends. If he or she is not good, then you get more deeply entrenched, and 15 years later, you are still undergoing psychoanalysis and find ever deeper layers of complexity in your past, and there's no end to it. The present moment is devalued, not recognized, regarded either as a means to an end or an obstacle. That is, for many humans, that is their predominant state of mental-emotional state. And as I said, their identity is derived from that. So the error lies in identification with thought. Now the question arises, who or what is it that identifies with thought? If I am not the story that I tell myself about who I am, if I am not ultimately that, then who or what am I? And what is it in me that identifies with the story? What is it that creates this sense of identity that exists mostly in a state of unease, or very often, discontent because it cannot acknowledge the present moment. That is the ego, by the way. That's what we call it, the, the egoic sense of self. There's a very simple spiritual practice to get you to the realization of who or what it is that identifies. I suggest at this moment that— Observe yourself internally right now to see if there's any lingering emotion in you, perhaps from earlier today or an hour ago or yesterday or the past 2 years or the past 10 years? Is there any— can you feel, for example, is there an irritation somewhere? Is there some kind of anxiety? Is there a kind of heaviness, a certain heavy mood, a despondent mood perhaps? Is it lingering there? "Is there anger?" Anger, big thing. Some residue of anger from what happened earlier, is that in you? And then normally, humans would say, "I am angry," or they would say, "I am anxious, I'm fearful, I am in a bad mood." Now, there's already a delusion when the moment you say, "I am angry," or, "I am anxious," that indicates already that you have identified with the emotion of anger or the emotion of sadness or the emotion of fear. You have identified, you equate "I" with what arises in your field of consciousness. So you say, "I'm angry." It would be more correct to say, "There is anger in me right now." Now, it may sound a trivial difference between saying, "I am angry," and, "There's anger in me," but there's a significant difference which goes beyond mere syntax, how you put words together, because when you say, "I am," you equate "I" with whatever condition is there in you. This applies to emotion and it also applies to thought. Because anger is often, it's not just the anger as emotion, the anger also exists as angry thoughts, and then they they reinforce each other as a vicious circle. When you are trapped in irritation or anger, the emotion feeds the thought and the thought feeds more energy to the emotion. It's a vicious circle, and you don't want to get out of it. You might notice when you observe an angry person or despondent person or an anxious person, they don't really want to be free of the anger. They don't want their— if you suggested to an angry person, you can be free, you will not get a pleasant answer. And you've seen angry people who, they are in the grip of anger or irritation, they cannot help it, then they shout at you and then they leave the room and a minute later After the door opens, they come back because they thought of something else to insult you with. They are in the grip of it. There is complete identification with thought and emotion. They are lost in thought. They are lost in emotion. But who or what is it that is lost? The thoughts and the emotions, who or what am I? Okay. I just asked you to just have a look inside yourself and see what it is, if there's anything there that's jarring and doesn't feel good, but it's there. And I'm not saying try to get rid of it, no. Acknowledge the present moment. The present moment is what is, externally or internally. That's what is. But there's a huge difference now. You've already, by recognizing that there is, let's say, irritation, anger, or anxiety in you, an additional element or dimension has come in. And that dimension we could call awareness, or we could call it presence. And the moment awareness comes in, you are no longer completely identified with it. One could say, I sometimes describe it as, let's say, there's the anger, and as your awareness of the anger comes in, there's a little bit of space around it. That's the awareness. The awareness knows that there's anger. The anger may still be there. It may not immediately disappear, but the awareness knows it's there, or whatever else it may be. The arising of awareness is spiritual awakening. The disidentification that happens When awareness arises, that is the spiritual awakening or the arising of the transcendent dimension of consciousness. Transcendent because it transcends who or what you are as a person. Adversity can either— it can strengthen the ego or it can gradually, or in some cases suddenly dissolve the ego, or at least diminish it. It can go either way. And I must agree with you, I don't know whether you literally said it, in perhaps still in the majority of cases it strengthens the ego because nobody knows, people don't know the opportunity that every adversity represents. So why does it happen? How does it strengthen the ego? You can see it sometimes with people who are sick or people who are disabled. Let's say I've met disabled people, people with physical disabilities, for example. And in some cases, they are very, really angry with the world and bitter because look at what happened to me, they say. Why do I can't move anymore? I've been afflicted with this. What have I done? To deserve this? And these are all questions that are justifiable questions. The question, what have I done to deserve? Why has the world, or whatever they say— God, the world, the universe, or whoever— done this to me? Well, and then they become bitter and angry, and the ego becomes more and more rigid and hardened. And, and that is one way it could go. And then I have met people with disabilities who, through their disability, at some point, whether through a spiritual teaching— and in some cases never come into contact with any spiritual teaching— it just happened that at some moment they realized intuitively that all the suffering was generated through resistance. And then the resistance to the is-ness of their life, this moment, they were able to let go because perhaps the suffering was getting too much. Something happened something clicked inside. Or even if it didn't happen completely, they were able to have moments of inner peace. An inner peace that is not caused by an external condition. An inner peace that seems to be in contradiction to an external condition. So that they would say, how could a person who is suffering this feels so peaceful. And so, um, also that applies to people who are approaching the end of their lifespan because they have some illness and they have been to the doctor and the doctor says you have 6 months or 1 year. And suddenly something in them opens up and all that remains is that the person already dies. There's no more future and all that remains is the present moment and the, the aware space. So I've had the privilege of working with, when I was still seeing individuals, with 2 or 3 people to whom that happened and they became luminous beings in the last few weeks or months of their lives and became just— there was no— there wasn't— I couldn't see that there was any person left. There was only a space of conscious presence left. Just wonderful, as if they had just come into this world. So they came, and then they came to me, and then still asking questions, very profound questions, wanting to understand what happened. And it's beautiful. So this can happen. It can happen collectively to people who have— who go through warfare and in countries or become refugees. They lose everything, and again, it can go either way. Whenever there's any great loss in your life, that again, an opportunity opens up. If you resist And you resist— the resistance origin, the origin of the resistance is a narrative that forms in your mind that says something about the situation and about your life and about other people. So the narrative forms in your mind and the narrative is an unhappy one. And then there's continuous Resistance and non-alignment with the is-ness of the present moment. Now, one could ask, well, how could somebody who has lost their home, perhaps even lost loved ones, and then they don't know where to go, how could this person be in a state of alignment with the present moment? Isn't that— how can somebody accept the unacceptable? Accept that which in conventional terms would be regarded as unacceptable. How is that possible? But that's precisely it. If you can accept the unacceptable, that is the sudden, the opening, and then you realize the unacceptable is actually not unacceptable, it is acceptable. And the— I was homeless for a certain period in my life with not knowing where to live on the the next day or the next week. And I had already gone into a state of acceptance, so it was a very pleasant experience, but potentially would have been extremely unpleasant. So not having a home was for me already something that was not experienced as something bad, but I knew I had to take some action eventually to get a home. And so gradually something happens. I don't want to talk too much about that. I also mentioned in the new Us, I believe, when I was at university, there was Stephen Hawking, the physicist who was confined to a wheelchair, passed away a couple of years ago, and there it was. He would always, he wasn't famous at that time, only famous locally in the university. We would always be in the same dining room having lunch, but not the same table. I never met him, wasn't introduced, but observed him many times sitting at a neighboring table. And then I, one moment when I held open the door for him, he was coming through in his wheelchair, and I looked into his eyes and I could see there was no unhappiness. I had a very extremely painful relationship with myself. I couldn't live with myself anymore, and so I somehow said, that's it, I can't live with it anymore, that's it. But that was so total that I no longer sustained, fueled the self through thought. I didn't know anything about it, it just happened. So the mind-made image dissolved, the self that I couldn't live with, that was so heavy, dissolved. And what was left was simply I. So the I shifted from— whereas before when I said I, I was referring to myself, the unhappy, dense I, the story-based I— that dissolved, and then the true I emerged, had always been there. Presence. I am nothing in particular anymore, a simple sense of presence or beingness. And for the first time, I could walk and be without having a relationship with myself. And that— there is something So precious in that I or presence, so it's beyond words. You could say it's like a diamond. It's something extremely very, very precious. That's why perhaps Buddhism sometimes has the image of a diamond. But this is not comparative. It's not a sense of that deepest self, not the mind-made self, is so precious that it has— it knows itself to be that in a non-dualistic way without needing to compare itself to others. It has nothing to do with the form or any mind form. So as presence arises, you don't need self-esteem anymore. You don't depend on that anymore because what dissolves is the mind-made entity with which you have a relationship. And it's so— self-esteem is an intermediate thing that for a little while makes your life more pleasant. It's fine. And then after a while, you see the unsatisfactory nature even of that, because you cannot uphold continuous self-esteem. It's hard work. All these affirmations, and then things come into your life that tell you the opposite, inevitably, sooner or later. So then suddenly you don't love yourself anymore, nor do you hate yourself, because there's no self to love. There's simply the state of this, which is love. It emanates. Your relationship to the present moment determines how the future evolves, what we call future, which by the way, never arrives, because when it arrives, it's again the present moment. Yes. So the realization that all you ever have, all that you can ever experience is intrinsically linked with the present moment. It's inseparable from the present moment. Your entire life unfolds in and as the present moment. That's all there ever is. The past, when the past happened, it was the present moment. It couldn't happen anywhere else. And when you remember the past, you remember it in the present moment. The future, when the future comes, when tomorrow comes, it won't be tomorrow anymore. It'll be the now. There was a British pub in London that had, I lived in London for many years, They had a sign on the bar that says, "Free beer tomorrow." And of course, tomorrow never comes. So the sign is always true. That's funny. So you go the next day, they say, "No, tomorrow." He that knoweth how to walk interiorly and to make but little account of things exteriorly doth not look for places nor wait for seasons to perform exercises of devotion. The man of interior life soon recollecteth himself because he never wholly pourest forth himself upon exterior things. Exterior labor is no prejudice to him nor any employment necessary for the time. But as things happen, so he accommodateth himself to them. Let's look at those two sentences, very important. The man, the past, the human being, of interior life soon recollecteth himself because he never wholly pourest himself forth upon exterior things. Lovely way of putting it. The interior man, again, we had that before, it means, it points to the who you are at the level of awareness, the unconditioned being, the timeless in you, the essence of who you are, the interior being. Soon recollecteth himself, never really, you never, the interior man never completely loses himself in the external, he or she soon recollects himself because he never wholly— I'll just put it into slightly more modern English— he never wholly pours himself upon exterior things. To pour yourself into exterior things, to completely lose yourself in exterior things. You observe it all the time. When you just, before you see it in yourself, look at other humans around you, how they lose themselves, or the slightest challenge comes in the form of an unexpected setback, something going wrong here or there, some difficult situation, a person not doing what I expect them to do, whatever it is, how quickly people pour themselves into exterior things, and so this thing suddenly becomes of absolute importance. That's what it means pouring yourself out into things, which ultimately, of course, you pour yourself into your thoughts. Every thought that arises takes complete possession of you. You pour all your attention into that. So you're continuously lost, a continuous loss. Amazing. You can see it in other Others, let's just wait, people around you, how, what they do when challenges come. Okay, you've done that. Now you've recognized in others, the next step is, oh, can you recognize in yourself? Do you do that also? Wait for the next challenge. Do you completely, does it completely draw you out of yourself? And when it does, don't beat yourself up, but even just noticing that that's what's happening is a huge gain in consciousness. So you don't beat yourself up and say, "Oh, I can't do it." No, just notice it. Any pattern you notice in yourself means there is some consciousness, there's awareness there. It's when you don't notice it you know it, that you're completely trapped in it. And if you don't know it, there's not much you can do except after the challenge has passed, perhaps you can look back and say, "Oh, I completely lost it there again." And when— so awareness comes after the challenge, which is still better than no awareness. Awareness at all. And because if there's no awareness at all, even the most unconscious reaction you will justify afterwards to yourself and to others. The ego is good at finding excuses and justifications. The most absurd justifications will do. It's an automatic defense mechanism of the ego. Many people don't— are uncomfortable with themselves. They dislike who they are, perhaps they dislike their body, how they look, perhaps they dislike who they are as a person, don't feel they are good enough, or are self-critical a lot. Many people live with a negative self-image, which of course all consists of certain types of mind activity, and that's not pleasant. And it may be for some of those people, once they realize that they live with a mind pattern that continually criticizes them and says negative things about them, they begin to realize that it's a mind pattern, this self-hatred is a mind pattern, and that it's harmful, it's not pleasant, and they can go beyond it and begin to replace it with more negative thoughts about— more positive thoughts about themselves. And having positive thoughts about yourself that kind of thing would perhaps usually be called beginning to love yourself, to feel good about yourself, but it's not easy, that shift from feeling bad about yourself to feeling good about yourself. Sometimes it requires a lot of convincing. I would regard loving yourself as perhaps an intermediate stage in one's awakening, but the essence of the awakened consciousness is that you go beyond having a particular idea in your mind that represents yourself as a mental self-image that you relate to. Because basically it's ego, a mental self-image of who you think, "This is what I am, this is who I am." If you want to learn about not having a mental self-image, watch your dog or your cat. They don't have an opinion about who they are. They just are who they are. So that removes an enormous amount of problems from their lives. Of course, they don't have the mind activity that creates a self-image in their head. They are pre-mind, and therefore their life is far less problematic than human life. You can see how wonderful it is not to have a self-image. You can even— you can look at an ugly dog or an ugly cat. They don't have a problem with that. Even an overweight dog or cat, they're okay. No self-image. It's easy to lose the present moment when you want to achieve something, even just you have to go to the supermarket, you need to— it's all your— are you able to be, when you take action, to be not to devalue the present moment, not to always make it into a means to an end, but are you able to just honor the present moment, every step you're taking now while you are walking to the supermarket or whatever it is, or, well, these days people don't go anywhere, but you get from one room to another, you have to go to the bathroom, even that can be a practice. You take one step at a time so that the moment of arriving at the destination where you want to get to is not more important than this moment. This moment is actually more important than the arriving. This applies on a small scale as well as on a large scale. This moment is of primary importance because it's all there ever is. So it's more important than arriving at the— yet you're achieving your goal or arriving at your destination. That is a spiritual practice also. When you're present in what you do, instead of losing yourself in the doing, then the stillness is still there in the background. When you're listening to someone while you're having a conversation, if you can be so relaxed that you can just listen when the other person is speaking, then you're not losing yourself in your mind and the stillness is still there in the background.

If you then start manifesting from that deeper level within yourself, you'll be amazed how empowered you can be in your manifestation. Sometimes there is a time gap, so sometimes manifestation happens very quickly. Sometimes you need to, as you are inspired, a, so to speak, a blueprint of what is possible, of what you, or not so much you, of what consciousness wants you to create may arise in your mind. And this mental blueprint of what you want to create, this may be there for a while. It might attract others with similar mental blueprint. And then at some point, the manifestation begins. And some action may be necessary, but again, the action that you take will be inspired by the consciousness and it will not be stressful. This is a new way of creating. If stress comes in, you're falling back into the old consciousness. This is a joyful way of creating. New forms and new structures in this world. How to deal with, with an exchange, perhaps without being— in a business dealing, without being taken advantage of or exploited?

Yes.

Whether it's business or something else, the question is always whether what I sometimes call the transcendent dimension is still operating in your life while in the background of your life, while in the foreground you talk about business dealings with another person or whatever it may be. If the transcendent dimension is not If it's not there, then it becomes very problematic and all kinds of psychological self-seeking and so on comes in and interferes with what could be a much more efficient way of even doing business. It's through self-seeking seeking something, seeking some advantage over the other, that a lot of dysfunction comes into business. So, there are always two levels. It's probably easier to give an actual example. Let's say you want to sell something to somebody. Whatever it may be, whether big or small, maybe you're selling a— I work in the hospital business, so hospital services, for example. Yes, yes. So you're always relating, there will be another human being there. You were talking You're talking about whatever it is on a practical level that needs to be discussed. You explain what you have to offer and the other person listens or asks questions, you explain more. The question is then, can you sense Where's the word empathy, meaning feeling your way into the other human being, to feel or to sense the consciousness that is that which animates the other human being, the consciousness behind the words, not what the person says, but the consciousness that enables those words to be articulated. In other words, the essence of that other person. Can you feel the essence of that person? But you can only feel that if you can feel it in yourself. So while you explain the practical side of it, you're also— there is an awareness behind, at the back of you, of this other human being, and you sense the shared consciousness of you and the other.

Do not be attached to the fruit of your action, which of course simply means Don't look to the goal of what you want to achieve through whatever you are doing now. Give your complete attention to the doing rather than where you want to get to through the doing. And that's again a very important lesson nowadays because most Most humans don't know that yet. They are always one moment ahead. They want to get there. You may find in your own life still a lot of the time you are not present moment centered. You are focused on the next moment that you need to get to. So whatever you are doing at this moment is designed to get you to the next moment, and internally you project yourself away from what you're doing now because the doing becomes a means to an end. This is very normal. Everybody lives like that. Whatever they do is a means to an end, and meant in their mind, the end is more important than what they're doing. That is so habitual and unconscious that most humans don't even don't even know that that is how they live, that they always live for the next moment, but they're never completely in this moment. They also don't know that by living in that way, they create frustration and suffering and stress and discontent. Basically, they're condemning themselves to continuous discontent and to stress, because if you ignore the present moment continuously, and ignore means you make it into a means to an end because the next one is so important that you need to get to, then you miss life completely. You miss the depths that potentially is there in life, and life becomes shallow because it's all mental because the next moment is always a mind formation. The next moment is a mental projection. The next moment is never a reality because it doesn't exist. When the next moment comes, okay, 1 minute from now, I've got 1 minute to finish this, and then after 1 minute, it's not 1 minute, it's always now again. And then there's the next thing to do. Of course, immediately you look to the next thing because you have become used to being uncomfortable with the present moment, conditioned since childhood to feel ill at ease in the present moment. Oh, I should be doing something, and doing implies some future projection. You can never be, you're always doing. As you get little tastes of that state of consciousness that we call presence, for example, Now you feel yourself, you feel your presence right now beyond any, uh, you're beyond any thought that's connected with your life situation or whatever it may be. Whether what age you are becomes irrelevant, what gender you are becomes irrelevant. What you have achieved or suffered in this world. It transcends all that. It is more powerful than any of that. It liberates you from all that. It's not that the person disappears completely. Of course, the person, the personal self, is still there. It continues to operate in this world, but there's a continuous knowing that there is more to you than that. And that is vital. So you continue to operate as a person in this world, but no longer deriving your identity from the personal sense of self. You can operate as a person, you need to in this world, in this world of time, past and future. You can operate in this world without losing yourself in this world and without losing yourself in identity. That ultimately is a very shallow and fleeting thing that you call me, the person. So that thing continues to operate for a while, but your challenge is, while you operate in this world as a person, not to lose connectedness with that deeper dimension. And that is bringing presence into every situation that you deal with, every interaction in this world. And that is a skill. That skill develops and is acquired. Presence itself is timeless. But it is a skill for you to— it requires some practice at a high degree of alertness to bring presence into everyday life. Whatever you do here, whatever function you have in this world, function. And for example, not to confuse your function with your identity. It's a function. I am a teacher of presence. You are a teacher of presence, or you are becoming a teacher of presence by living in that way, by bringing that consciousness into every situation so that you don't lose yourself in the doing of whatever it is you're doing in the situation. And you don't lose yourself in a sense of identity that's to do with your function and to reduce other people to their function in this world.

In presence, all this, what I sometimes call unnecessary baggage, that people manufacture mentally and emotionally, all that unnecessary baggage that really is a heaviness to it that they carry around, doesn't arise anymore. And there's the simple, this is what is. I can either do this or I can do that. I can deal with it now. I can put it aside. No story. But this is frustrating to the ego because when there's no longer any story where you oppose the other, where you make yourself feel superior to the other, then there's no food for the ego anymore. But there's an incredible lightness and the lightness of being comes, then the heaviness goes out of situations. That really, that's what the ego is, a heavy me. And even when it attempts to make itself superior, what it doesn't recognize is that all these are really forms of suffering. The ego doesn't even recognize suffering as suffering. It doesn't realize that when you get angry or irritated about somebody else's behavior and bring up a big story about it, you are actually in a state of suffering. If you were able to have attention in your body, you would notice that your body is suffering, because those things affect the smooth, harmonious working of the energy field that goes through the body. So an angry thought has an effect on the body. Small irritation already has an effect, and the body doesn't really like it, but the ego The egoic self is not in touch with the body, so it mistakes suffering for something good. Anger can really get into this. So you can look at your own life and see where you are manufacturing unnecessary stories, both in small situations and in bigger life situations, and in situations to do with relatives, family members, partners, ex-partners, a wonderful source of egoic stories. You can talk about your ex-husband or wife for hours, either to somebody else if they are ready to listen, or in your own mind. Or you had a confrontation or an exchange with somebody yesterday, and you can go on, continue that in your mind and say so many hurtful things to the other person that unfortunately you couldn't think of in the situation, but you can relive it now and it's almost as good as the real thing. So in that fantasy world of the mind, you can be right again and again. And the other person can be wrong again and again. How wonderful! These things are not— all this is what we call unconscious. So people don't know what they are doing. That's for them, that is their reality. Being is the one thing of course it's not a thing, we're just using words, is the one thing that you can be absolutely sure about, the only thing that is beyond doubt in your life, the only thing whose reality is beyond doubt. Everything else could be a dream or an illusion. Whatever you perceive could be a dream, an illusion. You don't know that it's not a dream or an illusion, because when this meditation comes to an end, then it evaporates into the so-called past. And everything that happens quickly dissolves, dissolves, dissolves. The same way that a dream comes to an end when you wake up, except that this dream seems to go on and on, replaced by another and another. If it is a dream, but something— what is it then that cannot be doubted? That there is a consciousness in which, if it is a dream, whether it's a reality or dream doesn't matter, in which it arises. In which it is known, the light in which it appears. So your presence cannot be doubted. Whatever happens in that presence can be doubted, but for it to happen, there must be a presence. And of course, I say to your presence, it's not your presence, it's the one universal presence, consciousness. I particularly welcome those of you who are getting tired of their personality. That cumbersome thing, that weight you carry around and create the same old stuff again and again. It's a good point to reach, to become tired of yourself. That is sometimes misperceived, and then you think you're tired of the world, you're tired of living, you're tired of— that's a misperception. What you're really tired of is the self. And the world that it creates, or seems to create, out there, with the same old conflict, the same old problems, or different problems but basically the same, if you're deep down. The same old thoughts in your head again and again, the same complaints. Oh dear. So the spiritual path, there are many practices you can use in order to access the dimension of presence, which is the spiritual dimension. But the most direct practice that immediately accesses that dimension We could call that surrender. What is that? It is to offer no resistance or opposition to whatever arises in the present moment. Whatever happens, whatever arises, whatever people say or do, to become one with the is-ness of the present moment. The present moment always already is the way it is. There's no doubt about that. Whatever form this moment takes, it is as it is. And if internally then you give up opposing, which is the normal state associated with dense personalities, instead of opposing internally what is, getting upset, getting angry, arguing with what is, either just in your head or out loud, telling people what they should have done or should be doing but are not doing, what it should be like but it isn't like, what I should be doing, what I'm not doing, I should be— whatever form the opposition takes. And I mentioned a few minutes ago, those of you who are getting tired of the old personality, and of course this is part of the old personality, the way in which it interacts with people and events and places. It's not usually pleasant. There's always some resistance, always something not good enough, always something missing here and now. Wherever you go, the structure stays with you, goes with you. So you recognize that that's an important part of the false self that lives through opposition to what is. It strengthens itself through that sense of separation, separating itself from what's going on. Condemning it, judging it, and people. And then you realize, what happens if I just accept that whatever arises in the present moment, say, 'Oh, that's what is.' You can still take action, but But foundation is acceptance, surrender, and then immediately the false self can't really operate anymore, and something else comes in which is essence, which is awareness, which is consciousness itself. So the most fundamental spiritual practice is surrender, so that internally you're one with what is, and immediately you are a spiritual master. Because that's all a master— a master does not necessarily have more knowledge than you. You may have much more knowledge than a spiritual master, but the master lives in alignment with the is-ness of the present moment. That's all. And that's where the power arises, because when you're aligned with the is-ness that inner spaciousness opens up, essence is there, and that is the power that then moves through you and can become a thought. It can express itself in form through a thought, an action, a movement, some— something you do or make. In many ways, or just as an emanation. That is true power.

When you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, know that you have identified yourself with an illusion. It is not danger that comes when defenses are laid down. It is safety, it is peace, it is joy, and it is God. So, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, know that you have identified yourself with an illusion. When you become defensive about something, then it will be something that is conceptual, you as a concept or some concept you hold that you need to defend because you have identified with it, so you are defending your sense of self, a fictitious sense of self. That means you're defending an illusion. When you don't defend, because the truth of who you are does not need to be defended, so to let go of defenses can be a way of accessing the deeper dimension of who you are. And of course, takes you beyond ego, because the defensiveness is ego. Ego is conceptual identity. In my defenselessness, my safety lies. You are safe already, so you don't need to defend anything. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. Herein, meaning knowing this, lies the peace of God. I'll just let it be at that. I'm not going to interpret those lines. I believe it's a They're most powerful if you just let them sink in.

Whenever there is a situation, let's say it's work or like an emotional relationship, one side of my mind is like, "This is not gonna work out," blah blah, and the other side is, "Yes, it's gonna work out." No, yes, no, and all day long, seriously, I'm doing something and in my mind they're gonna 'No, they're not gonna lay her off.' 'No, they're gonna lay her off.' 'No, no.' It seriously comes to a point of losing my mind. Sometimes, but sometimes I know it so strongly, so I can calm myself down. So I just wanted to ask you, how can I know what's the right answer? What's the voice of intuition? Like, how do I know the voice of intuition instead of this fighting? Okay, okay. Well, I believe many people recognize your question. It's a pattern in the human mind, and perhaps in you it's stronger than in some, who knows. But it's in many people's minds. So it's, of course, the answer is in— and this is your challenge— is not trying to figure out which of these voices is the right one. That's not it. It's to discover within yourself that space that is not the voice, that space of awareness. So that can only— you can only practice that while it happens. There's that voice, and then there's the other voice. And who is Who is aware of these voices? You don't need to answer that question. I'm just putting it out. Don't answer it because there's no answer. There's only a direct realization of it within yourself. There's no external answer because if you give an answer, that's another voice. So this is a question that you should not answer in words. So I'm asking again, who is it in you, who or what, there is something in you that is aware of these different conflicting voices. There is an awareness, otherwise you wouldn't know that there is a voice. Now the voice is a— these are thought formations, these are energy fields. Every thought is an energy field, and each Each thought formation wants to draw your attention, suck it up into itself, come here, and the other one says, no, come here. These are like little— this may sound a little spooky, but it's not spooky. What you can regard as thought almost as an entity, entity, not a physical entity, but as an energetic entity, and that lives there. It has a lifespan, and some thoughts persist for a long time, and certain thought patterns are also entities that can shift, take on one form and then another form and another form. So you have every thought is a little entity or energy field. It wants to— it wants your identification with it. It wants to draw all your attention in, because the more attention gets drawn in, the more it grows. It wants to grow. It wants to— like everything, it wants to— it doesn't want to disappear. So it's for you to know when this happens. Who am I? You are— are you this voice or that voice? No, you are aware of the voice or these voices, and that is the place where you go so that from that place of aware presence, the voices are no longer disturbing you. You recognize recognize them as only a voice. This is not important whether you go this way or that way, or whether something is going to work out or something is not going to work out. You don't know that. Your responsibility is to be present, which means to disidentify from the voices.

Can we trust our feelings? Now, often you hear people say, trust your feelings. I would suggest, however, that that's not necessarily true. Acknowledge your feelings, yes. Be there as the observing presence for your feelings, yes. Be aware of your feelings, accept that they are there, trust, which means to take them to be the truth or the truth for you, or using them as a guide to correct or skillful action that may be doubtful because it depends where these feelings arise. In you. A little anecdote from my life to illustrate that. When I lived in England in the country in that alternative town Glastonbury for 3 years, I lived in a cottage and Once a month, I would travel to London or other cities in my beloved Russian-made Lada car to do a workshop, and usually a weekend workshop called things like Transcending Time or Be Here Now, nothing much has changed except that the average number of people I had was about 10. And since my income was not enough, I had to rent out a room upstairs in my cottage. So I had to Over these 3 years, a few people— there was a second room, but I also occasionally went out. Anyway, the room became vacant. I advertised in the local paper. Several people came to apply and finally chose a young woman who had just been offered a job in that town. She moved in, and after the first night in her room, she came down for breakfast into the kitchen, which was a shared kitchen, and she said, "I can't stay here." I said, "What's wrong?" "It's just a feeling. I always listen to my feelings. I just can't stay. There's something not right." So she was very nervous. I said, "Okay, that's fine." And she found that very disconcerting because she had expected a more conventional response, which would have been, "What? I've interviewed all these people, I've chosen you, and now what? You're doing this to me? You're not getting your rent money back that you paid in advance." But I said, "Okay, I'll give you your money back." 'Fine.' So she was even more confused after that. And he said, 'I'll spend one more night or two more nights.' She spent the second night, and then in the morning she said, 'No, I think I'll stay. I have a different feeling now.' And I said, "Oh, that's fine. That's good." And again, she was a little disconcerted because the conventional response would have been, which I did do, "I just put another ad in the paper and now you're telling me this?" This is how to make the conventional response. The conventional responses are how to make life complicated for yourself and others. But it's normal. It's how the ego responds. And so whenever somebody does not respond in that way, life becomes simple. But when life becomes simple, people who expect the conventional responses become confused. Weird person." And so she decided to stay, and a few weeks later, when I got to know her better, she explained to me that that first night she was in her bedroom, and she said, "I found you so weird that I thought you might creep sweep in in the middle of the night and murder me. And later she said, living in the same living in a float tank. I think she learned a lot, not so much through me explaining things to her, just by being there. Not that she didn't go through through her episodes of neurotic reactivity, which is quite normal for most people, but that's fine. So feelings, now where did her initial feelings that she experienced, that she then believed that they were a correct guide for action. Of course they were not, because they originated in fear, and they also originated in a misinterpretation of reality, which is so easy to do for the mind, to misinterpret another person, to misinterpret a situation. You misinterpret because you see it through the conditioning of your mind. You see it through your beliefs, your prior experiences in childhood. You see it through even other things that have conditioned your mind, maybe even scary movies about weird people who don't say much. And then just when you're having a shower, they creep in. So it is not— therefore, it's not that easy often to say, where does this feeling that I have arise? Where does this feeling originate. So there's no need to demand that external conditions should be perfect so that you can become still. In fact, it's sometimes the case that it's precisely when external conditions are seemingly unhelpful that can sometimes be a great opportunity to find that true stillness. And especially that is the case when external circumstances have the appearance of actually being a hindrance, something disturbing, something happening that upsets the status quo in your life. And those are great opportunities because then your motivation for going deeper as you suffer when things happen in your external life that quote-unquote should not be happening Then you begin to suffer, and as you suffer, the motivation eventually arises of going deeper, of finding the place where there is no suffering. And you could still suffer a little bit on the external level of your life, So sooner or later we find in our life that life does things to us, seemingly putting obstacles in our path, seemingly having bad intentions towards us. We experience diminishment in some form. Of course, the ego says, or the egoic self says, that's terrible, I don't want any diminishment. Diminishment meaning loss of something that had become part of your sense of self. It could be loss of possessions, could be loss of a relationship, loss of a loved one, loss of a healthy body, diminishment of physical health. Loss of your persona, of what other people think of you. One day they tell you that you're the greatest, and the next day they tell you you're awful. Diminishment of whatever kind is abhorrent to the egoic self. There's a beautiful saying. I believe it comes originally— I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter where it comes. It comes out of consciousness, so it doesn't really matter. But I believe it comes originally out of Sufism, and that is When the ego weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found. And those people who— there's no human, by the way, who does not experience this. In life several times. Sooner or later, the next one comes. Some people experience it even very early in life. Some children experience loss of a parent, of both parents. So diminishment comes sooner or later. How do you meet it? Recognize it when it comes, not as a monster or the work of some malevolent deity or demon that wants to sabotage your life. But as an opportunity also. Now, you may not be able to be grateful for it in the moment of it happening. That would be perhaps, perhaps too much to ask. But you will find that later, A year may pass, 2 years depending on what it is, suddenly realize that it has taken you deeper into the essence of who you are because something was removed from you that you thought you were, but it was a fiction ultimately. You had identified with something that ultimately is not who you are. It's a temporary thing. Possessions, not status, great physically strong body, good looks, relationship. And then retrospectively, Very often you are able to be grateful for the loss, for the diminishment, because it drove you deeper. It brought out the essence of who you are beyond any form. Now, it does not do that to all humans. It's for everybody— diminishment is only a potential deepening. The possibility is there. Many, many humans are not able to use it because nobody has told them. The knowledge, this kind of spiritual knowledge, is still very limited. It is not part of mainstream culture. People are dying every day without having any true assistance. People who are approaching death, who are getting old, our mainstream culture still knows nothing. It's just, let's prolong life as long as possible, even if it's totally pointless and it creates a lot of suffering. Let's just— because we don't know what to do with death. That's one of the reasons why The Foundation will hopefully be able to reach people to use the opportunity of this greatest diminishment, which is death. The greatest— when, as you approach death, an enormous opportunity for spiritual awakening, realization. But many humans, of course, miss the opportunity of that diminishment and with the result that the ego becomes even more hardened through it, or in the words of Brother David, shriveled, shriveled up to an even harder, lifeless thing. Then either you carry continuous anger or resentment or despondency for years which becomes part of your egoic identity. And the ego loves any kind of identity. If it's a miserable one, doesn't matter. I'll have it. Just give me a strong identity. I take miserable any time over being nobody. So the opportunity of diminishment is missed. Often you see when people, they're wealthy people and suddenly something happens, they lose their money and then they jump out of the window because the entire sense of self was associated with their possessions. There are people who lose their reputation, or you remember of course the case of Mr. Madoff a few years ago, who had this scheme, fraudulent schemes, and people lost millions or billions of people who was investing with him on Wall Street. They lost. It was a pyramid. It was a Ponzi scheme, I think is the word. So he was deceiving all these people and they lost all their money. And he had accumulated billions, and then finally it all collapsed. Now he's in prison, and his sons couldn't take it. One of his sons— apparently the sons didn't know what was going on, I don't know if that's true, but they were also working in his firm, in his company. I believe one died of cancer soon after, and the other committed suicide. Would have been a great opportunity if only somebody had told them, you've lost your money, you've lost your reputation, this is a great opportunity. Find yourself. The opening is there. But it's just lack of information. Nobody told them. I hadn't actually thought of this until this moment, because we want to bring the teaching to places where it otherwise would not go or would not reach, and I just thought of Wall Street. We will donate books and CDs to both. So we'll have to call Goldman Sachs tomorrow, see if they agree. Now, they won't be very interested perhaps at the moment, But they may become interested in the future. Just wait. So you have already— I believe everybody here has already experienced some forms of diminishment. To use that word, through the physical form, the psychological me entity. And for many, the reason why you're here is because you've gone through that and it has deepened you. Even the collapse of a relationship— you don't even have to be married, but you have a relationship relationship doesn't go well, it ends. It's a little death, can be painful. It leaves a little hole in you, it takes— it seemingly rips something out of you, and for quite a while you feel it. It's not pleasant, but that too is an opportunity. So when the ego weeps for what it has lost— oh dear, it's so terrible. I'll tell you what happened, and I'll tell myself what happened. Even if nobody's listening, it'll go through. I can't take any more of this. I just can't take it. It's just too much. What's the point of it all? Just completely. It's good to act out the ego sometimes because then you can actually see it. It's like a reflection in the mirror because it's funny because you remember everybody knows, familiar with that in some way, and that's why it becomes funny. I'm learning from Marianne yesterday because she has other ways of acting out the ego. It's a little bit more feminine, but I can try that too. It may look a little weird when I do it, though, but it's— there's a lot in it that doesn't really need to be explained in words, does because this simple gesture implies a self-image, to look at yourself through a self-image. Look at me, me. Be grateful for whatever your experience of this moment is, and if you cannot be grateful, at least allow it to be, because It already is. You might as well. Now, if you did this little thing, it sounds very little and it is very little, allowing your experience of this moment to be the way it is, just this little thing would remove— well, it's hard to put it in percentage terms, let's say 95% of the suffering from your life. I don't know about the rest, the 5%, we'll get to that sometime. That would already remove a gigantic chunk of unhappiness in whatever form. Unhappiness is the most generic term one could use. The Buddha called it suffering. And so for the next 6 months, then that obviously is one of the practices, not to internally resist your experience of this moment. Now, of course, Many times, possibly you forget that, and that's fine. The moment you realize that you forgot it, it's there again, and then you can accept the experience of this moment as the unhappiness that is arising in you because you forgot to accept your experience of this moment. And so you feel this unhappiness arising in you, and you say, 'Where does that come from? Oh, I forgot to accept my experience of this moment.' And then you accept the unhappiness. And the weird thing with unhappiness is, when you completely accept the happiness, it cannot survive very long. It doesn't like, it cannot actually coexist with acceptance. So the weird thing then arises that you say something like, "Okay, I'm unhappy, that's okay, I don't mind being unhappy." And then the unhappiness goes, "What's going on?" That's not supposed to happen. The unhappiness cannot survive for very long with the acceptance, even the acceptance of unhappiness, not indulging in unhappiness, but the acceptance. Now the acceptance of unhappiness presupposes that there's an awareness there that knows that you're unhappy. Now that might sound like something very natural, but it isn't. Because the most unhappy people, and there are still millions, and of course they have reasons for being unhappy, yes. And it's not necessarily the people who you'd think would have the most powerful reasons for being unhappy. It's often those who you would think Well, they— there are many millions who have it worse than they, but these are more unhappy than those. That's often the case. So the unhappiness is something that when it's recognized as unhappiness and accepted, something happens to it. It begins to dissolve. But the really unhappy people are so identified with the unhappiness, which is a combination of certain recurring thoughts in your head, a certain narrative that is not pleasant, whether it is about my life, whether the narrative says, 'My life, oh, dreadful thing, my life. Why did it all go so wrong, so wrong, wrong? And now it's nothing I can do.' Or whether the narrative is about somebody else, you know what he did, what she said and did, and the narrative may be about something that hasn't happened yet, and it goes on and on, or something that happened in the distant past or not so distant past. So there's a narrative, and then there are emotions that are a reflection of the narrative. The narrative is thought. Thoughts, certain types of thoughts, certain thoughts that have a certain frequency. And then that awakens the emotional frequency because the body thinks the narrative in your mind is reality, that is the reality that you're experiencing. So the body reacts with an emotion. Simple. A simple example: at night you can't sleep because you're extremely worried about what's going to happen to you or somebody close to you or even the world. And it all sounds very critical. There's a crisis in your head, not outside. Outside your head there's a pillow and there's a blanket or even something big and fluffy and soft, down duvet, and there's no unhappiness there. And if you look around the bedroom also, where's the unhappiness? The plant is okay, it's not unhappy. No, it's all happening in here. And then the body, since that is the critical reality that you inhabit, you are— there is a a crisis in your life, the body doesn't know the difference between what's actually happening and what's happening in your head. What's happening in your head is taken to be the absolute reality, and then you experience the emotion that goes with that kind of narrative, and so there's no awareness. And when you're trapped in that, you don't even really know that you are unhappy because you are the unhappiness. The unhappiness has become your identity. So when you become the unhappiness, you don't even know that you are— or suffer, let's use the Buddhist term suffering. When you are in this deep suffering, you don't even know you're suffering because the suffering is a gigantic, huge chunk, part of your sense of self. You are a suffering entity. And as All therapists know that once the patient or the client, whatever they call the people that come to them according to their school, they reach a point where there's a possibility of going beyond the deep-seated patterns, unconscious patterns, and then there's a huge resistance very often. Because the person is afraid of losing a very important piece of their identity, and sometimes it's the most important part of their identity. They have lived with an unhappy sense of self for years and perhaps even decades. They don't want to let go, and again, they don't know that consciously. They never say, "I do not want to let go." If they could say that, then that means there's already some awareness. So lack of awareness, lack of presence, that is the unawakened state that still unfortunately millions of humans are trapped in. But the moment you know, you recognize your inner state, that means there's an awareness which is a— is another dimension of consciousness that has emerged in you, through you, a deeper dimension of consciousness that is not the conditioned thinking. So we can call it awareness, we can call it presence, we can call it the unconditioned consciousness. And then the beginning of freedom freedom arises. And it's from there that you recognize your inner states as they arise, from there that you recognize your unhappiness and say, oh, you can feel the unhappiness. But the moment you become aware of suffering or unhappiness in you, you're no longer feeding it with your thoughts. As long as you're not aware, you're feeding it. There's this vicious circle. You're feeding it with your thoughts, with your narrative, and you're trapped in the vicious circle. Your narrative creates more unhappiness. The unhappiness creates more thought. And you're trapped in that. So for the next 6 months and hopefully beyond, because it's a much more pleasant way to live, make it your practice to be aware of your inner states. And meaning, no matter what situation arises in your life, whether it's little things, big things, difficult situations, difficult people, challenges, problems— because the next 6 months are not going to be free of challenges and problems. So whatever it is, realize that the primary factor in any situation is your inner state because that determines how you respond. So no matter what it is, your primary responsibility is to be aware of what goes on inside you. And that means whatever arises in your life is actually to be used in your practice so that you do not become dependent on what's going on externally in your life. So your inner state gradually is no longer determined— perhaps still a little bit, yes, but not completely determined by outer events, people, situations, and so on. Inner freedom arises. That's awakening. So to, to go about wanting to manifest material abundance in your life is perhaps not not the right way to go about it because you're concentrating on the outermost layer of abundance. And even if you manage to manifest abundance on the outer level, it's not going to give you the true feeling of abundance. It's not, in other words, it's not going to make you happy. It's not going to fulfill you except for a few days. The new possession, nice and shiny, whatever it is, and there you look at it, "Got it now, it's mine." And after a few days or a week or two, or give it a month, it wears off. Hmm. It's no longer that fulfilling to be driving the Ferrari. Ferrari or whatever it is. There's nothing wrong with the Ferrari, but if you're looking to the Ferrari for happiness and fulfillment and to give you the feeling of— it's not going to work for that long. If you're just driving it because you enjoy that experience, that's a different matter. Manifest abundance from the inside out, not from the outside, just hoping that you go— find some inner state through external things. That is the dilemma of many people who practice manifesting, which of course manifesting is something that you can use and it works if it's done rightly, but the dilemma or the fallacy is is the belief that whatever you manifest is going to make you happy. It's to seek the fullness of life through what you manifest, through things. First question here is, does the mind create a physical problem to distract us from emotional pain? It is often the case that emotional pain that is not recognized, when there's not enough awareness, the emotional pain exists beneath your level of awareness and it can come out as certain kinds of reactivity in daily life. So you are taken over by reactions to certain things that trigger that type of emotional pain that is in you that you're completely unaware of. And emotional pain that is in total unawareness can very easily become a physical symptom; it's transferred into the physical realm. Any kind of prolonged negative mental state which produce corresponding negative emotions affect the functioning of the physical organism. And even research has been done on this and been confirmed that negative states, mental-emotional states, effect in the long term affect the physical organism. If you're unable to enjoy what you're doing, then it's time to move to another job. But you have to look to see whether your inability to enjoy the job you're doing now has something to do with the particular job you're doing or has more to do with your inability to enjoy the present moment, in which case the next job that you find you will also not enjoy. So if you can't enjoy your job, either one of these is true, either there is something for you to change, there's something inherently not right anymore with this particular particular job that no longer corresponds to who you are or your state of consciousness, or you cannot enjoy your job because you haven't learned yet to be present enough to enjoy what you are doing now, and you always think, "Oh, the next one is going to be much better. And if you don't know which one it is of those two, you may have to get another job and then see if you can enjoy that one. Many jobs that the mind tells you cannot be enjoyed actually can be enjoyed. Also, the mind telling you if you enjoy this job that you really don't want this job to be permanent, and if the mind tells you, "No, if I enjoy this job, I'll be stuck with it for the rest of my life, and I don't want to be stuck with it." Let's say you got a job working working in a diner as a waiter or waitress, but you really want to get your job as an actress, or you really want to be a writer, you really want to be whatever you want to be, a senator, successor of Donald Trump, whatever your mind says, and so the mind says, "I'm not going to enjoy this job because I really want to be somewhere else, and if I enjoy it, then I'll really be stuck." But you may find that the opposite is the case. It is freeing to enjoy what you are doing, even if it's not something that you would want to do for the rest of your life. All you have to do is enjoy the present moment. Your energy field then shifts, and when this energy field shifts, you become open to life only if you no longer resist life. You cannot be open to life, the greater consciousness coming through you, if you resist life. And you resist life if you resist or resent the present moment. That's where life is. So the shift happens, you need to be in the state of alignment with the present moment no matter what activity you are doing in the present moment. And if you absolutely cannot be in alignment with the present moment, you need to walk out. The vigilance then as regards your inner state is very important. So that you no longer believe the outer is more important than the inner. That's the great illusion. Some outer condition is more important than consciousness, the state of consciousness. So the vigilance needs to be there, and I'm saying that to you because there's enough awareness in you for that vigilance to arise. Without the vigilance, you have no idea what's going on inside you, and you project it all outside. And you don't even know— this is the essence of unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Many really unconscious people, they don't even know that they are suffering, because everything is projected outward. Bad stuff is out there, other people and whoever they blame. It's all out there. Everything is projected. They have complete unawareness of their inner state. That's the essence of unconsciousness. But even humans who have already begun the spiritual path or the awakening process can still be taken over periodically, regularly, completely by the delusion that something out there is more important than your inner state of consciousness. And then you go— in that moment you become reactive. And in that moment you become identified with the reactions, which are mental, emotional forms that arise. And so you are lost, and you think it's all out there. So the vigilance then can tell you the moment you become upset about something. When things go wrong, that's a moment of becoming more conscious. It's every, even the smallest things. If you don't react out of the conditioning, the mental-emotional conditioning, but be the awareness, and then, oh. And you observe if emotions arise, you are there, and you can say, oh, there's the anxiety again. And then you know that there's anxiety without calling it anything. This is a huge difference to know that anxiety is in you, anger is in you right now, for example, or anxiety, whatever else it may be, or some mood that suddenly gets a hold of you, and then you're suddenly in a bad mood. Don't talk to me. Don't see. I'm grumpy. Well, to say I'm grumpy is already a little bit step forward because at least you know that you're grumpy. If you're totally unconscious, the grumpiness is you, and you don't even know that you're grumpy. To say, "Don't talk to me, I'm grumpy," that already means there's a little bit of awareness there. That's great. So there's a huge difference between saying, "I'm angry," and Slightly different. I feel angry, or there's anger in me. I feel that there's anger in me. I feel angry. There's somewhat a difference between I am angry, because then you equate identity with the emotion. So it's not I am angry. That's a huge— you've fallen into a huge trap if you equate emotion with your identity. Or if you equate a thought with your identity, or a story in your mind, you equate that with your identity, or an opinion which is thought. The world is full of people who don't know the difference between their opinion and their identity. Their opinion becomes their identity, and then they have lots of fights with other people because they are totally confused about who they are. They derive their identity from a set of opinions. Politics, for example. You derive— it doesn't mean you cannot have opinions. Everybody has opinions. But where does your sense of identity come from? Does it come from the opinions, or do you realize that you have certain opinions which may be valid or not? You're on a human level. You have opinions. Or viewpoints or perspective, mental positions. You have them, they are there. But do you— do these give you your sense of self? Or if they do, then you're continuously arguing with other people, making other people into enemies, because When you contradict somebody who equates opinion with identity, unconsciously they believe that you are attacking their very self because there's a confusion about who they are. They don't know who they are. So you attack the opinion of somebody who's totally identified with their opinion and you become their mortal enemy. They might even try to kill you in an extreme form of unconsciousness. The Tao, or consciousness in its pure form, is pure no-form before it becomes something, before it becomes a thought. Or words. So right now you're aware of sense perceptions because you can still see me. You're aware of the words. But more importantly, you are aware that you are aware. You know yourself as this aware presence space. Without that space, that aware space, there would be no sense perception. It is the light of consciousness in which all the objects of consciousness are perceived. Most people are not aware of themselves as consciousness. Consciousness. They're only aware of the objects that arise in consciousness. And their sense of identity also, their sense of who they are, ultimately is an object that arises in their consciousness. That's me. This is my story, me and my story, my identity. I am this and that and that and all those things together, that's me. But they're all thought forms or emotional forms that arise in consciousness. They are an object in consciousness, and this object in consciousness for most people is the foundation of their sense of identity. But that, unfortunately, is an enormous limitation and ultimately a misperception of who they actually are. Most people's sense of identity, therefore, is based on a misperception because who you truly are is not an object in consciousness. That's ephemeral. It is here for a while, then it evaporates. Who you truly are is the space of consciousness itself. And so you become aware of an underlying presence, just to use a word, an awakefulness, a certain alertness, a stillness, but not a stillness that is asleep, An alert stillness. That's the realization of consciousness, of yourself as consciousness.

Maybe you lost possessions, money, whatever. And the question is, do we resign ourselves to the loss, or should we take action to bring new forms of abundance into being? Well, you can do— you can resign yourself. It's not a question of either/or, whether or not you create more of the same whatever it is, if you lost a house, whether you work to have another house, or if you lost investments, whether you work hard to create the same again, or whether you no longer are interested in doing that. In any case, resigning yourself to the loss applies in any case. If you don't do that, then you suffer, and then you build up negativity, and then you— all your— the action you take is then based on negative reaction. And you can work very hard, and perhaps you'll recreate the same abundance, but it's not pleasant. So acceptance of what is always comes first. And then you're free to go on from there. Acceptance of loss— that's what is. Nothing is permanent in this world. It consists of gain and loss. Sooner or later you have to let go. Acceptance comes first, and then there's a choice. If you enjoy you enjoy the creation of abundant forms in whatever you do, why not carry on doing it? And very quickly you will probably create the same abundance. If you don't enjoy the doing, if the doing is only a means to an end because you need the money, you want to have the psychological security of money, learned that it doesn't really work, then you just go through the same cycle again, and you won't be happy. You'll be compulsively working hard, trying to get your money back. So it's a question of Step 1 is acceptance of what is because it is. Step 2 is you listen within and see what it is that wants to be done. I'm in the investment world, so I'm always faced with a lot of resistance because it's not conducive to good business to spend too much time being too soft. And I was wondering if you can comment a little bit on how can I help the patients and also help the people who are in the business side of things. Do not compromise on what you feel you are called upon to do with other human beings. And don't compromise and say, okay, I'll just have to drop this and just treat them like everybody else. But see if you can still function from within the system and do what you feel you need to do. And if you can't, again, it's a question of doing it in a new way, doing, creating something that makes it possible for you to work on both levels, on the outer level and the inner level with human beings. Thank you. That's a very, again, this question comes up very often for many people in different ways. And many of you may find, because you represent the arising and the awakening consciousness, many of you will find that the existing structures within which you work are not able to carry the new consciousness anymore. Jesus used this funny expression, new wine in old bottles, because apparently Actually, at the time, the bottles were not glass bottles, they were kind of leather bottles, and if you, for some reason, if you put a new one in, they would probably burst. So what that means is many of the existing structures, social structures, that also applies to economic structures, the structures in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, counseling, education, education, school system, university system. Many of those structures, they were created by, not by the awakened consciousness. They were all, they've all been around for a long time and they evolved out of the egoic consciousness. So many of the structures are the products of unenlightened states of consciousness. They reflect the unenlightened, unawakened states of consciousness. So many of you will find it necessary to step out of— sometimes, as I said, they can, may, in certain cases they can be changed from within if there are enough people within who want to change it. But many structures are too rigid for change. So it is up to you to create new structures that reflect your— and come together perhaps with others who are also awakening so that the new structures will reflect your state of consciousness. I haven't mentioned being in the body for a while, so let's feel it now. That you are actually— feel the energy field of your— as you sit there and I sit here, we feel a certain aliveness pervading the body. It's very simple, but some attention has to go there, otherwise you can't feel anything. which means you have to take some attention away from the thinking. If you're fully in thought, you can't feel your body at all. You don't feel alive anymore. Just abstractions. So the beautiful thing is, it's not only that your body loves being acknowledged, and getting your attention, it's a very healing thing to do. And most importantly, it slows down your thinking considerably, if it doesn't even stop it completely, because if you have your attention here, you can't have it there. and this be the embodied state, it's quite nice— what you're feeling is not ultimately the physical body, it's already halfway beyond the physical body. Chi, life energy. And I call that, it's halfway between form and formlessness. It's a bridge. Qi is a bridge between the formless dimension and the form. So it's wonderful to sense that. And it can be— you can do it anywhere when there's enough room. You don't need to focus on externals 100%. And have some attention in the body. So we sit here. Boredom disappears, for example, when you have attention in the body. You're not bored. You actually enjoy being, feeling alive. And that can serve as an anchor for staying present. And that can be one way of Looking around at the world without unnecessary mental labeling, there's clarity of perception. And looking at the situations that arise in that clarity of perception, and from that clarity of perception you know what you need to do or what needs doing in that situation. It's a higher intelligence that you contact via the body, a higher intelligence than the acquired knowledge of the human mind. And then you know what to do. It acts. It tells you, you have an insight or spontaneous doing, or if there's nothing to do, it's being is enough. It's— you can enjoy just being. Sleepless nights are wonderful opportunity for going into the body. Oh, I can't sleep. I wish I could sleep. Why don't you do something useful? Go into the body. And then you lie there and feel the aliveness. Oh, I hope I won't go to sleep too soon because it's so nice. And before you know it, you've gone to sleep perhaps. And then you wake up in the morning, perhaps you still feel a lingering sensation there in the body, and if you don't, as you wake up, put your attention into the body first before you start thinking about the day for just a couple of minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes. Ah, it's a good start of the day to feel alive. It can't be a bad start to the day. Taking responsibility for your life is taking responsibility for how you perform your actions, what you do. And if most of your actions are means to an end, your whole life is of low quality. It lacks presence, and you're always looking out for the next moment moment which you think is going to be better, when it comes, is unfortunately only the present moment, which is never good enough. That's low-quality life. The quality of your life, the way in which I use the term, is deeper than the conventional use of the term, although it's good to have the term at all, quality of life, because it implies that what determines the value of your life is not quantity, it's not how much you consume, how many things you own, or whatever, how many people you control in your job or your— Whatever, it's not quantity that determines the value of your life, it's quality. So in the conventional term, I'm glad that this term exists, it means whether you enjoy, whether you can go to have quality time with another human being, which means attention, quality activities where you're not just working all the time but doing other things. They have the quality of life of cities. Every year they have a list. I don't remember who publishes it or how they exactly determine it, but it's an attempt to determine how pleasant it is to live or how unpleasant it is to live in a particular a particular city. Many factors contribute to that. So that's a good thing, but the way in which I use quality goes even beyond that. Well, it is connected somehow, but it goes deeper. You can live in a city that's very low on the the life quality list and lead a life of the highest quality, which means as you do what you do, you're giving it full attention, knowing that, yes, I'm doing this because I need to get there and there you know what the end is that you want to achieve, but your primary concern is the doing the smallest thing, and then your life is of high quality. Every action has a certain aliveness and presence. It is not stressed, it's not done with reluctance, it's not done with impatience, it's not done done with irritation. All this, can't you see how that lowers the quality of your life, all those things? But it's so normal. But you can do the same thing. Why bring all that to the action, the irritation, the stress, the dislike, the impatience, the complaining, Why? What purpose does it have? No real purpose except it strengthens your false sense of self.

It's already a wonderful thing that you are able to sense the stillness, which is of course the temporary cessation of thinking. That's really what stillness is. So a momentary gap, whether it's a few seconds or a few minutes, in the stream of thinking, but no loss of consciousness, but rather one could almost say an intensification of consciousness. You're very alert, but still, is that what you experience? Yes, that is what it is. Now the rest is the, the mind comes in again and is asking questions about it. And it might say, as it does in your case, which is not uncommon, The mind says, is that all there is? There must be more. I can't quite feel what some other people talk about. That's unnecessary to go there and try to figure out mentally, or from somebody else to tell that there is more. You should let go of It's really connected to the desire of the mind to understand the stillness. That's often part of that. And you cannot understand it. I don't understand it. Understanding can arise out of the stillness, that is true. The deeper understanding of certain things arise out of the stillness. But the stillness itself you cannot understand. And that's the very reason why Jesus described this inner peace as— I think it was Jesus, or was it Saint Paul? I don't remember— the peace that passes all understanding. This peace, which is the inner peace, which is stillness, you cannot understand. It passes all understanding. You cannot understand it. Understanding involves concepts, and concepts is thought. So the stillness, you cannot, you cannot understand. In fact, it is the— the stillness comes when you relinquish the desire to understand. Either understand yourself or understand the world. When you relinquish the desire to understand, then the stillness is immediately there. In this world, you have to be careful with what kind of thoughts you absorb from the collective, because there's so much unhappiness in the collective energy field of humanity. So it's very easy to get drawn into that if you're not careful, and participate in the suffering of the collective— fear, anxiety, anger that's everywhere. It's also very easy to be affected by certain thoughts that can take over your mind that come from the collective thoughts and thought patterns. Anybody who is not sufficiently present, sufficiently aware is susceptible to being infected by certain thoughts.

The mind—

certain thoughts become lodged in your mind. Every thought is an energy formation. Like you could say a little entity. The thought gets lodged in your mind and attracts associated thoughts and becomes a bundle of thoughts. And without awareness, you identify with the thoughts, and then you are being possessed by certain thoughts. They may arise from your personal, but very commonly they arise from the collective. In your personal life, you could develop some kind of thought that of an obsessive nature that occupies your mind and you can't get rid of it. It could be the thought of one directed to one particular person, very, very negative thoughts, even At the simplest level, some people have— you can have a melody that you can't get rid of in your mind. You can have a whole day or two days and you can't get rid of some— this thing that's in your mind, it repeats itself again and again. You can have certain assumptions about this world, like they may be totally absurd and irrational, or there may be some truth to it, but only there may be an aspect of the truth. You might think that The most absurd thoughts could be there. You might think that the extraterrestrials are already here. Well, they may be, but— and every other human is actually an alien, and you just have to look at them carefully to figure out whether they are aliens or humans. And that could— I'm not excluding the possibility that some aliens may be here, but we are really— I'm talking about obsessive thoughts that are probably not correct. And then it colors your subsequent perception of reality, gets totally colored by the obsessive thoughts, and it can explain everything. In those terms, all the evils of the world have suddenly one explanation. Another one that's also in the collective, you can have a thought that the entire world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. Any human being either belongs to the oppressors or to the oppressed. That was an idea in communism in economic terms, in terms of social power. They divided humanity into oppressors and oppressed. And then they look at, you can look at any human being and to me he's oppressed, he's an oppressor. Now, thing is, of course oppressors and oppressed have existed And to some extent, in some areas still exist. But to take one fragment of truth, because the totality of human life is much vaster than that, this is one aspect. But if you take one aspect that then occupies your mind because of lack of awareness, you are possessed by a thought. And this thought says the entire world— this is just one example, could give many examples— the entire world is either— the essential identity of any human being is either they are oppressed or they are the oppressor. Now, of course, if that is the thoughts that dominate your mind, then obviously you would probably regard the oppressed as the good ones and the oppressors as the bad ones. So that simplifies life enormously. You immediately can decide who is good and who is bad, and you are probably good, presumably. Even if you, if you are an oppressor, traditionally you're you now recognize your sins and you will atone for your sins of being an oppressor and you side with the oppressed and therefore you become one of the good people. Okay, so we had the same phenomenon in very extreme form. We all know about Soviet communism, we know about Chinese Mao Zedong Cultural Revolution, quite a crazy time here, you know, National Socialism in Germany, all these evils perpetrated by all these collective delusional systems that divided people into good and bad, entire groups, gave them an identity. I was in Cambodia a few years ago and visited the death camps of Cambodians. It's a small country, so not many people are familiar with the recent history of Cambodia, but they had an extreme communist regime under a mad dictator called Pol Pot. And in that extreme communist regime, And Cambodia experienced dreadful suffering. 1/3 of the population was killed by their own government because they were the oppressors. An oppressor was anybody who could read and write because obviously they were exploiting the peasants. Anybody who wore glasses, —like that's what oppressed them—they would be sent from the cities into the countryside to work on the fields where they didn't have enough food, and most of them starved. Total lack of humanity, total lack—because the entire country was dominated by one absurd and obsessive thought that made it impossible for them to relate to any human being as a human being. They relate to him through the conceptualization that thought had created for them. They couldn't sense the humanity, the being of the other human anymore the moment they had imposed a conceptual identity on them. This is an extreme example of what can happen to you when you're taken over by certain thoughts in your mind. This is not to mean that Of course, oppressor and oppressive existed and exist, but it's not the entire explanation. There are many other facts in this life. But I'm saying all this because you need to be very alert so that your mind is not taken over by certain thoughts that are not— that invade your mind and color your view of reality. And there are certain irrational thoughts that are floating around in the collective at the present time. So it's very easy for you to absorb some of them and being possessed by certain thoughts. And maybe it's so irrational that it's unbelievable, but I'm not giving any examples, but you have to find it out for yourself. With awareness you can, and be very careful with observing your mind. Be there as a witness of your mind so that you don't get taken over by certain thoughts, that your mind does not get taken over by certain thoughts. And then you, you cannot perceive reality anymore as it is. Everything is colored by the veil of irrational thinking. So when you nowadays— these things can spread very quickly and easily, these irrational things. In the past, they were confined to either one country or one area in a particular country. But nowadays, certainly rational thoughts can go through the entire world through the technology we have and can quickly affect millions of humans all over the world. So in the past, you had it, as I said, limited. Let's say the hunt for witches in the past, totally absurd and irrational. It's a mental disease that affected certain countries or areas in certain countries. This mental disease then— there were some places in Europe, there were villages and towns in Europe in the Middle Ages during that time of collective insanity, there were almost no women left in some villages and towns at that time because they had all been burned or drowned because they were called witches. Absolute insanity. So don't underestimate how insane humans can become. The only antidote that you have against it is awareness so that your mind does not get affected by mental virus. The awareness. The awareness is aware of what your mind is doing so that your mind does not get occupied by one particular way of thinking, which is probably irrational. Anything that's one-sided, that does not see the totality of a situation, like oppressor and oppressed, if you don't see the, the many factors that make up a human being's identity. So be very careful with what you consume in the media, the media that brings the news to you. Be very careful with what you consume so that you do not take on, without knowing it, unquestioningly, certain ways of looking at the world realize that you're being— how manipulative most of the mainstream media has become. You need to watch that, if you watch it, knowing how you're being manipulated. And they, the people themselves, are being manipulated too. So they are in the grip of unconsciousness and they want to draw others into unconsciousness. So they're not the evil ones. They just don't know any better. How you respond, and that, if you are, I have to, we can use the two words, react, respond. The way I use them is react means it's a karmic law. Determined reaction. You act, you react out of the conditioning of your mental-emotional field. Response implies that you are present and your action is no longer determined by the mental-emotional conditioning of the person. There is a higher intelligence, one could say. I call it wisdom. But in other words, there's a higher intelligence that can then operate in your daily life, a higher intelligence which we could call wisdom. So it's not the conventional intelligence that you can measure in IQ tests. That's a very limited version of intelligence. There's a higher higher intelligence that comes in through presence that deals more intelligently with any situation that arises in your life. That's the only possible way of dealing intelligently is by dealing with the situation through presence, especially important, of course, in human relationships. There's so much unconsciousness that happens in the interaction between human beings, between two human beings and larger numbers of human beings, and then groups of collectives of millions of human beings here and another million there. Or this, you can see when you look at politics and affairs and so what's happening in the world, there's very little intelligence the way they deal with things. And you would be, you're amazed, how can they be so short-sighted and ultimately have to use a simple word, stupid. But these people have degrees, they have university degrees. How can they be so stupid? Well, they only activated a very limited version of intelligence that you can measure in IQ tests. That's not enough. I'm sorry, I don't want to offend anybody who has a very high IQ. Or is a member of this— there's an organization called Mensa, I believe. So if you have a very high IQ, you can be a member of that, and that's good for your identity, of course. So I don't want to take anything away from you, but that is not real intelligence. Yes, it is a form of intelligence, but it's a relatively low form of intelligence. Much higher intelligence comes in through presence, and that is lacking in the world. There are occasionally, you see, very rarely you see a politician, actually, you can see, oh, this person has some real presence. Real intelligence and insights, and it's usually not the people who are running things. If it's a politician, it's usually somebody who's been pushed to the periphery of politics, and from there he or she comments on the stupidity of what's happening in the world. I've observed it in different countries. Similar phenomenon. There are, okay, there are a few people here and there who can see clearly where we are going and what we are doing. It's crazy because there is a lack of true, this higher intelligence that is beyond the egoic mind. And, um, well, Well, at the moment it doesn't look good because we're going— I was going to use that weird expression about the handbasket again. So you can see it. Now it's important. When you look at the state of the world, it's important that you do not enter a reactive mode because that will draw you into unconsciousness. Also, if you watch too much television or current affairs, you will be drawn into, most likely, unconsciousness. Unless you watch it as an anthropological study of how misguided humanity can be. So you need to stay present while you look at all this and see what's happening. Question may arise, shouldn't I be doing something to— well, there may be something you can do, bring some sanity into this world, perhaps through saying something, speaking out, pointing out something, not creating enemies. If you see people are doing are deluded in what they say or do, don't make them into enemies and attack them and say, "You are totally crazy." No, it may be that what they do may be and probably is disfunctional and stupid, or the opinions they hold may be extremely misguided and irrational. So you can address the opinions that they hold, their mental positions, and point out the irrationality and so on without making the people who hold the opinion into enemies. So don't equate the mental positions that people hold with who they essentially are. You can speak out, maybe you can post something on one of the many platforms that are available, something that is sane rather than insane, but perhaps you can post something that points out the insanity of it all. Some people do that, so that's a good thing. No, because some people may suddenly see, oh yes, that's true. So higher intelligence comes comes in, and that can then deal with situations, and that's the end of karma. What humanity is doing now collectively is karma playing itself out, the movement of unconsciousness. And so, as we mentioned yesterday with reference to individuals, You remember we talked about responsibility. Can you hold a person responsible for what they do if they are unconscious? We talked about that yesterday. If they are in the grip of their mental-emotional conditioning, that is part of their karma. Can you hold a karmic formation person? Can you hold a karmic formation responsible for what they do? Not really. So there's a deep wisdom in what Jesus said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Forgiveness means the realization that they are not responsible. They cannot do otherwise. But we also— and this also applies the collective, what all the politicians are doing and so on, they don't know any better. They are in the grip of egoic reactivity and shortsightedness that comes with it and so on. But as is the case with individuals, although They may not be and cannot be held responsible, and yet they have to suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. This is how humans ultimately awaken. They're not responsible, but they still have to— they create suffering for themselves and others. And through the suffering that's created by the unconsciousness, in a way, awakening happens. So in other words, the ego is necessary for the awakening to happen. The ego ultimately self-destructs. It has built into it a self-destruct function. That is ultimate wisdom. So that also applies to the collective. Already, if you look at the 20th century, the wars that happened and the internal conflicts in countries that happened, the countless millions upon millions killed by other humans, what they did, the terrible suffering they have to— this is all the movement of unconsciousness. They can't— they don't know what they do. and then humanity suffers and suffers and suffers. Through the suffering, gradually an awakening happens. So the ego's dysfunction creates suffering, and ultimately the suffering acts as an awakener. It's just a question of how much longer is the suffering is suffering going to go? And what's the next stage, you may ask, on the scale of collective suffering? I don't know, but it doesn't look good at the moment. But you are here to represent, to embody the higher intelligence, I mean, hopefully you don't make that into a mental concept, I embody the higher intelligence. It is true, but it should not become a mental concept that you identify with. And so the sanity, you embody the sanity in a world that is still predominantly one has to say, insane in many ways. Not all of it is insane, but a lot of it, some important parts are insane. So let's then see what the— whatever comes is— may be bad from— From a lower perspective, it doesn't look good, but ultimately everything that happens is in the service of the evolution of consciousness, even in your own life. And if it applies in your own life, it also applies to the collective of humanity. You are now, compared to years ago, you are now definitely more conscious than you were before. And it could be that in the past, when you were not conscious, you did things that you now recognize as not right, or you inflicted suffering on another being or other beings. And you can now see it. At the time you didn't know what you were doing because you were not conscious enough to act differently. Now, the fact that a person feels guilty means he or she can see something now that he or she could not see then. If you were still in the same consciousness, then you wouldn't be able to see that that was wrong, you'd say, you did the right thing by whatever, killing that person. I did the right thing. But now you see, you have awakened, and then you can see a lot of your past as dysfunctional unconscious action inflicting suffering on yourself and others. Virtually every unconscious Unconscious human inflicts suffering both on themselves without knowing it and others. They create their own misery and they make others miserable. That's what unconscious humans do. And some to a greater degree than others. So guilt can come up as you awaken and suddenly see how unconscious you were. That can bring up guilt and say, Because the guilt says, "I did that." The guilt uses the word "I." But what does that mean? What does it mean when you say "I"? What is that "I"? Who is "I"? Is "I" the conditioning of your mental-emotional conditioning? Or does "I" have a deeper meaning? Who is "I"? When you think that your mental-emotional conditioning is 'I,' then you are deluded. Your mental-emotional conditioning is not 'I.' It is the mental-emotional conditioning in you. It is a false identity. There is no real 'I' there. The only true 'I' is the 'I Am.' It is you, the essence. That essence of who you are is consciousness. That is the I. I am that I am. That's even how God describes himself. This is probably one of the most profoundest lines in the Bible. Somebody asked God, who are you? Or what's your name? I am that I am. Because your deepest I am is the I am of of the universe. It's not personal. Your deepest identity is the identity of God and of the universe. This is the I. That's the only true I. So when you confuse the unconsciousness of your past, which was only conditioning, which was a reflection of where humanity is at at its present evolutionary stage, you reflected where humanity is in its present evolutionary stage. That's all. You were a reflection of the evolving, or the unevolved, as yet unevolved human consciousness. That's all. There is no I in there. It's not that I did that. The unconsciousness, human unconsciousness did that. If you construct an I out of human unconsciousness that you represented, that is an ego attempt to manufacture another mind-made identity for yourself because the ego loves to have a conceptual identity. The ego is conceptual identity. Identity in the head. That's me. I. So, and the ego doesn't mind even if it's a very unhappy conceptual identity. It prefers that to having no conceptual identity because that's its end. So the ego will cling to the guilt and associate unconscious action in the past with identity, my identity. And that's how the ego can survive for years, and it can torture you for years saying, "I did that." And it's a terrible feeling that you did that. You can now see it as so wrong, that was so wrong. But it's ultimately a delusion. Find the true I, and then that will free you of that, and then you will naturally forgive yourself without needing to take an action and say, I must forgive myself. That doesn't really work. In the same way that it doesn't— this can also be applied to other humans. You can also do that to other humans, what you do to yourself, when you see what they did. And you can manufacture an identity out of their unconscious action also, and then say, this is who they are, this is who he is, who she is. It's not. It's unconsciousness playing itself out, human unconsciousness. There is no ultimate identity there. But the mind likes to manufacture a conceptual identity, not only for yourself, but also for others. So the mind loves to get in there and say, these are those evil ones. And sometimes you do it to a whole group of people. Those millions of this particular group of people, no matter what they are, they are— this is what they are, and this is what they did, and this— that is who they are. No, it's human unconsciousness, that's all. So very careful, the same process. And then And you cannot forgive them because you've made an identity for them out of their unconsciousness and say that they are their unconsciousness. And then forgiveness will be very hard. Okay, I have to try to forgive because I'm supposed to do that. I have to forgive them for what they did. They did such terrible things, but I have to forgive them. Okay, I forgive you. Ah, it's not easy. The real forgiveness happens when it's just you realize that ultimately there's nothing to forgive. And that's true forgiveness. There's nothing to forgive. And forgiveness happens naturally in this way, not as a conscious thing that you do, but a thing that happens by itself. It falls away. The false identity that you inflicted on yourself or another human being or a group of human beings, that false conceptual identity falls away. And that is an essential part of being here as a conscious human being. A conscious human being does not have resentments anymore because what What could you resent? It's only if you manufacture a pseudo-identity, then there's resentment. So all those things just, they fall away. And there's the flowering of consciousness. When you're in nature, you may be looking at something, whatever it may be, But then you can also take in the totality of where you are, whatever it may be, your surroundings, trees, mountains, the ocean, or just simple, a low, grassy surface, bushes. Take in the totality and then bring in other sense perceptions too. But that requires alertness so that you don't drift back into mental concepts. Stay alert, then you bring in, become aware not just of the visual aspect of being there, you become aware of the sounds, there may be sounds, natural sounds, or there may be sounds that are not natural that are interfering, but that's fine. There may be natural sounds, a breeze, you can hear the wind, the leaves are moving in the wind, or the birds, who knows, all natural sounds. Sounds. Then there's also the air. You can feel the air, perhaps there's a very slight movement of air, you can feel it on your skin. And then there's a sense of— you smell, there's a certain sense arise as you become aware of your sense of smell. Maybe you can smell the moisture in the ground or whatever. Be there with all your senses, all senses. You can also for a few moments close your eyes so that you can more focus on the other senses that tend to be neglected for many people. So you just take in your— you smell the air, you feel the slight breeze on your skin, sounds, It's a beautiful experience. And you don't need to look for always the spectacular in nature. Sometimes nature can be very spectacular, but a lot of the time it's just ordinary things. Yes, sometimes you have a beautiful, incredible flower or gigantic sequoia tree or whatever, incredible things, and many other times there's just normal nature there, nothing that says, pay attention to me. So you have to find, if you're alert enough, you will see the concealed in the ordinary spectacle of nature, there is an extraordinary aliveness and beingness and presence. So you don't always look for the one, the great thing. Just to be aware of many things that one would habitually overlook in a normal state of consciousness. It's just, there's a bush there, the grass here, it's been cut, all— nothing special. But if you really come alert, then you see everything is intensely alive. There's a consciousness there. It may not be self-conscious, not conscious of itself, There is a consciousness that has manifested as the tree, the flower, the grass, the bush. There's a consciousness that has manifested in that form, a different vibrational frequency, one could say, to your consciousness, but it's not your consciousness. There's only one universal consciousness consciousness manifesting in countless life forms. So you begin to recognize, but only because you know yourself as consciousness, your mind has become still enough for you to know yourself as consciousness. You sense the consciousness that is inseparable from who you are, that is the essence of who you are, that is who you are. And then you You can sense the consciousness in other life forms.

Asking is the ability to ask is wonderful. Thank you. Please, thank you. Because if you are truly asking, there is a space of openness. If you are truly asking, you voluntarily enter the state of not knowing. So, and this is a wonderful ability to ask whatever it is so that you become a space. You can ask a person something, you can ask the universe something, but there needs to be the receptivity. If you can ask any kinds of questions, but the question needs to be the question The question needs to come out of the spaciousness which is there when you truly ask. There are many people who ask questions and there's not the openness to receive the answer, and that is not true asking. But to put yourself in this, basically it's connected with the state of not knowing so that you can And that's the part of the state of awareness is that you're— an aspect of it is that you're in that state of not knowing conceptually. So there's nothing more beautiful than asking a question, and if it's directed to other human beings, then people love to be asked true questions. Questions, and they can feel whether there is an openness there or whether you have certain expectations as far as the answer is concerned. So that in itself is a spiritual, great spiritual practice to ask.

How can we overcome or eliminate stress and suffering and anxiety in our lives when it seems to be crippling us? Unhappiness is another word you could use. It's a generic term. For any form of negativity inside yourself, unhappiness, suffering. So you begin to realize that most of that arises from a mental narrative about a situation or about your circumstances, but not from the circumstances themselves. And then you can begin to practice every time you feel upset is arising, some form of anger is arising, some form of negativity, blaming people and situations and saying this shouldn't be happening or something is not happening, but it should be happening or they should do this or they shouldn't do it. All kinds of narratives in your mind. So your spiritual awakening is you're beginning to be aware of what your mind is saying, the stories that you're telling yourself about situations, but also the stories you're telling yourself about what you call your life. So because people, there's millions of people in this world who live with a very painful sense of identity. They perceive their life as a burden. So they live with this heaviness and they don't realize what they, this heaviness that they call my life is actually a narrative that they tell themselves. And they say, that's me. All the things that have happened to me, the dreadful things in the past that people did to me or circumstances did to me, or maybe even the bad things that I did. So you get a very heavy identity built up And that becomes your sense of self. And people don't realize it's a story you're continuously telling yourself in your mind. But you are so identified with the story that you don't exist. You're outside of the story. When you want to strengthen the physical body, What do you do? You exercise. But what is that actually when you exercise? What do you do when you exercise? One way of putting it is to say that you create difficulty for the body. You create obstacles for the body to overcome. Whatever it is, running on the treadmill, lifting weights, ugh, ugh, it's a— you're creating a difficulty for the body. Any exercise is making life difficult for the body. That's a way of looking at it. That's not a normal way of looking at it. You take the body out of its comfort zone, although there is a stage where the body, once it gets going, the body may enjoy the energy of it. But until that flows, there's a discomfort. And that's the only way the body can get stronger. If the body stays in its comfort zone, then, well, you will be lying on a sofa or in a deck chair. It's very nice, but but the body doesn't change. So that's an interesting— almost an analogy for something that happens to humans, because it seems that life for everybody creates difficulties So it's not— one would have thought if I were God, I would make life easy for everybody. And you would then see most likely if you did most likely there would be no evolution would ever have happened, or no further evolution if you do it right now, because it's only, it seems, both on the physical level and beyond, it's only through facing difficulties, which you could also call challenges, —which you could also call problems, if you like, which you could also call one damn thing after another. The strange thing is, only by encountering these challenges do we grow in consciousness and generate energy It awakens us eventually. It is true that negative thinking can be very addictive. I, from my point of view, it is not caused by the chemical that's generated in the brain, although I do not deny that the chemicals in the body very often reflect certain things that happen on the mental-emotional level. But what comes first, the chicken or the egg? So if you become very angry, of course there are certain chemicals that are released in the body, and if you become peaceful, then they go. The addiction is not in the chemical, although I don't deny that there is a chemical component to emotional states, but it is the addiction to negative thinking, and the addiction Addiction to negative thinking is usually connected to the pain body, which is the emotional field that feels fed, fueled by the negative thinking. So it— addiction means it feels, on some level, it feels good. If you're addicted to something, on some level it feels good. If you're addicted to alcohol, the drinking feels good while you drink, not afterwards, but while you drink. So if you're addicted, well, who feels— to whom does it feel good? Not to you, not to the physical body, because the physical body suffers through it, but to the pain body. This emotion loves to get more of the same energy by generating further negative thinking in your mind, and it feeds on it because it doesn't get enough food through the drama in your relationship. So the awareness has to come in so that you break the link between your pain body and your thought processes. That is the key, is to sever the link between your thought processes and the pain body. In order to sever the link to be enough awareness, presence. Only the presence can sever the link. The presence comes in, and so you no longer— the emotion is no longer controlling your thought activity. That's the key, and that's the beginning of the end of that vicious circle. That otherwise will take over your life. So what is needed is for you to be there in the moments these thoughts occur or immediately after, and then immediately look at the thought and say, "There it is again," and do not believe it.

And again, it comes back to the state of connectedness with being, it's only from that state of connectedness with a deeper dimension of who you are, from there it becomes easier to forgive. Because forgive means there was something that was done on the level of form by one life form to you, perhaps another life form, pain was inflicted or whatever it may be, treat whatever the transgression is. And it's only from there that you can see the relative nature of what was done because you are in touch with a space a space within you that was never hurt by that. That dimension in you is beyond what can be injured. It's only the form can be injured, the psychological form. Somebody might have insulted you deeply. The psychological form of who you are can feel pain, or the physical form form of who you are can feel pain, and somebody inflicted that out of unconsciousness, then recognizing the first step in, uh, forgiving is to recognize that this was an act of unconsciousness, and you do not equate what this person with who that person is. And it's only from the place of connectedness with being that you can say, no longer hold a grievance about that, because you are in touch with that inside you that is beyond what can be injured. If you are not in touch with that space, then you're still It's hard to forgive. Forgiving means not to harbor grievance or resentment or any negative feeling about it. And really, that's only possible when you are connected with the formless in yourself. The normal thing to happen is that the connectedness with your essence identity Identity is lost very easily in human relationships because the mind is so active, and we live in a civilization that provides continuous and incessant stimulus— stimuli is the plural— continuous, incessant stimuli for the mind, even more than even 30 years ago. 30 years ago it was just radio and television and people would sit there for hours. But nowadays you have countless sources of stimulus for the mind that draws you into continuously thinking about what's your next Facebook 'What's it going to be?' And you look at the ones that are coming in, all these people are doing these fantastic things, and me, I'm just sitting here. And then you have to pretend that you are also doing fantastic things, and usually it involves taking a nice selfie, and then you project your self-image, which has existed for a long, long time before in humans. They have a part of ego is to have this image of who I am. But in these Facebook, now you have the opportunity to project that image into the world and it'll reach hundreds or thousands of people all at once. You construct your life. There are many people alive these days who, without knowing it, they partly live for their Facebook image. And they're just looking for the next thing that they can project out into the world. It's narcissus. You might remember the myth of Narcissus, the ancient Greek myth. There was this young man who had had never seen himself before because they didn't have mirrors at the time. But one day he happened to look into a little pool of water and he saw himself and he realized that he was extremely beautiful. He said, 'Oh, that's me.' And the story goes he fell in love with himself. Not in a good way. Not by becoming one with who he is, but the separation happened. This myth shows the beginning stage of the egoic sense of self expressed as a story. The image that he said of himself in the pool is the mental image of the ego, and stories are part of that image. That's me. I'm me in my story. So you have the image of me and then, oh. So this guy, Zarcesus, he experienced that separation. And then I think something bad happened to him, but I don't remember what. So, and then you have other divided things that continuously stimulate the mind that almost designed for you not to become still. It's like the civilization has made a great effort to come up with as many things as possible to prevent prevent people from becoming still and spacious and taking a moment of, ah, looking at the sky and feeling the inner spaciousness arise and becoming aware of the leaves of the tree or the branches and the wind blowing and the noise of water, the simple thing, becoming still, alert, sensing that stillness within.

If you find the strange phenomenon that you are always right and others are always wrong, that's an important realization. How is that possible? I must be superhuman. And in the eyes of the ego, of course, that's kind of the case. Because the ego, which is that which is perhaps the major obstacle towards the realization of that deeper dimension, and the ego strives incessantly for some kind of superiority. And so this is what you are condemned to when you have not yet awakened, even just at least to some extent, to the deeper essence of who you are. The awareness, the presence, the stillness, then you are in the prison of your own personality. And it's not a pleasant place to be. I sometimes watch people and they are so burdened with their personality, so in the grip of that thing. What is personality? It's the sum total of their mental, emotional conditioning from the past. Mental, emotional, conditioning. Mental conditioning means certain thought forms, mind structures that become repetitive, certain narratives concerning your life. My life, says the ego, a certain narrative concerning my other people in my life. What I did, what they did to me, my victories, my defeats. But many things form the egoic conditioned self. And one important aspect of the egoic conditioned self is it talks about my life all the time in the head and out aloud. And my life is what concerns me. Obviously, it's my life. And what is my life? It's a story in my head, but they don't know that. They think it's the reality, but it's a story in my head. It's a narrative. It's the predominant narrative in my mind. And it's a narrative through which I interpret everything that I come into contact with. It becomes a screen through which I interpret other people, situations, places, events. I don't know that because I am so identified with that mental-emotional conditioning that it has become me. It has become me and my life. It's— I don't know anything else. That's the fate still of the majority of humans on the planet. Although the minority that is awakening is growing, it is still a minority. Most humans are still totally in the grip of their egoic self, and probably most of you are moving still in and out of your egoic self. Let's just take a moment and become aware of the present moment. Vitally important in any endeavor that you undertake no matter what it is, is not to lose your connectedness with the present moment. So before you start a new enterprise, a new activity, always good to take a moment for awareness. Basically, that's what it is. Sometimes people ask, well, what is the present moment? How do you be— where is it? What does it even mean to become aware of the present moment? And the first thing, of course, is that you become aware of whatever surrounds you. That's the entry point into the present moment. A very easy entry point into present moment awareness— some people may call it mindfulness— is to become more aware of whatever surrounds you here and now. Sense perceptions. Just be with what is. Give it attention, some attention. The room you're sitting in, maybe there's a window, you can look out of the window. You can see trees behind me, I can't see them, I know they're there. This is— you enter the present moment by becoming more aware of sense perceptions— auditory, visual, and perhaps others. And of course, what that does, you might notice, is there's less mental noise. The voice in the head that speaks and speaks that talks to you, that you have a dialogue with, a monologue that comments and interprets and takes positions, mental positions, identifies with, likes, dislikes, yes, no, never stops talking. That's the mind, the the voice in the head that most people are completely identified with, and that means they are not present. So the first step is take some attention away from that by simply becoming aware of sense perceptions. And if you can look at something natural, that's even better, because a natural thing— a tree, a flower, a plant, the sky— A natural thing lends itself to present moment awareness more than a man-made, human-made thing. So anything natural that you can look at for a moment, focus on, and give it attention, acknowledge it. You don't need to think about it. So it's just become aware of the present moment through sensory perception. And already, if you can do that, if perhaps a few minutes before you were very much immersed in the problem-making mind, it wasn't actually solving any problem because this continuous mind activity actually creates more problem than it solves if it's not focused, if it's unconscious. So already, suddenly, there's a certain amount of peace that descends upon this, the world, your world. It becomes a bit more peaceful. You become aware of the aliveness of things. To practice self-observation is implies that there is enough presence or awareness in you from where you can self-observe. And in almost all of you there is, maybe not all the time, but there is, there is enough to have brought you here, and that is quite a bit. So is there enough presence in you so that you can self-observe your own motivations, your own thought structures. What are the habitual thoughts that I think? So that you are not drawn continuously into every thought that comes and follow it where it wants to take you. One little thought comes in about your life, oh, and then another thought and you follow it, oh, oh no. And then before you know it, more thoughts come and then other conflicting thoughts, and no, no, that's not how it is, yes it is, no, I can't take anymore, and you believe in that thought too that you can't take anymore. So the ability to observe non-judgmentally judgmentally what goes on inside you. There is awareness. There needs to be awareness. So that is self-knowledge. Instead of giving more attention to your thinking, you just take your attention into the inner energy field of the body, and suddenly you feel the aliveness that pervades the entire body. And so you have taken consciousness away from the mind and put it in here, and you can't think that much anymore. You can't feel the body and be engaged in a lot of thinking. And if you really fully experience the aliveness in the inner body, the mind stops. And so that becomes an anchor for awareness, an anchor for presence. Even if you just— even if you cannot feel the entire body, it would be enough to just go into your hands with your attention. Just take consciousness into your hands and feel the aliveness in your hands. That alone can take attention away away from useless thinking and you continue to feel, because that is part of experiencing the present moment, which actually feels quite good. It feels good to be alive. That's an amazing realization. I would love to hear your thoughts on your definition of the law of attraction, but also maybe the 3 habits that you see people doing the most that hurt them from attracting effortlessly using the law of attraction? Right. Well, the main mistake perhaps that people make is not coming from a place of fullness, but coming from a place of neediness and putting too much attention on what is the undesirable conditions that they want to get rid of, but mentally almost continuously focusing on the undesirable condition, like not enough money, for example, which is a problem for many people. So let's use money for the example then, the law of attraction with money. How could we attract more wealth or financial abundance in our life using the law of attraction? Yeah, well, first of all is the acknowledgement of abundance that is already here and now and not focusing on the lack of abundance that is here now, which you could find by thinking about it, but to actually focus on where is the abundance that I can find here and now? And that is all around you. It is in nature. When you look at the abundance of nature, the multiplicity of life forms, the wonder of nature, the abundance of even, or let's say you're in a city, you can look at, appreciate all the things that you see around you. You don't need to necessarily own it or buy it, just appreciate it. So this first, the appreciation of the goodness of life that is always all around you, even if you have no money, there's still the goodness of life is all around you. You see it all around you, the sunshine. I mean, the sun is the ultimate symbol of abundance because it gives energy of itself almost eternal. I mean, eventually the sun will die, but as far as we are concerned, it's virtually eternal. It pours out energy continuously. And at some point we will realize that even on the level of energy, the universe is infinitely abundant. So we will no longer need things that we are using now. Fossil fuels and those things, we have access to other forms of energy that are more helpful. But the abundance is all around you. Let's say you walk past in the city, you're walking past a flower shop and you look at, wow, such beauty, appreciation, even to seeing a beautiful man or woman or even a beautiful car. Oh, I love this. Not why don't I have that car? Why does he have that car? It's all egoic much narratives that make you unhappy to appreciate. Nature, of course, is very powerful. And then you to appreciate the aliveness in your body that you're breathing and you can actually feel that your body, many people can't feel that. I call it the inner body awareness. Earth. You feel that every cell of your body is pervaded with a sense of aliveness, energy, and you can feel that. That is abundance. So there's abundance of life all around you. You can feel the life within you also. And so some people call that gratitude. I call it more appreciation, the appreciation of the abundance of life that is always around you. That's a wonderful starting point. Is there some type of discipline that is needed to be successful with conscious manifestation? If so, can you describe what the discipline is that is needed? Well, basically, I have already described the discipline that's needed for in your daily life to be a to be aware of yourself and of your own state of consciousness. Also an important factor perhaps that is implied in what we've been saying, but it's worth pointing it out explicitly, is the importance of what is conventionally called gratitude, but there could be other words. Gratitude is a very powerful transformational tool and also one of the most powerful tools for manifesting better things in your life. Now, what does that mean? The gratitude is to acknowledge the good in your life now. And it's surprising how many people don't do that, who can only see the bad in their lives or only complain. But it's extremely powerful to acknowledge the good that's in your life now.

When the Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago, He told people to seek out a quiet place in the forest and meditate there. That was an essential part of his teaching. So nature was an essential part of his teaching. And of course, as you know, probably the story goes that The Buddha sat under a tree when, as the story goes, he awakened spiritually or became enlightened. So his enlightenment is associated with the tree. A tree— don't believe what science tells you. There's more to the tree than that, and you can know that and sense that if you become still enough and give it your attention. Looking, almost sensing its stillness. So, but it is a reciprocal movement. It goes both ways. Yes, nature becomes conscious of itself through you, but nature also helps you to realign yourself with stillness.

Almost everybody has in one way or another been a victim of other people. But in some cases much, much more so than in others. Some element of having been victim is probably present in everybody's life. In other words, you are surrounded by unconscious humans, and then unconscious humans will inflict suffering on themselves and others. That's just how it is when you're a life on this planet. Childhood particularly is a place where many, many children experience abuse, either minor forms of abuse, emotional abuse, or they live in a very toxic family environment. And then of course there are other children who experience much more serious forms of abuse and really suffer and have these carry with them the memory, both mental and emotional memory, of what happened to them. In some cases, the memory is repressed because the child— the emotions may be repressed. The child could not deal with them and they had to repress them. And then later the possibility of remembering arises, and then you remember what happened to you. And how do you do— it's the question— what do you do with what happened to you? What was done to you? How do you deal with what was done to you by other humans, whether it happened in childhood or whether it happened later in life, whether it was a relatively minor thing or whether it was a very serious form of abuse. How do you, how do you deal with that? Now, the, the ego, the human ego is always looking for something to add to its sense of identity. It's looking for a stronger sense of identity because it always feels, I'm not enough. So it's, it's going, it's trying to add something that it can identify with, so add to its sense of self. And it very often happens that the memory of, of having been abused is used by the ego and is added to the ego's sense of self. So that means you not only remember what happened to you, the memory of what happened to you, which is a bundle of thoughts and emotions that go with it, the memory of what happened to you is more than just a memory. There is self-identification with the memory. In other words, it's not perceived as just something that happened to you, but it becomes part of who you perceive to be. So I am a victim of that. It's not that this was done to me, but I am a victim of— so it's the transition from memory to self. That is the victim identity. The ego does that because victim identity is a very powerful form of identity, a very powerful form of ego. And particularly in cases where the, the ego is always does not find sufficient things that it can identify with in this world. Because the, the most common form of identification, for example, is with the way you look. Uh, you look better than others, so you can identify with that. If you look worse than others, of course, that could become part of your victim identity because you've been been treated unfairly by life and life has made you look worse than others, that could become part of victim identity. Although that's not actually abuse, but it could also be incorporated into victim identity. There are millions of people in this world who believe in God and have no access, have not found within themselves access to spiritual dimension. So we are here, in the case of some of you who are perhaps new to this, so to speak, we are here for some of you to get perhaps a glimpse of it as you sit Sit here and watch and listen, and I will endeavor to put you in touch with that depth within you without which your life is frustrating and without which everything you undertake, every endeavor and every activity ultimately becomes frustrating. And for others, we are here just to deepen it, to provide a reminder on a conceptual level, but to deepen the dimension that they already have access to within so that it can be sustained in everyday life. One thing is accessing the spiritual dimension in a meditation setting like here and now. That's already a good thing if you are able to do that when you sit still. Become still inside. Another thing is to carry that with you, so to speak, so that it is there when you lead your life, when you do things, talk to people, interact, even when you think. To have that in the background. So we have the two steps, one could almost say. First is you realize that within, when you're not being disturbed like now, hopefully you're not being disturbed externally, although you may be disturbed as you sit here by your mind, that's quite possible, who says, "What is he talking about?" about, because the mind doesn't understand it. The conceptual mind alone is not sufficient to make this a satisfying experience for you. So for this to be a satisfying experience, you need to have at least a glimpse of what it is that I am pointing to. and a glimpse also of that which underlies the words, and that's ultimately not in me, but ultimately you can only glimpse that in you. There's a stillness behind the words as I speak within myself, and there can be a stillness in you as you listen to the words. And that would already be a glimpse of the spiritual dimension. So part of this is, of course, to give more attention to the present moment, because the more you think, the more future you generate. And the more attention you give to the present moment, the less thinking. Because to be really present, you don't think about it, you just are with it, give it attention. I recommend the little things of life to be more attentive to all the little things that make up every hour of every day, every minute, every hour, and give them more attention. Walking steps, one step at a time. Objects that you're handling, you're all the time you're handling objects in your life. They're always touching something, putting something here and there? Is everything that you handle just a means to an end, or are you able to just appreciate the simple presence even of a so-called inanimate object? Contemplation also of all the lovely things that make up your environment, part of your environment. For example, if I were sitting here alone, let's say I'm waiting for everybody to arrive, I might be sitting here looking, of course, at the floor, sense the stillness. And then there's a glass table here, And then there's a glass of water here, and there's a clock and a bell and tissues, and they all reflect the light in different ways. There's a little bit of a rainbow effect in the glass of water here, and then the lights are reflected on the The bells, almost like a mirror, and there's the clock ticking away. It's a beautiful scene. Sometimes you go to an art gallery, well, not so much with modern art, but a very favorite thing would be still life artists, and it took a while in art before they discovered, the artists in the history of art, before they discovered the seemingly insignificant things and started to give attention to those. Before that happened, they were very much interested in the huge things, the saints or the kings or the huge battle scenes or the big— they painted those things, or the important people or some dramatic thing, the volcanic eruption or whatever, fire. And then at some point, they started to discover the beauty and the incredible sense of the quality that is in the little things. Perhaps after these— more of these artists depicted relatively seemingly insignificant things, perhaps it motivated some people to give more attention to that. But even now, it's still— people very much overlook that. You overlook then a large part of your life. You don't give it attention. When I say give attention, there's an element of appreciation of everything, of the little things, and you begin to realize that your entire life consists mainly of little things.

Non-attachment to things does not mean not appreciating things, but It means not seeking yourself or to regard things as an extension of yourself or think of things as needing them to add to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. That's attachment. Attachment to things. It's an ego dysfunction, but in a way in which the ego survives. And it's not pleasant because you always need more and nothing really satisfies you. If ever you buy something and see seek some kind of self-satisfaction through it, very quickly you realize it doesn't work, and then you look for something else. However, there is a way of appreciating things, beautiful things or simple things. Appreciate is not being attached. You can love, even love, a piece of furniture or whatever it is, a little object or a piece of something you wear too. Not saying all this needs to disappear. You can like things and appreciate them, love them in a sense of having appreciated without the self-seeking in it. And when the thing leaves you, you lose it, or it breaks, or it gets stolen, or whatever, without the attachment, you'll say, oh, it's a pity, but you don't— there's no reaction and no pain. You're able to you let go, and that's a sign that something you appreciated, and yet when it's not there anymore, well, that's all right too. I always appreciated since I started in my— between the age of 30 and, well, up to the age of 30, I don't know, 36. My main transportation was bicycle, and I always appreciated my bicycle, and I developed a strange habit. When I parked my bicycle and chained it to something, a railing outside, whatever, I would take a few steps and look back on it and just appreciate its being. It's a very strange habit. You look back at it and look back one more time. There it is. And sometimes people ask, why are you looking back at your bicycle? Are you proud of it? Well, it wasn't the best particularly special bicycle, just a normal— no, I just appreciate its being there. And one day when then I got a car, somebody gave me an old car, and then I lent my bicycle to somebody, and suddenly that person came and said, "I'm so sorry, I lost your bike." I didn't lock it for a few minutes and now it's gone. And I had already gone through a shift in consciousness, so I said, "It's okay, it's gone, nothing we can do about it. Hopefully somebody else appreciates it now." Then I developed the same habit with my old car. I would look back when I parked it, I'd look back and just appreciate its being there. And I do the same now that I have a much better car. And now with my good car, people think I must be proud of this car or something, but it's not that. I did the same with the bicycle. It's a strange habit. I'm not recommending anybody that he should do that, but it's just, it's a way in which I appreciate it, its being.

In this world, dealing with things, creating things, achieving things. And being is about being aware of the present moment, which after all All is all you ever have. Whatever you achieve through becoming in the future eventually turns into the present moment. So as I speak to you, The meditation, if we even want to call it that— it's perhaps best to forget about the word. As I speak, be aware of the style the silence or the stillness between the words. Being aware means just notice that it's there. It's very simple. So you notice that in addition to the words there's another dimension that is easily overlooked, and that's the dimension of stillness, which we could also call space or spaciousness. So when you notice that there are two so to speak, two dimensions here, dimension of words which you hear and which then become thoughts in your head, and the dimension of no-thing, spaciousness. You just, so you just notice, that's all that's required. That there is that dimension also present, so you notice it in between words and even behind the words, so to speak. Now, when you notice it, what happens inside you? What does it mean to notice the stillness? Be aware of the stillness. It means you have become still inside. It means you're conscious, but at that moment, at this moment, You're not thinking, but you're alert, present, completely here, but not thinking. So that's the realization of the dimension of depth within you. How do we deal with the collective problem with through presence or through reactivity. And if we deal through— by the way, when you deal with something through presence, it means there's wisdom. This is another important word. Wisdom arises out of presence. Wisdom is different from intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to use the conceptual mind. That has its purpose, it's fine. But there is something deeper and more important in every, potentially in every human being, and that's not intelligence, it's wisdom. Wisdom is this faculty that arises out of presence, and then you can deal with situations truly intelligently rather than reactively. and you do not make the situation worse by your reaction to the situation. So you need wisdom. What the world needs is not more intelligence. Very soon AI is probably becoming more intelligent than humans, and the human challenge is to access the dimension where wisdom arises. That's— computers don't have that. They can be very good at thinking, probably. They're making incredible advances, but not wisdom. Wisdom— so we need to, as we are being almost replaced by artificial thinkers. This coincides with the transition of human beings to a higher state of consciousness than thinking, where of course they can still think, but they are not trapped in thinking. And so it's terribly important And again, coming back for a moment to that situation, collective situation, there's a collective challenge. We had the pandemic situation as a huge collective challenge. Was there wisdom in the way in which we reacted to that challenge? Not very much. There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of panic, a lot of anger, and many measures were taken, not necessarily seeing all the possible repercussions of measures that were taken that would still play themselves out in the next few years. We don't need to go into details, but the question is always, do you create more suffering by your reaction to a situation than is contained in the situation itself? That's lack of wisdom does that. And lack of wisdom means lack of presence or awareness, whatever word you want to use. Be aware of the conceptualizing your life and allowing an unhappy story in your head to make you unhappy. People think they're unhappy because of the circumstances of their lives. In most cases they're unhappy because of what they're telling themselves, or what the mind is saying about what's going on around you and has happened, will happen. So that's a— it's a suffering. The origin of suffering, to a large extent, is there. And even in extreme situations, having lost your home, for example, not knowing where to live, even there it applies. You do not, in the face of a challenge, If you are present, you don't convert the challenge into suffering. You just be with what is. And you start experimenting with little things in your life that cause you irritation, or a little bit of anger, or some impatience. That situations that are very common common every day. And you look at the situation, you become aware suddenly that there's irritation arising or anger arising, and you become aware that it doesn't actually feel very good, and the body knows it doesn't feel good. The body doesn't like it. There's irritation arising, and you think it's because of what's going on, but if you look more closely, Now, is this situation causing this, or is what I'm saying about it causing this? What my mind, the commentary of my mind. And in most cases, you will find it's the mental commentary that you had been identified with that causes the unhappiness. And then And you say, let's experiment with removing the commentary. How would I experience this situation if I did not add the mental baggage to it? So in other words, you're just now with the is-ness of this moment without any mental stuff being added to it that says this should not be happening, I don't want to be here, and many other things. Suddenly, you're fine. A minute ago, you were extremely irritated and angry, and you couldn't differentiate between the circumstances, external circumstances of your life, and the inner commentary about the circumstances. and this is the essence of unconsciousness— unable to differentiate between the circumstances and the commentary. So the circumstances and the commentary become a single— are experienced as a single phenomenon. And then when you suddenly, you can separate this is the is-ness of this moment, and it is as it is. Enormous power is suddenly arising in you, which is the power of the present moment, which is the power of unconditioned consciousness, also the power of dealing with the situation if there's something that you need to do. Suddenly, right action, as the Buddha calls it, right action happens. Or non-action, if action is not possible, then right surrender happens. But you allow this moment to be as it is without— but what does it mean? It means you don't add unnecessary mental baggage to it that argues with the is-ness of this moment. Take your attention more deeply into being or into attention itself. Purely practical, don't turn on the TV in your room, please. I have not installed hidden cameras to check on you. Second, limit your interaction, the interaction with your devices. If you cannot eliminate interaction with your devices completely, and I understand that you may not survive if you do, at least put aside just maybe once a day 15 minutes when you check your whatever it is that comes through, whatever text, email, Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder. It's all very important, but there's something more important, and that's why you're here. So now let's see, I suggest to you that you make an agreement with yourself not to go there any more than is absolutely necessary. For some incredible Bruce Lipton motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The movie The Matrix, everyone thinks science fiction. I go, no, no, that's a documentary.

Everybody got programmed.

That's a fact. That's a biological reality.

But what was interesting, they always said, well, there's a red pill, and if you take the red pill, you get out of the program.