Eckhart Tolle’s Guide to REAL HAPPINESS: What You Must Know About Being vs. DOING!

Many things come to you when you don't need them anymore. That's a lovely thing. No matter what you achieve, no matter where you are, there's always something missing. There's the essence of consciousness, and anything you achieve will be a manifestation of that consciousness that you can sense within you. So the thing is, it won't make you any happier, it won't make you any more fulfilled than you are now, because if you think it's going to make you more happy and more fulfilled, it's still ego. You need to find the fulfillment and the true happiness by connecting a deep I, then anything else is secondary. And then you can play the game of life from there. The mind says, let me try to figure this out. That doesn't make sense. Meaning I've been meditating for nothing all these years.

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.

Manifesting is a secondary thing. It's a bonus. Yes, it is the destiny of humans, of course, to humanity as a whole, eventually to live in a different state of consciousness where all the stuff that we are doing now won't be necessary anymore, so that you can affect external reality through your inner state of consciousness. But the thing is, you no longer have this need for external reality to satisfy you, because that is the egoic need. And then what you create in your external reality is very different from somebody who needs external reality for self-satisfaction, for some kind of sense of happiness or fulfillment. And I need that. Jesus pointed to the future possibility that is in the next stage in human evolution when he said, he talked about faith. Now that's an interesting word, faith. There are two words used in the New Testament, or Bible, belief and faith. Now they are confused and people have misunderstood the basic message because there's a confusion between belief and faith. In some languages even it's the same word, but fortunately in English you have two words, and there people don't understand they're very different things. So in conventional Christianity, it talks about salvation, and it says, if you believe in Christ and that he died for your sins, and so you partake a story basically, you believe this story to be true, If you believe that, you're saved. Now, belief is— to believe something to be true means you don't know if it's true, because if you knew it, you would know it, you wouldn't believe it. I don't believe that there's a flower here, I know that there's a flower here. So belief implies that you don't know, but you're certain that it is the case. And usually belief refers to something that you believe in, a story, or something you've been told, or the existence of something that you cannot verify. I believe in angels. Or maybe you have seen them, but if you've seen an angel, then you no longer believe, then you know there are angels. You've never seen them, you believe in angels. Now, faith is something different, and because of the confusion of faith and belief, the misunderstanding arose in Christianity that the belief in a story can save you. What Jesus said is what saves you is faith. And he said, if you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, you can tell this mountain, remove yourself from here to there, and it will be done. Now what is that? That's very different from believing in a story. Faith is a deep sense of trust or connectedness. It's not faith in anything in particular. It's not a mental thing. Faith is not— belief is mental. Faith is to be rooted in being, and out of that being arises this enormous trust in life. And that really what we're talking about is the deep I. When you connect to the deep I, suddenly you feel rooted in something vast. That removes fear. And when fear is removed, you have trust. And when you have trust, that is another word for faith, that complete trust in this power that you feel that is not separate from who you are, but infinitely vaster than this little person. So you can sense that vast power in you, and sensing this power in you, which is consciousness that emanates from the source of all life, sensing that power in you is faith. It's not a mental thing. And so when you are connected with this power, Then Jesus says in this parable, you can affect things in the outer world much more easily, and that is manifestation. And he talks about another thing. He says, when you pray for something, my translation is feel that you already have it, and then you will have it, it will be given to you. So you need to already feel the fullness of life now, which is when you connect yourself to the deep I. In that, you don't need anything anymore. Anything you could obtain is already there. So when you try to manifest because you think you need something, then you're not very good at manifesting, but you I mean, you may succeed, but it won't make you happy, it won't satisfy you. But the power is in you, and so anything you want to manifest, you feel that power, which is faith, trust, as an immediate realization. And then you might have a mental image which will no longer be egoically determined. It won't be something that you think, is going to satisfy you eventually, or eventually make you happy or famous, or make you into a saint, or become a spiritually evolved being. It's all future stuff. No, it's just an externalization of something that is already within you. So that power is the cream. The cream, and the external things are the skimmed milk. So there's the essence of consciousness, and anything you achieve will have— will be a manifestation of that consciousness that you can sense within you. So the thing is, it won't make you any happier, it won't make you any more fulfilled than you are now, because if you think it's going to make you more happy and more fulfilled, it's still ego. You need to find the fulfillment and the true happiness by connecting with the deep I. Then anything else is secondary, and then you can play the game of life from there. You don't need anything anymore. And then when you don't need anything anymore, you can play with it. And things, many things come to you when you don't need them anymore. That's a lovely thing. A little disappointing for the ego because the ego would love many things that then come to you. But when the ego isn't there anymore, the ego can't enjoy it anymore. That's a bummer. Also, you don't— when you achieve things or something comes to you, you don't claim credit anymore. That's one of the things that, again, the ego would love that. But when this power that is in you manifests through it, You do something, you create something, you attract something, and there's no person who says, "Wow, I did it, I made it, I finally made it, I did it, I'm a great spiritual teacher, I've been trying for decades and now I've made it, yeah!" That doesn't work. If that happened, you would immediately, the power would immediately shut down. And then you would feel abandoned. Where is it? And then you would come and try and give a talk and say, "Uh, I should be saying something, I don't know what." Or you just talk from memory. Faith. So faith is a foundation for also for manifesting things. If you bring a mental image to the feeling of faith, which is a connectedness with the deep I, and then you bring a mental image to it, then it's easy to manifest. So you manifest out of the sense of fullness of life, not out of a sense of lack. Lack, not of a sense of needing something. If you need something, you can't manifest very well. You can still be successful now and then, but it won't make you happy. So the neediness, whether it's money or some other kind of achievement or success or relationship, whatever people want, if you need it, You're weak because you haven't found the power that is in you, because then you think there's something out there that will satisfy you. But if you don't need it because you're already totally fine with this moment as it is, it couldn't be better because you have realized who you are in the depths of your being, then you can play with things. Bring a mental image to that feeling of fullness. That's what Jesus meant when he says, if you pray for something, feel that you already have it, because there you already have it. You won't feel better when you get it, you just feel the same. I don't feel any better now than I did when I was Nobody. I'm still nobody, but people now think I'm somebody. But at that time, I was running out of money. I was writing The Power of Now, doing some counseling sessions, and having a bicycle for a time. And then somebody gave me an old car. It was fine to be nobody. I could go into a cafe, sit there, nobody recognized me. Of course not, because nobody knew me, and that was perfectly wonderful. I love being invisible. And then the success came that my ego would have said when I was in my 20s, it would have said, "That's what I want, that's what I want, the recognition and doing something that changes the world." And now I do. Yes, something, it does change the world, but I didn't do it. It just, it came through. It was consciousness working through this form, that's all.

You have your name and then you believe that that's who you are. You say, "I am so-and-so," not realizing that the vocal cords are producing a sequence of sounds, whatever your name is, I am— Oh, now I know who I am. It's a thought form that begins— that is the receptacle, and it's also the beginning of your prison, of the mental prison in which your sense of self is reduced to something ultimately insignificant, and you are trapped in that. So next thing is possessions.

This is mine.

A child identifies with its toy, and then another child takes the toy away. And that's the first moment of deep suffering because it was your first identification with a possession, the sense of ownership. Identification with a possession, and another child takes it away. And the suffering of that child is incredible.

Oh, the pain.

But a few minutes later, the toy becomes unimportant. Suddenly, the child loses interest completely.

It forgot.

It forgets that It was his until the mechanism starts again, but it's removed and then enormous pain happens because the sense of self had become identified with the object and the object is removed. Enormous pain arises. And this is the most— on the most basic— this is the most basic level at which this operates. But throughout a person's life, that mechanism operates. The loss of something that was yours, and then you lose it, and then it creates an injury in your sense of self because you had identified with it. It creates suffering again. Then many things. So after this, then the child suddenly begins to identify with other things. Many other possessions and even abilities come in. I can do this, but you can't do that. I can jump over this ball, but can you do that? No, you can't.

But I can do it. I, I.

So abilities, possessions, anything, then a young person seeks a stronger identity. Every young person is searching for a stronger identity, something to identify.

It's an unconscious process.

And this is, for example, if in very underprivileged backgrounds, if the Gangs are a phenomenon. Young boys, teenagers become members of a gang because they're in desperate search of an identity and they don't have much else to identify with. So they need to start a gang and then you get your tattoos that shows you what gang you belong to and the others become your mortal enemies. That is how the ego operates. It needs its enemies. And this is on the most basic level, but it operates on all levels. The ego always needs the other because only by comparing itself to the other can it strengthen its sense of identity. So this applies whether we talked about physical appearance, possessions— I have this, you don't have it— achievements, what I can do but you can't do it. Comparison always operates, and the other is needed. The other is needed to sustain and feed your sense of self. And the ego needs to emphasize the otherness of others. It needs to really, because otherwise its sense of self would begin to evaporate. And that would be a dreadful thing. The ego loves— you can see how when discussions, you discuss something with someone, different viewpoints, different opinion, and suddenly people get very emotional.

Why?

Somebody questions their viewpoint or their opinion. And then suddenly a shift happens in them, enormous amount of anger or negative emotion. They're in the grip of a wave of emotion, and then they shout something back and the other one shouts something back. And if they're very unconscious— unconscious, by the way, means completely identified with the egoic sense of self. That's spiritually speaking unconscious. If they're very unconscious, even physical violence can happen over a difference of opinion, which is two mental positions. I would say it's politics or whatever it may be. Two mental positions, different, different viewpoints, different opinions. But because of total identification with a mental position, they feel threatened by anything that questions their mental position. It is perceived as an attack on their very self. And it is an attack on their self because the self consisted of identification with that thought form. And so some people then come to blows. They physically— physical violence happens. And all this is Spiritually speaking, you are unconscious. Just before we go deeper, briefly mention we've been talking about ego identifications on an individual level, but the part of every person's ego is some certain percentage of ego is also collective. So ego identification is also individual nature, possessions, achievements, body image, whatever. But it's also collective. For example, obviously a minor thing, the Oilers would be part of your collective ego, which you adopt. But there's more to collective ego. It can consist of anything cultural that surrounds you, that gives you your sense of self. Even a simple thing like being a man or woman. And for some people, that is an important part of their sense of self. And there are some countries still in this world where, because they're very old patriarchal cultures— well, the West used to be like that also, mostly old patriarchal cultures. If you're born, if you're a man, you're immediately in many ways superior to being a woman in the old patriarchy. So no matter how stupid you are, you are superior to 50% of the humanity, the others. So you can derive your sense of identity from this collective, your gender collective.

I'm the man.

And then in some countries, the woman is also conditioned to behave in certain ways so that the collective image of how a woman should behave becomes part of her sense of identity and behavior.

So in some countries, a woman is not supposed to laugh out loud.

In the West, we often see a woman laugh, ahahaha.

But if you go to Japan, a woman wouldn't laugh like that. She goes, "Hee hee hee hee." She's a woman.

Now, gradually, there's a little bit of happening in the contemporary world. Men are becoming a little bit less men and the women a bit— they're approaching a bit more, which may be a good thing. In addition, you have now, if being a man or woman is not enough for you in the modern world, you have a growing choice of genders to choose from. So if you're not happy with one, you can adopt others and then identify with that. But it's fine. It's ultimately none of this is who or what you are. It's only who or what you are temporarily in your— I call this your form identity, your identity of form. Form means not only the physical form, but also the psychological form. This entity that when you say I or you talk about my life, you refer to this mind-made entity that you identify with. That's me.

It's very much—

and all this is conditioned by all— by your upbringing, your surrounding culture, and so on. It's a collection of conditioning, mental, emotional conditioning. And that becomes what— this is what people refer to when they say 'I,' they refer to this mentally created entity, which is ultimately a narrative in their mind, a story. They call it 'my life.' Everybody has a life. So you call it 'my life.' What about my— oh, my life, let me When you start thinking about my life, your life, it gets really problematic because all kinds of things have already happened that perhaps shouldn't have happened.

Was that— wasn't meant to happen. And all kinds of strange things could still happen. There's hope and there's fear as far as future is concerned.

I could lose what I already have, or I could gain all the things that I think I need to make me happy and fulfilled and complete. But the sense of self, the egoic self, is never really fulfilled and complete.

No matter what you achieve, no matter where you are, there's always something missing. Time is ultimately not helpful as far as your awakening is concerned. Time is not helpful. In fact, it's a hindrance in your awakening. Okay, so no time is required for awakening. Okay, now let me— the mind says, let me try to figure this out. That doesn't make sense. Meaning I've been meditating for nothing all these years? Meditation, if it works as it should, ultimately the purpose is, the aim is to be present. While you meditate, not to seek some future condition. This is the fundamental mistake that meditators make, is they imagine a future condition that they want to arrive at or achieve, and they think, if I just practice more and harder, I will eventually achieve that awakened state. And that belief is actually a hindrance. So, because then you are doing a meditation, and if you're doing a meditation, you miss the one thing that is the awakened state. And we could call that being, the realization of being. There needs to be a cessation of doing, an end of doing, in order to realize being. You have the two dimensions in your life. Doing, it requires time, and being, that requires no time. Now most humans are unaware of being. They are lost in doing. And the primordial doing is thinking. And then you miss the now, which is inseparable from being. So I invite you, as we speak, or I speak, or the speaking happens— I don't know who is speaking, something is speaking— invite you here and now to become aware of being here and now. Now, how does— some of you may just, as I say these words, which are only pointers like signposts, As I say these words, some of you may be able to sense their own beingness. You sense that you are. And if you cannot, if you have no idea what I'm talking about yet, you're still trying to understand it mentally, Let me take you then gradually into being. Let's become aware of this moment. And the first thing you become aware of in this moment is sense perceptions—visual, auditory, And then some of the others do tactile and so on, but the most predominant sense perceptions are the visual and the auditory. You hear and you see. So this is the— you're becoming aware of the present moment, which has taken the form of sensory perception. Here and now, and you look around the room, or you see this person, so-called person, sitting on a chair, and you can take in the totality of the room. The question that arises is: Are you able to take in the totality of your sense perceptions at this moment without any mental commentary? Just be like a— maybe like a 1-year-old child hasn't learned language yet and just looks in wonder and amazement at the world. You don't have to look like that, I'm just proving. So you look around, it's an innocent perception without— is it possible for you? Only you can answer that for yourself, but not through words, through just knowing. Are you able to be here in this moment Allow your sense perceptions to be there. Being aware of all these things without commenting mentally, without interpretation, just let it be. Like the Beatles song, 'Let it be.' No, there's a shift in consciousness that's already happened because when you interpret your sense perceptions, that's the conditioning of your mind. It's a person perceiving things. But when you don't interpret, there's still a knowing there, but not conceptual. There's a deeper knowing, but the person isn't there really at that moment when you're not commenting, not interpreting, not imposing some kind of interpretation on the world. Then the person that was there before when you were commenting has been replaced by awareness, presence. So there was a person, but then the person comes to an end temporarily, and there's simply— who or what is perceiving this room when you are not commenting according to the conditioning of your past?

Who or what is perceiving this?

Awareness itself. So something has receded, the person, and something else has arisen to replace it, so to speak, awareness. That awareness is very still. Stillness is sometimes what in spiritual discourse Stillness is another important term. It's just another pointer. It's stillness. So, and that stillness is not a sleepy stillness. It's an alert stillness. And so a shift has taken place from being a conditioned entity, conditioned by the past, and now the shift has happened And suddenly, just, you are that space of awareness. And so the next step in presence, you're not just— yes, you are aware of your sense perceptions and you're not labeling, but you're also aware of the awareness itself. Through which you are able to be aware of sense perceptions. You're aware of your— let's say, words are very limited, but we have to use them— you're aware of the being of yourself, the presence that makes sense perceptions possible, the presence of consciousness that makes sense perceptions possible. And you can sense that not as a subject-object relation, relationship, although when we talk about it, it sounds like a subject-object relationship because language operates in that way. Language has a subject and an object, so as you use language, you say, "I am aware of awareness." That creates a duality that's not really there. When you talk about it, there's an "I" that is aware of awareness, so there's two of you, but there isn't. It's only when you start talking about it. It's you become aware of yourself as awareness itself. Awareness becomes self-aware, whatever you want to call it. But that is an amazing thing that you are able to enter the, even if it's just for brief moments. For brief moments, you can become free of the person. Oh my God, that heaviness, that burden that people carry around, that they are so identified with that they are that heaviness. And that's why many persons, their identity is intimately bound up with their this burden of problems, that I have to figure out how to solve my life problems. So for many people, their identity is, "I am a problem to be solved," that's seeking a solution. And then you go to a therapist. However, if this— if it's the therapist is present that makes a huge difference, but I don't know. I'm sure there are some therapists here, and some of you are probably doing fantastic work because you're able to, even though the client or patient is talking, perhaps you are able to be present while you listen instead of interpreting everything, but be the consciousness. And then perhaps some awakening can happen if you embody presence. So the little— the big secret— it's not a secret, but it seems to be a secret— to be aware that you're conscious, to be aware of yourself as consciousness, as awareness, as presence, to sense the beingness of you, which is not the you, the limited you, it's actually the beingness of the universe in you.

You are a ray of sunlight and as this ray of sunlight you've always been looking out here. So you're the little ray of sunlight thinking you're an independent entity with other rays of sunlight everywhere around you and they're all looking for things. And then the ray of sunlight that considers itself to be an independent entity autonomous, having certain relationships with other rays of sunlight and even with itself, the me, becomes still for a moment and then realizes there is a depth to who I am that goes all the way back to the sun. But it can only realize that when you stop thinking. Then you become aware, the ray of sunlight, you become aware of your own depth. You don't, you don't, there's no end to, to you. There isn't this finite little thing. As the mind, the thinking mind stops, there is suddenly a depth. And in that you realize that you are not a disconnected disconnected fragment that has been thrown into this universe by some malignant deity that enjoys your suffering. No, but that you are an essential part of the universe. You haven't been thrown into the universe. You have come out of the universe. And so in this analogy, you have come out of the sun, and as the mind stops, and then you can actually sense how far you go back, but there's no distance. You are actually never, never separate from the sun. The ray of sunlight realizes suddenly that it is still actually part of the sun. Nobody can say where the sun actually finishes because it doesn't have a boundary. So the light that reaches us from the sun, one could say, is still part of the sun. We are all within this vast energy field of the sun. This is an analogy. Sun is the closest you can get in the sense-perceived universe to the source of all life because in the sense-perceived universe here, the sun is the source of all life. The very heat in your body comes actually from the sun. It's all, all the energy we use is stored-up energy from the sun and we, one day we'll find a way of using sun energy in a much more intelligent way than fossil fuels and so on, but that's another matter. So you realize the sun, the ray of sunlight realizes that it's still connected to this vastness, to the source. And that's the self-realization of the ray of sunlight that it was never separate and could not even exist as a separate entity. It's totally impossible. And then the ray of sunlight actually becomes a much more peaceful and relaxed being while it's still there. That's— I'm talking about you, of course. Because you've realized without any needing to convince yourself of anything or take up some new belief. No, through actual direct realization, you realize your connectedness with something very deep. So you're not just a little person. You're also the kingdom of heaven, or as the Buddha called it, spaciousness, sunyata. So there's two of you, and this is not an ultimate truth. Ultimately there's only one, but let's just temporarily— it sometimes helps to have a certain perspective on things. There's two of you. The, that which expresses itself in form, the physical body, and the, the, all the stuff that's in your mind and in your emotional field, that all that makes up the person that has a limited lifespan, even if there's a continuation of that after the body dissolves. It has a limited lifespan because all forms— no form is permanent, so all forms are continuously changing.

It would be dreadful if you survived as this personality that you are now.

I mean, who would want to be the same personality for centuries and millennia. There's an evolution of consciousness. So the body is short-lived. That which is beyond the body may continue for a while as it continues on its journey of self-realization. But you are that which is the form identity, and more essentially you are that essence identity, the two. And all the great spiritual teachings, all they do is point to the possibility for you to realize that there's more to you than meets the eye. To use an expression, what meets the eye is first when you see another human being or you look in the mirror or you look down on yourself, what meets the eye is first the physical body. Then what meets the eye, metaphorically speaking, when you meet another human being is their personality, the things, how they act, what they say, how they behave. It's already unseen, but it manifests in the scene, so it meets the eye. That's all the form of the person and your own form. And all spiritual teachings really come down to somebody trying to show you that there is another dimension to who you are. And whether they call it the kingdom of heaven that's within you, or the emptiness that's the essence of who you are. That's, or in other teachings, the true self. In certain Indian, in India, they talk about the true self, or the self it's sometimes called. And then people who haven't had any, not even a glimpse of a realization, they may be religious scholars, they say that Hinduism, the Hindu talk of a true self or the great self, and the Buddhist teachings of no self is totally opposite. They don't realize that they're talking about the same thing from a different perspective. When Buddha talks about the unreality of the self, he's talking about the unreality of your form identity, the relative, the dreamlike nature of your form identity. And in order to get you to realize your essence identity, he talked about inner spaciousness. And what is meditation all about that he taught is to help you stop the mind, not as an active thing but as a relinquishing, and then there's the spaciousness. And then you know who you are without having any added, without having added any concept in your mind to who you are. When we think of knowing who you are, we think you must know more about you, but that's not that knowing. If you want to know more about you, then you'd have to perhaps go to psychoanalysis, and then you can delve deeply into your form identity, and many things will come up. But eventually you'd have to go deeper beyond that. In order to be free of complete identification with form. So let me just remind you that the essential practice is to relinquish Thinking not by falling below thinking, but by rising above thinking.

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My life is something, is a narrative in many people's heads that causes an enormous amount of suffering. You can't imagine how many people's lives are made miserable by a very unhappy story in their head that they identify with and call it my life. That creates people just driven to suicide. By the unhappy narrative that tells them how awful my life is. And they never realize they are trapped in a delusion of thought. If they were able to step out, and again the question arises, where is your life? Uh, let me think, this is all my past, My dreadful past, my probably dreadful future, that's my life. All the things have gone wrong, all the things that I missed, all the things that people have done to me, all the things that the universe has done to me, all that is my— oh, it's been just awful. Nobody has suffered more than me. Nobody. And that's— and people don't realize how much unhappiness is derived from what they're telling themselves in the head. Now these people need to come out of that if they want to be free. Do you want to suffer more? No. Okay, are you ready to step out of the narrative in your mind that says "my life" and realize that you don't have a life, that the whole thing that you call What you call my life is certain thoughts that float around in your head and you identify with them. You don't have a life, you are life. And to realize that you are life, which is a temporary expression of the one life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe, you are a temporary expression of that one life. You don't have a life, And if you don't have a life, you can't lose your life. People say, "He lost his life." "She lost her life." How does that work? There's he and there's his life. Who is he and who is the life that he lost? There's a duality there that doesn't exist. You can't lose your life because you are life. You don't have a life, they are just memories and thoughts in your head, yes, but the life that you are can only be realized in the present moment. And in the present moment, the first realization comes to you when you realize that there are there can be gaps between thoughts when you realize that apart from thinking, there is another dimension of consciousness in you that is not disconnected from thinking but deeper than thinking. We could say higher too. Higher than thinking. And what is that? That is awareness or presence. And you realize this dimension of consciousness in you right now When you become conscious— I'm slowing down, as you might have noticed— when you become conscious that there are not only words here being spoken, but there are also gaps between the words. And you become aware that there are these gaps between words or between one sentence and another. And when you become conscious of that gap, which we could also call a moment of stillness, you might notice that every time you are conscious of this little gap, when there's no word, in that moment you are aware but you're not thinking, and you haven't disappeared. In that space of awareness The essence of who you are is there fully, and yet it's almost— it's like nothing, and yet it's not nothing. Undoubtedly, there is a presence that is deeper than thought, out of which thought arises. And to sense in yourself this presence that has no characteristics as such, it's pure conscious presence, to sense that is to get in touch with the essence of who you are. And that essence If we had to attach a word to it to describe it, we would probably call it consciousness. You are that consciousness out of which thoughts come. In the same way, I would— I I sense or experience thoughts as movements on the surface, like waves and ripples on the surface of a vast ocean.

Thinking.

Now, if you, if you only If you only live on the surface, then all that you have is waves and ripples, which are thoughts. It's only this dimension for you, and you can't stop thinking. And you look for some kind of answer to who you are on that level. Only. Maybe if I join with this ripple, I'll feel better. Or I need to accumulate power over all these other ripples, then I'll be someone. Or I need to own more ripples than others. But always never being able to go beyond that. So the cessation of thinking, which is not falling below thinking, which is not a regressive step to where the animals still dwell, because the animal has not yet arrived at conceptual thinking. Consciousness, yes, but not conceptualization, not thought. The animal— are we regressing when I say, when I present to you the possibility of discovering within yourself the possibility of stepping out of thought? But I'm not saying this is a regressive step towards the animal or the vegetable realm. The dog is more peaceful and joyous than most humans, except neurotic dogs that have lived for too long with humans. The dog is more joyous, non-judgmental, and alive than most of the people who own these dogs because the dog does not have a burden of a conceptual self. It does not have the burden of an ego, except some neurotic dogs or cats have already a beginning of little egos, yes, But put that aside. So the dog looks at you and does not judge you because it doesn't have concepts but is conscious. But are we going there? I mean, it's wonderful. Why do people love dogs and cats? Why do they go, "Ah"? Because when you look into the eyes of a dog, you realize for a moment, you connect with the dog and you can sense the beingness or the consciousness of the dog looking through the eyes back at you. And this consciousness of the dog, although it's not the same as the human consciousness, it's also one aspect of the universal consciousness temporarily taking on the form of dog. This consciousness looks at you, and for a moment you feel free to not think, and you might not even know that. When you look at the eyes of the dog for 3 or 4 seconds, you're not thinking when you feel joy arising. 3 or 4 seconds, and it makes you feel good. The cessation of thought makes you feel good because then you sense your beingness, your deeper presence, your beingness. And this is why people get connected with animals. They give them moments of sanity. The capacity for compassion is something that is part of the evolution of the human being. Humans, even nowadays, in this present time, there are still millions of humans who are so trapped in their egoic sense of self that they are incapable of sensing, feeling the reality of another human being. The word that we need to use here is empathy, which is closely related with compassion. There are still many, many humans on the planet who are so trapped in the egoic sense of self that they are incapable of empathy. And then there are many others in whom empathy is present to a greater or lesser degree. And without empathy, of course, there can be No compassion. Now, this is particularly important when we talk about compassion with reference to other human beings or other life forms. For a moment, let's talk though about compassion towards yourself and what that means. Particularly as awareness begins to awaken in you, you become aware of your own patterns. You become— you begin to become aware of your own behavior, not necessarily in the moment that it happens, but in many cases, those people who are beginning to awaken, the awareness is beginning to arise, those humans become aware, for example, after they have engaged in unconscious speech, unconscious behavior, reactive behavior, and suddenly they become aware, "Oh, that's what I did. I got completely taken over by anger. I got completely taken over by my overreaction. I said things to that person that I didn't really mean, that they just came out of my mouth." or even, I could even go to physical violence. I did that, how could I have done that? And many humans who are awakening are experiencing these times when they begin to judge themselves as not good enough. So that is something to be aware of when you, as you begin to awaken, you become an observer of yourself to a greater or lesser degree, rather than just being totally identified with whatever comes into your head and whatever words come out of your mouth and whatever action you're engaged in, you're so identified that there's not the slightest space of awareness. Now, there's no point in talking about compassion towards yourself to people who are so unconscious. So, we talk about compassion, that already implies that there's some awareness in you, you're aware of yourself, you're aware of your behavior, and you experience different levels of awareness at different times in your life from day to day. And then you become aware that there are times when you are unconscious, and usually then you wake up, so to speak, out of it and say, "Oh, I got taken over by my pain body again." And for many people, that can become a source of suffering because they judge themselves as not good enough, and they even have a hostile, begin to have a hostile relationship towards the more unconscious aspects of who they are, your imperfections. So compassion towards yourself is to still realize there are areas in your life where you're still unconscious, and that's how it is, and you forgive yourself. Again, forgiveness is related also, all these things are closely related, empathy, compassion, forgiveness. You forgive yourself for your moments of unconsciousness, or if you've done bad things in the past. And this is— often people have asked me that question. You have, in the past, when you were not as aware or completely unaware, you did certain things that you now regret. You recognize them as Very unconscious. And what do you do with that? The compassionate way is to see that at that time, you could not have acted differently because your actions reflected your degree of unconsciousness, consciousness, unconsciousness. And that recognition is compassion. You forgive yourself. Instead of making an identity out of your own past unconsciousness for yourself and say, "I am this kind of a person," which is again a mental construct, instead of making an identity for yourself out of past unconsciousness, You recognized your behavior at that time as unconscious, so you manifested the collective— ultimately the collective unconsciousness that is in the human psyche, the collective psyche of humanity. And so when you don't make it into an identity, then you realize that it is not who you essentially are. And so you become compassionate towards yourself. But it also applies to the present, in the present time, not making impossible demands of perfection, and then you fall short. There are certain things, certain areas in your life that will never be perfect on the level of form. You cannot be a perfect human being on the level of form. There are always certain things that you are good at, other things you are not good at. That's fine. No matter how conscious you are. So you don't demand perfection of yourself, not on this level of form. The realization is there is a deep— at the deepest level of who you are, there is perfection already. You are already perfect, complete, whole at the deepest level, yes. On the outer level, There will always be certain imperfections. And so you have compassion with yourself as far as your imperfections are concerned, which does not mean that you actually indulge in behavior that is harmful to yourself or others and say, "Oh, that's okay, I have compassion towards myself, so I continue to get drunk 3 times a week and beat up my wife, and I'm just compassionate." 'compassionate towards myself, my errors.' This is not what I'm talking about. You cannot become compassionate with inflicting suffering on others as you recognize it now. If it happened in the past, that is different. So there are some forms of behavior that need to be rectified. Through awareness, through presence. Have the main focus of your attention in your daily life in the present moment. The rest of your attention— so that's the main focus, here's this. The rest of your attention is where you want to go to, whatever task you're engaged in has a certain purpose. The purpose is you want to finish the task, then it has achieved its purpose. And that's here, and that's in the— in your peripheral, the peripheral vision of your consciousness. That's where you want to get to, and this is what you're doing in order to get there. And your main attention is not where you want to get, and in the meantime you're just doing it in order to get there, you can see how that already creates an inner stress. I'm here, but I want to be there. That's a normal way of living, is the main part of people's attention is there, but in the meantime they are here.

Where they don't really want to be.

Rather be there, as shown in famous bumper stickers on cars which say something like, "I'd rather be fishing." When I visited Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher who has now passed away, he lived on Maui, On his car, I saw a bumper sticker which said, "I'd rather be here now." That's a good teaching on a bumper sticker. So your attention is— and this is a reversal almost of how humans normally usually live. It's the opposite. And so that is in itself already a shift in consciousness. And then of course you're also aware of the past. There's certain things that may have relevance in the present. That's fine. So peripherally, past and future. Usually future is more important because you're moving towards towards that. And here's the central vision of present moment. In the present moment, you're either actively doing something or you are more passively perceiving something. You're there as an observer, or you're just there, not actively doing, but simply perceiving. It could be when you travel back from here already, you might be sitting in a car. If you're driving, you're doing something. There it's particularly important to be present. Or you might be sitting on a plane, and this is a good opportunity for being the— you go into the witnessing mode. There's nothing particular to do unless you get out your laptop and start doing. That's fine. And sometimes situations arise that are problematic. That's quite normal in life. They are challenging rather than problematic. And then you face the challenge, you look at it, so to speak, not necessarily visually, but you give it attention that this is a challenge. Instead of unconscious reactivity, The challenge is: your flight is cancelled. Oh, it's not one of the greatest challenges a human can have, but some people react as if it were. And when any challenge arises, is there anything I can do to respond to this situation? Or is that something where I simply have to say, well, for the time being, I accept the way it is because right now there's nothing I can do? I heard, for example, at some airports they're so busy, not sufficiently staffed people, when the plane lands they're still trapped on the plane for 2 or 3 hours. It has happened in Toronto and other places. That's a good opportunity for surrender. Some people can't do that. They start start screaming and shouting. It doesn't have no particular purpose, but they can't help it. It happens to them. So always the question was, is this an opportunity for surrender, or is action called for? That is some practice to get used to until it becomes second nature to have the your attention in the present moment rather than elsewhere. And it usually implies you are aware of your surroundings. That's inseparable from present, being in the present through your senses. A more alert human being than a normal human being but an alertness in which there is no tension. Often alertness in a human is associated with, with being tense, but there's an alertness without tension. But it's not enough to be just aware of your sense perceptions. That's a good thing. It also can help you to avoid dangerous situations that otherwise you just stumble into and you don't know how you got there. You're more alert of your surroundings. You see how animals in that sense are very alert, because if they are not, they get eaten by other animals. So many animals have this incredible alertness, not the same as the human alertness, but it is an alert awareness of their surroundings that many humans don't have. They walk in the street and they're not really there. In their mind thinking about all kinds of things except where they are. And so they're not here. Whereas the bird sitting on a branch or the deer that's stepping out of the forest and there's a field and the deer stops for a moment and and the ears, they're very huge ears, they go— and it can hear probably 100 times better than a human. Or a bird on a branch sitting, it goes like this. And then suddenly it goes— And of course there's no decision-making involved when a bird suddenly flies off. It did not think, "I'm now going to fly off this branch." and I'm going to go over there. It just happens. There is a flow to life. There's no mind. There is a consciousness there, but there's no conceptualization at all. But when an animal rests, an animal also rests completely. It is completely at rest. Not thinking about my life. I have to figure something out. What's the purpose of it all? This is why it can be very healing to live with an animal. Yes, it can be quite a bit of work too, but it can be very healing to live with an animal and to have an animal presence in the house— dog, cat, usually. This unproblematic existence, except when the dog or cat are neurotic, which can happen, but there are reasons for that, usually connected to their early life, just like human childhood, when things go wrong in childhood, it leaves traces. So if— but usually a dog's and cat's normal state is, unless they're hungry or want to go for a walk. They can be really rooted in being and joyful. The cat purrs, the dog's tail wags, and it's a joy just to see it. And then you can contemplate with detachment, what time is doing to your body, okay? Because your sense of identity is no longer derived from body, who you are. Obviously, that's That's sometimes a difficult step to take, to go deeper beyond. There are some people who have a particularly— a body that is more beautiful or more well-developed than normal bodies. Normal bodies are kind of, "Mm, I'm not sure." And then there are other bodies that are definitely not great. But people still identify, right, it makes them unhappy. For many years I had body identification too, but not in a proud way, it made me unhappy because it was less, much less good-looking than most other bodies actually. And so if you have body identification, it can either create pride, And enhance your ego? Well, any identification enhances your ego, even a negative one. So I had body, negative body identification made me unhappy for quite a few years. And that's also ego, the ego, the negative profile of ego. Egos are not always happy egos. Many egos are miserable egos. Just as strong as the happy ones that say, "I'm the greatest." And then the other ego, "I'm the most miserable," just as strong as the other. So ego is not just, "Me, look at me." Also, ego is, "Oh no, why is all these horrible things always happening to me? I feel so miserable. I'm not..." It's all still ego, it's narratives. So anyway, I had ego identification, but I could see perhaps a little bit easier for if you have a negative identification with the body, it's perhaps easier to let go because you're more motivated to let go of that. But if you have a positive body identification, very good looking, whether man or woman, or strength. If you look like Arnold in his younger years, How can you not identify with your body if your body looks just like some ancient Greek god or something? And so, or you're very beautiful and every time you look in the mirror, you see how beautiful you are and you continuously, these days you continuously constantly post images of yourself into the world. Look at me, look at me, look at me. And you have thousands of people who love you. They send love signs. Me, me. And so many people have this, their strongest identification is with body. And the rest, the psychological entities, come secondary. That's also ego, of course, but psychological entity, whatever they are on the level of their personality, becomes secondary, or whatever, what they have achieved becomes even secondary. But the body figures so prominently in their sense of identity And that goes on for years. When I was in my 20s, anyway, somebody had asked me, some god had come down and asked and said to me, I offer you a deal. I take away, I'll give you a great body like Arnold, or, well, it doesn't have to be that extreme, but just a good-looking body. Well, some would say, Arnold, this is going over the top a bit. That's a bit— but just a beautiful— I would have said— and he said, but you have to give up 20 years of your life. You are 20 years younger, but I'll give you a great body that you can enjoy for a few decades. For 3 decades, you can enjoy this. I would have said, it's a deal. And I would be dead now. I wouldn't be here. I would have enjoyed perhaps ego satisfaction during those years and sensory satisfaction through countless physical encounters with women. And would have exhausted myself and would have died young as predicted by the god who came. We were walking, or I was walking in, on a waterfront, I believe in Sydney, Australia. It was a lovely day. I believe it was perhaps a Sunday morning and not excessively hot, just very pleasant temperature. Everybody was enjoying themselves. And then I saw one man walking without a shirt on, just bare. And he had a fantastic body. And everyone is kind of looking at him. And I thought it's strange that he was the only person who felt too hot, he had to take off his shirt. Strange. And then comes a time. The time eventually becomes your enemy when you'd say, you have For years, you identified with your good looks, and then after a while, you realize the same thing is happening to you. It just takes decades. That's happening if you put a fresh apple on your windowsill and wait a few weeks and see what happens to the apple that you leave there. It kind of shrinks and becomes develops, it goes— before it looked— after a few weeks, the apple shrinks and it's old, an old apple. It happens to all life forms. And that can become a source of great suffering. There is still time for you when this suffering sets in, you realize you're no longer beautiful because old age is eroding your beauty. And then when you compare yourself to younger humans, you begin to feel inferior and to get resentful. Look at these young— and you feel diminished, and that's painful. So many humans who are identified with body, as they get As people get older, they move into a period of unhappiness, increasing unhappiness, unless they can break through that and go to a deeper level. Some can, some cannot. I would advise to go to that deeper level before time starts to erode you, as soon as possible. There's always a chance to go there, so at the latest, shortly before you die, I would hope. But for many people, when they reach old age, the patterns are so deep-seated that are associated with the ego identity, they have become so rigid and so deep-seated that they get trapped in them. There's nothing you can do. We've all met old people like that. Instead, old age is meant to be a flowering of consciousness. When, as the body begins to dissolve, something else emerges, and it can be a beautiful thing. In many other cases, this does not happen. And we've all met old people who are cranky and angry and— your grandfather perhaps? You're still in all that spiritual nonsense? Are you still doing that? It's all rubbish, obviously. I know it all. I've seen I see it all. And I have an opinion about everything. I know everything. And it's all dreadful. They're all idiots, all of them. And then he dies. Oh my God. So no matter where you're at in the movement of time, this moment is the best moment to step out of the movement of time, take your attention into the timeless so that you learn to Be connected with that consciously for the rest of your life in this form.

What is boredom? Why this pervasive unsatisfactoriness that I feel everywhere, but most intensely when I'm alone with nothing to do? Pervasive unsatisfactoriness. Unsatisfactoriness that I feel everywhere, but most intensely when I'm alone with nothing to do. What is this? It's called boredom. That's a good way of putting it, pervasive unsatisfactoriness. And of course, There's a whole industry designed to help you not feel this pervasive unsatisfactoriness. In other words, to stop you from being bored. So you can always, as most people probably do, they always provide their mind with some kind of stimulus. And these days that's not difficult to do. It's available everywhere. So the mind wants to be stimulated. It's always hungry for the next thing. So when people get home from work, immediately the mind needs to go into the next thing and And once you've done, cooked your dinner and eaten your dinner, then the mind goes into what's the next thing? Is it television? Is it picking up a phone? Is it internet? Is it emailing or texting as the teenagers do? And many others. There's nothing bad about it. It's fascinating. I recently started occasionally texting, and it's quite fascinating. But what is important to become aware of the mind's demand for food, for stimulus, And if you don't get it, immediately you get into a state of restlessness or pervasive unsatisfactoriness, as the questioner says. You don't feel at home. You don't feel there's something— of course, that feeling is always there, it's obscured by the mind. So that means if you continuously feed your mind with these things, you never reach the deeper levels within yourself. You're stuck. You have to at some point confront the unsatisfactoriness without continuously anesthetizing the unsatisfactoriness and getting some kind of substitute for true aliveness, because that's really what it is. You don't really feel alive, the aliveness, so you need some kind of stimulus to get a sense of being alive. So it's important to be able to just stop feeding the mind all the time. There's enough for the mind to do with the things that it really needs to do.

And just sit with yourself and allow boredom to arise without running away from it. Because that's your first, your beginning to go a little bit deeper. But first you need to feel that.

And if you don't run away from it, you can actually go through boredom. It's like suddenly you're through. So it becomes its little obstacle there inside you. But if you don't run away, stay with it, suddenly, before you know it, you've gone deeper into yourself. Especially, it might be helpful to feel the inner body while you sit when boredom begins. Boredom comes in, You can feel it. You start looking around. What's the next thing I can do or think about? There must be something to do or think about or worry about, even better. And you stay and you notice that and And then you just endure that discomfort of the mind not getting enough stimulus, food. And it's not that bad. It's just— just endure it. And then begin to feel the inner body, the aliveness in your hand, your arms, your feet, your legs. And you've already gone through the threshold of the boredom into something deeper. And suddenly you feel alive without mental stimulus. Much, actually more life than you could ever feel through mental mental stimulus, because mental stimulus is always on the surface of who you are, ripples on the surface. And now you go deeper. And then you have the ability to sit or stand or lie and be at ease with the here and now. That's all there ever is, life here and now. Be at ease with yourself here and now. To feel at home here and now without needing to escape into some mental realm that's not here and now. 'No. Need to think about that. Need to play a video game. Need to watch this program. Look at the magazine at least.' You see how people— the mind consumes. See how they look through magazines, go to waiting rooms or into people's homes. Nowadays magazines seem in many cases are being replaced by the screen, but people still— so they go— a greedy search What's the next?

And nothing is quite interesting enough.

It's always the next thing. So that's the dysfunction. And so the wonderful disability then grows in you of being rooted in the present moment, in yourself, without needing some mental external stimulus to make you feel complete or alive. In fact, It's only now that you really come to life. There was a famous French philosopher, lived a few hundred years ago. Was it Pascal? Or perhaps— who said all the problems of humankind —can be traced back to man's ability— man includes women— can be traced back or have their origin in man's inability to sit quietly in a room. All the problems of the world can be traced back to your inability to sit quietly or at ease in a room. Of course, the implications are deep and vast. It's not just sitting quietly in a room, but because sitting quietly in a room implies for you to be able to do that, to sit quietly in a room, you need to be connected with that which is deeper in you than the mind. Otherwise, you can't sit quietly in a room. You'll be bored. You may be quiet on the outside, but you won't be quiet inside. So you go within, use the inner body as a starting point for going deeper and taking your attention away from where it's usually lodged in the thinking mind. So you go through boredom into being, and suddenly you enjoy just being. That's an enormous awakening if you can just enjoy the simple fact of being And then from that state of aliveness, of being, you can look around you and find pleasure and satisfaction in what you see or hear or perceive with your whatever sense. The little things around you, their quiet presence, the flowers, the table, curtains, whatever is there, the sky through the window, the room, the totality of the room, the quietness, and it's all lovely. So you don't need all these substitutes anymore. You may still— of course, you still use the internet, or you use it for— but not anymore continuously, because you cannot stand being with yourself.

Stand yourself.

And that's the reality for most people. Think of that or realize what that means, how dysfunctional that is. You can't stand yourself. That's why you continuously run into this and into that and into that. And if a person who cannot can't stand him or herself, of course, what kind of relationships is that person going to have? If you can't stand yourself, then you're using others to make you feel a little better, but that doesn't work. And basically, the inability to be with yourself gets reflected and projected onto others also. And comes the ability being with other humans, because at first you try to use them, and then you can't stand them either. So you have to break through that mental barrier, because otherwise you spend the rest of your life not being able to sit quietly in a room. And as the French philosopher said, all your problems arise there from that inability, because what that really implies is you are not connected with being, you are not connected with that which is deeper than the mind-made personality, the thinker. So come home to yourself so that you can end enjoy your own company, and then you can truly enjoy also other people's company rather than use them as substitutes. Enjoy yourself, as the expression implies, it It all starts there. Can you enjoy yourself, your being? Otherwise, nothing will satisfy you ever, because you're not at ease with yourself. And you take your dissatisfied self wherever you go. Into any relationship or any place.

So at first, the being dimension, you find it as separate from external activity or thinking. And then that's a good beginning. And then gradually you learn that it is not is not irreconcilable with external activities. It's why presence through movement is a good practice, because it shows you do not need to sit still to find stillness, which is another word for it, which people believe initially. Stillness also has kind of two meanings in English. On the one hand, stillness means the absence of noise, but there's another meaning of stillness, is the absence of movement. You say, sit still, it's the absence of movement. He stood still, he sat. So stillness points in English to the absence of either noise or movement. So when we talk about stillness, you might think you can't move, In order to be, to consciously sense the being dimension, you mustn't move. And then you learn you can actually move, and in fact it can be helpful. You begin with that, and then you can perform certain tasks. And still being that connectedness with being instead of completely losing yourself in the activity. You can have goals to pursue, which is in the realm of doing. It's good to have goals, although there may be periods in your life when you don't need any goals, certainly if you reach a certain age. It becomes increasingly pointless to pursue goals, at least at the latest by the age of 95. You don't need to pursue any more goals unless for some reason you have to. But even before then, there may be time periods in your life when the pursuit of goals is not necessary and you can become more deeply must just be engaged in ordinary everyday activity without pursuing any particular big goal, big or small, working towards something. But on the whole, it said it's good to have goals. But again, goals belong to the realm of doing, and that's fine. The problem arises if the goal absorbs So much of your attention to the meaning, the desired outcome, the place you want to arrive at, whatever that may be—passing an exam, achieving a certain position, acquiring mastery in some activity, whatever it may be—the desired outcome. If the desired outcome occupies a place in your mind that's overwhelming, or you desperately need to go to arrive at that place, then in the meantime, all the things that you do, the steps you take, the activities you undertake in order to arrive at your goal, are then simply a means to an end. And they are not enjoyable because you desperately want to have arrived already. To have attained that already. So some ambitious people are like that. They are— what's the expression— consumed by ambition. This is almost literally true. And desperately need to— and in the meantime, they're very unhappy while they're working so hard or whatever they do to achieve their goal. And not only are they unhappy and full of anger very often and irritation when things don't go the way they want them to go, when little obstacles arise, as they always do, often in the form of people. So obviously, right, they get angry. So the entire journey is a place of unhappiness and stress and turmoil. And often toxic emotions. And not only do they make themselves unhappy, they make other people— whoever's around them is also unhappy. The entire company, if it's a big business, the entire company is unhappy basically and stressed. And so although there is a saying that In order to achieve anything in life, you need to learn to— what's the expression? It's, I think, it's to delay gratification. There's some truth to that, some truth. You can have a young person, one young person studies to go to college and studies in the evenings and only goes out occasionally. And then their next-door neighbor can't be bothered, wants immediate gratification, and starts drinking and indulging in not only intoxicating beverages but also in substances and whatever, hangs out in clubs and drinks. And what's the point in doing anything? And a few years later, the one who delayed gratification achieve something. And so that seems to be true. The danger is, though, with that recipe of delayed gratification is it becomes a mindset in you that you cannot get rid of after a few years of practicing delayed gratification. You never arrive at gratification except very briefly, and then And you have to delay again because you have another goal that consumes you. That's the danger. So the— and all that means there's an absence of— that it's not balanced. The life is not balanced by the being dimension. You're so obsessed with doing and arriving and achieving that you cannot appreciate whatever is here at the present moment. It's like you're on a hike and you want to get to the top of the mountain or whatever it is, the final destination. You're determined to do it in 6 hours. I'm going to do it. I'm timing myself and I'm going to do it. On the way, you see the most beautiful flowers and the sky and incredible marvels of nature. You don't see any of that because you desperately want to arrive. This is your task. And finally you make it. But what was the journey like? It wasn't that great because you didn't see all the beauty around you. You couldn't stop and, as the expression goes, you couldn't stop and smell the flowers. Because if you could, stop for a moment, there's the being dimension. It's present moment. It's inseparable from the present moment, from acknowledging the present moment. That's the portal or the entry point into the being dimension, is the present moment. If you miss that, you might have certain successes, as what the world calls success, You might have certain successes in life, but fairly pointless because the whole journey was a journey of unhappiness. And even when you arrive, you're still a stressed-out being. I'm not necessarily saying everybody who is successful is like that. There may be some humans who are able to balance being. In fact, there are. I've met a few. Who are very successful in the world, nevertheless are not lost in the activity, still being able to appreciate the present moment. Ah, and then what about the delayed gratification then? How does that work? Well, Is it possible to change your attitude and instead of saying, okay, I have to delay gratification, are you able perhaps to enjoy whatever activity you engage in that before you call delayed gratification? Are you able to enjoy? If you start, let's say you're studying for an exam or you're just learning to play an instrument, and you want to get good at it, and other people are playing around and you are practicing, are you able perhaps to experience gratification even with the practice before you arrive at mastery, even at the very beginning? So it is possible to— many, many tasks can be performed in such a way that you don't need to delay gratification. Your attitude towards the task can change so that the task itself becomes satisfying already in itself. And then you don't need to delay gratification because the gratification can already be here in the present moment. Many things can be actually enjoyed, although the world may tell you this you're doing this in order to arrive. It's only a means to an end. And when that becomes a mindset, then your entire life becomes a means to an end. Where's the end? You never arrive. What is it? So you are transforming, converting, reducing, the present moment to a means to an end. The one thing that only— the only thing that ever is real, you're saying, well, that's just— I'm just trying to get there. This is just a stepping stone. That's the unconscious pattern. I'm trying to get there. Here is never good enough. Why is it not good enough? Because The true goodness derives from that inner place, the recognition of being. That's the source of all joy or happiness. 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 regard it 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 now 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 if you lose yourself in the doing, there's always another— and this is how stress arises. What's stress? It's 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, "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 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'd 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. This is an amplification of the dysfunction. Attention through this, and you lose yourself in the doing. You become completely uncentered and basically lost. There are many, even 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 they're 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 thoughts 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 more than a 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 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, then 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. So the present moment is devalued, not recognized, regarded either as a means to an end or an obstacle. That is the— for many humans, that is their predominant state of mental-emotional state. And as I said, the 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 egoic sense of self. As 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 certain 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 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 a 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 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. Thought and emotion. They are lost in thought, they are lost in emotion, but who or what is it that is lost? If I'm not the thoughts and the emotion, 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. 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 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 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 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. The 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, I could give many examples— the entire world is either— 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 are an oppressor, traditionally 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 period, 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. One-third 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 I said, oppressor—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. You have to find it out for yourself. With awareness you can. And be very careful with observing your mind. Be there as the 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 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 irrational 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. And this mental disease. And so 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 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 many factors that make up a human being's identity, so very 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 are being manipulated. And 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.

On a collective level, then, as humans awaken, there will no longer be completely pointless conflict between nations, but it must begin with the absence of pointless conflict on an individual level. The way in which you experience life is a kind of mirroring back to you your predominant state of consciousness. So if you're engaged in continuous conflict and unpleasantness year after year with people, if you're engaged maybe in countless court cases with all these nasty people who want something from you, who are all— if you find that when you talk about people, you may find that the strange thing is that those people that you talk about they're always wrong and you're always right. Isn't that strange? If that is still the case with you, you might have to— it's very unlikely because you're here, but you might just be, when you talk to others, to third people about others, this is what he said, so this that's what she said, and then he did this, and then I said, and then, and he never did, he should have, but he didn't, and 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 in the, the ego strives incessantly for some kind of superiority. And so this is what you're condemned to when you have not yet awakened even to 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, 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 the story 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 a 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. This is usually how the awakening process happens, sometimes you're drawn back completely into it and it talks and there's the search for superiority and you compare yourself to others and you need to be right in any argument. Being right is more important than the truth. And you're always right, that's a good sign that there's ego. So the egoic entity, I'll just say a few more words about it because it can be very deceptive. It can use you, come back in sometimes through the back door. By that I mean you may be going through an awakening spiritually, and when the ego comes in through the back door, you begin to feel very superior to ordinary people. Who are not awakening. And now, what does that mean? It means— and this is always ego— there is a conceptual sense of self, and you derive your identity You derive your sense of who you are from a conceptual, mind-made self. If, for example, let's take myself in the— the world tells me, now you are a great spiritual teacher Now, 25, 30 years ago, so he didn't tell me that the world basically was saying, who are you? Nobody. Nothing has changed. If I walked around with an image of myself— this requires a lot of awareness because what I'm describing now has happened to some spiritual teachers, and this spiritual teacher is only one example— if I had a mental image of myself as a great spiritual teacher, I would be lost. 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 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— or 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 inflates 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 who is 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 Fool was, they were always, you could see, happy fools. There's not enough thinking to make them unhappy, so they are below egoic thinking. In 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, 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 engage 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. 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 it. 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 is not, ah, 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 door open or whatever it is, or suddenly something new comes into your field, 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. 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. Now, 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 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 recede it. If the only thing you achieve in life is this, that you are able to become— 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. In other words, if you can step out of thinking into 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. Just as reading a book can be helpful, any book that has come out of presence, a spiritual book, has a very different quality to it. I talked earlier about classics and this is slightly different. A spiritual book— there are many spiritual books around, many of them have good, excellent information that will be helpful to many people. And some books, in addition to having helpful information, have an added quality to it that is very hard, if not impossible, to define, but you recognize it somehow when you read it, when you open it. And one of the things you recognize it by is is that you can go back to the book after you've finished it and read it again or open it anywhere, and it's always fresh and new. Although you might already know the information by now, you might even have read the book 2 or 3 times, and obviously you know the information, and yet when you read those lines, something happens inside you, and that is it helps you enter presence. So the book then has a secondary function in addition to providing new information, helpful advice, techniques, whatever it may be. Also, somehow, in a way that I cannot explain because I don't understand it, the energy field of presence has somehow crept into the words, into the flow of words, of the words, and that when you read it and there is an opening in you, then that happens, you become present as you read. And this is why some people have read The Power of Now or other books 5, 6 times over the years. Some people say they read it 10 times. You can live with a book. At some point, you don't need to read sequentially anymore. You can open it anywhere and read a passage. The little book that I wrote, Stillness Speaks, is particularly helpful for this. Stillness Speaks is for meditative reading rather than informational reading. You only need to read a page at a time or a chapter, the chapters are very short, or even just one of the small little entries at a time, and then these are powerful pointers, and after reading, as you read, immediately it puts you into presence. Anybody who tells me they love Stillness Speaks, and I know Well, that means you're already an advanced practitioner of presence. And others say, 'Well, stillness speaks doesn't say so much to me.' I understand that from the level of information, it doesn't give you that much, but it has a different purpose. And this also applies to other books like I Am That by Nisargadatta, the chain-smoking Guru, a very powerful passage, I Am That, Nisargadatta. That is a similar kind of book. You don't have to read it sequentially. Each chapter is self-contained, and you can just read one chapter at a time or even just a paragraph at a time, and there's a power in the book that is— and this is a book that was based on the spoken word, and that spoken word, somebody else took it who was also able to tune into presence and translated it from this language, whatever language he spoke, Gujarati or something, I don't remember what it's called, and that translated into and in the translation also, he was able to provide a translation without loss of presence. That's quite an enormous achievement. So that's a great classic that I would recommend. And other spiritual books, they may come to you, you may already know them. Depends also whether you are, what kind of form of teaching you are drawn to or resonate with, whether it's Eastern or the Eastern teachings coming out of India or Buddhist teachings, or whether it's, you still feel you resonate more with Christian teachings, but you're not satisfied with conventional Christianity, otherwise of course you wouldn't be here if you were satisfied with conventional Christianity, but perhaps you can sense there is something there that has a depth that is not usually revealed to you in church, and in that case, A Course in Miracles would be one, because A Course in Miracles uses Christian terminology but takes it to a deeper level. And another teacher is, of course, Joel Goldsmith, who was teaching in the '50s and '60s in the United States, who also uses Christian terminology but takes it to a much deeper level than what you would hear in a church. So those are all books that are spiritually alive. And of course, the ancient classics, the Tao Te Ching in a good translation— there's so many different translations of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom going back 2,500 years. Maureen, not that long ago, Stephen Mitchell published a translation or his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, which is really good. Stephen Mitchell is the husband of Byron Katie. So he translated the Tao Te Ching, or rather interpreted it into English, and that's good. It takes somebody Somebody who translates a spiritual book into another language needs to be present, otherwise a lot can get lost in the process of translation. The famous expression is "lost in translation." Always great, the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, beautiful, powerful spiritual teachings, highly recommended. He talks of the self, which it means the deep I, what I call sometimes the deep self, again has that energy field that is always alive. You can go back again and again and again, and it's alive. So these books are like living beings, almost living entities. They contain something. How it got in there, I don't know. Somehow it did, but it needs you to release it, to bring it back to life. So it's there, it needs somebody, not just anybody, because there may be people that open the book, Ramana Maharshi or whoever, and say, What's he talking about? The same way with The Power of Now. I have reports of people who've given The Power of Now, they were deeply changed and influenced by The Power of Now and said, "Oh, I have this relative, he really needs this, I'm giving it to him for Christmas." And then straight, "Look, this is a fantastic book, you have to read it, it'll change your life." And a few weeks later they call it, She started reading the book. Yeah, I read 2 pages but couldn't understand a word. And then the giver of the gift was very disappointed. Oh, how is that possible? There was not yet anything in the reader to resonate with it. It was too blocked. It wasn't there yet. And that's fine. There's nothing you can do. You can say, 'You keep, just keep reading and you'll get it.' No, you won't get it. Even if you force yourself and keep reading, you won't get it. But the best advice you can give in that case is put it on the highest shelf you have and go back to it in a few years' time after you've suffered a bit more. And actually, people have told me that they were given the book or they found it somewhere and it was meaningless to them and they put it on a shelf. Years passed and something happened in their lives and then it made them pick up the book again. And the same book that was meaningless a few years ago suddenly is amazing. So that means that something has opened up in the reader so that the spiritual message can be received without being totally obstructed by the conditioned mind, the density of the conditioned mind. There's been a little crack has opened up in the egoic shell, and that probably was the result of some kind of suffering. So the book was meaningless until I lost my job. My investments and my wife left me, and then I got sick, and then suddenly I picked up the book. That's how suffering can work. So suffering isn't all bad. As I said, it's necessary until you realize that it's unnecessary.

To learn how to deal with the negative thoughts that arise in your mind, check the video right there next to me. I think You'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

It's useless to be present. It's hard work. I can't do it. I can't stay there anyway. These are thoughts that arise in your mind and you believe them, but they are thoughts that are designed to take you out of presence and to