It’s Evan.
My one word is believe, and I believe in people
more than they believe in themselves,
and my sincere hope is that if you see in yourself
what I see in you, you’ll be able to change the planet.
So to help you in your journey,
today we’re going to learn from
bestselling author Eckhart Tolle
and my take on his top 10 rules for success, volume two.
Rule number four is my personal favorite,
and I’d love to know which one you guys like the best.
Also, as you’re watching,
if you hear something that really resonates with you,
please leave it down in the comments below
and put quotes around it
so other people can be inspired by it, as well.
And if you leave it within the first couple hours
of this video going live,
you have a chance to win one of two daily prizes.
(loud whoosh)
(dramatic orchestral music)
– I need my story,
all the things that I’ve been telling myself in my mind
about myself and other people and my parents
and my relatives and my coworkers
and my ex-wife and my ex-husband,
and what people did to me
or what I did and shouldn’t have done, failed to do.
Who am I without that?
I can’t let go of that.
I need to think about this more.
(audience laughs)
So it becomes habitual place,
the habitual place of mental noise
where you feel, “That’s me.”
And so every therapist knows
that you always reach a point with your clients,
patients, whatever, depending on the school of therapy,
it depends whatever your clients, your patients, whatever,
there comes a point when you hit that resistance.
They don’t want to be free of their problems. (laughs)
And the big challenge is there.
Is this person going to overcome that barrier?
Because that barrier is not just
becoming free of my problems,
but also becoming free of a very limited
and ultimately fictitious sense of identity, me.
So that is, what I’ve described,
is the next step, one would say,
in the evolution of human consciousness
is stepping out of self talk,
which is the conditioned mind,
and realizing there is much more to who I am
than this conditioned content of my mind.
And that is the beginning of awakening.
It’s not those words, not that you need to believe that
there is much more to who I am than the self talk in my head
because that is still self talk in the head.
I believe there’s more to who I am.
(audience laughs)
And you better believe it, too.
Analytical thinking itself, or processing information,
is not creative.
So even to find a creative or new solution
to a problem in your life requires some creative insight.
So whether it’s a problem
in your work situation or your personal life
or something that you need to build or do
that you have come to a dead end
or you want to create something,
whatever it is, a work of art
or a new system for the computer,
I don’t know the expression for that,
you need to go to the place where creativity arises.
And every human
who is creative has some access to that
even if they don’t know it.
It seems to me there’s a general pattern at work
that it is inherent in the nature
of physical existence of life forms
that challenges are an essential ingredient
of their life span here
and part of the way through which they evolve.
And when they say, “They evolve,”
what it means is the one consciousness evolves,
awakens into this dimension
through the different life forms in different ways.
And it awakens only because we are being challenged.
And that is quite a relief to realize
to be challenged doesn’t mean
there’s something wrong. (laughs)
There’s something wrong with my life that shouldn’t be.
If you believe or act as if this shouldn’t be happening,
then you get really unhappy.
Then the challenges become transformed
into unhappiness inside you.
If it’s not unhappiness, it’s resentment.
If it’s not resentment, it’s anger.
It’s self pity.
It’s complaining.
It’s despondency. (laughs)
The simple reason that you’re misunderstanding
the very purpose of life
and expecting something that your mind has come up with
should be different.
Some people are afraid of
not succeeding in whatever they do
because they have a self,
their self image,
which is derived from thinking, would suffer.
If I fail at something,
then my self image will be injured,
and therefore I’m not even going to try. (laughs)
And again, that’s to do with
deriving your identity from thinking.
And even the thought, “I have failed,” is a lie.
“I am a failure,” is an even greater lie.
You have not failed.
You can simply reinterpret and say,
“I have learned something here.
“This is not for me,” for example.
But why believe the lies that your mind produces?
As you know, many people live with a very hostile mind.
But those people are, their motivation,
their motivation would probably be very great,
I would hope, to get out of their minds.
But first they need to realize
that their problems are self generated, mind generated.
May be surprised to know that there are
millions, billions of people on the planet
who have that same thought pattern,
“There’s something wrong with me.”
It’s part of the human ego.
So you bring in the awareness,
and that will change everything.
That’s the only true key.
If you fail, next time the anger arises,
what happens, you will become aware immediately
after the anger has subsided.
And then, “Oh, there it was, and I wasn’t present.”
And then the moment will come
when you are there in the first,
if you can catch the anger the first moment it comes,
or if you might even see that
it could be the result of a thought that creates the anger,
and if you can be there in the first moment
before it becomes fully blown anger,
then you can stay there
and it might not even become fully blown anger
if you catch it the first moment.
You can feel the first stirrings of anger.
You may only have three seconds, it may come very quickly.
Anger is like an explosive energy.
You may only have two, three, four, five seconds
to stay there with your awareness and feel it,
“Oh, it’s coming, there it is.”
That’s the pain body, the angry pain body, coming.
And if you catch it in the early stage, don’t suppress it.
By catch it I mean
feel it, be there as a witness.
Then you can stay, even as it grows,
the witness grows with it.
It may not even grow.
We’ll have to see
whether it still grows into full blown anger or not,
but that doesn’t matter.
And so you be thankful for your anger,
because the anger can become
a very important spiritual practice for you,
because through it, awareness can grow.
So it’s sometimes strange for people to see
you can be thankful for things that you think are
the most difficult obstacles in your life,
but they can become your greatest opportunity
for spiritual awakening.
Use it as part of your practice.
There is a source of power in you
that transcends the person.
And it’s not egoic power over somebody.
And it’s one with the power that is
the power of life in the universe where all life arises.
And people sometimes have a problem with
self confidence
or valuing yourself.
And sometimes, you try
to convince yourself by changing your thinking
that you are actually good enough,
that you should be self confident.
But there is a better way
to find the source of self confidence.
On the egoic level, self confidence is there
because you see you can tell yourself,
“I’m actually more intelligent than most of these people.”
(audience laughs)
Or, “I’m better looking than most.
“I have to remind myself that I’m better looking than most.”
And then you, “Okay, yeah, I feel a bit more confident now.”
(audience laughs)
Or you say, “I actually have more money than these people,
“so I have more self confidence.”
Whatever it is, some way of convincing yourself,
and then you compare yourself with others,
and then you focus on those areas
where you feel superior to others
and try not to think about other areas
where inevitably you are inferior to others
because you cannot be superior in all areas.
It’s a complicated game when you start,
(audience laughs)
start comparing yourself to other people.
And if you want to bolster your self confidence,
then you only have to focus on
where you feel I’m actually better than most.
But that doesn’t really work that well.
So there is a better way of self confidence
that has nothing to do with comparing yourself with others
or with feeling you’re better than or not as good as.
And that is direct access to inner power.
You don’t need any comparison.
You can have it right now at this very moment
if you’re not stuck in your thinking mind.
But take your attention
a little bit beyond the thinking mind
and then realize that you are
the presence behind the thinking mind
without which there could be no thinking.
You’re the aware presence behind it all that is deeper.
You’ve gone deeper than the thinking mind.
And that aware presence is where power resides.
And it’s not yours
because it connects you with universal power.
Therefore, you don’t need to
compare yourself to anybody anymore
or feel, as the ego always does,
that you’re either superior or inferior to somebody else.
That’s not a comfortable way to live,
where you have to classify yourself when you meet people.
(audience laughs)
And so if the fear is always, “I might be inferior,”
(audience laughs)
or behind that fear is a desire to be superior.
(audience laughs)
What happens when you pay attention
to the way in which you interact with objects?
Okay, every minute of the day,
you pick something up, you put something down.
You unbutton your shirt.
You take off your shoes.
You lift this, put this there.
Open your zipper bag. (imitates zipper)
You looking inside.
Take something out.
Can you feel it as you take it out?
Can you feel the texture of that?
And then you put it on the table.
It makes a sound as you put it on the table.
And then you have a glass of water
and the light is reflected in it.
And it moves.
Perhaps you drink, and it tastes.
And you put it down again.
And then you look at a familiar object,
and instead of using it always as a means to an end,
here you have the luxury of occasionally
just taking an ordinary object that you handle every day
and just for a few seconds give it attention
and acknowledge its being just as that object.
Just feel it, see it.
Hear as it makes a noise as you put it down.
And again, you bring in sense perceptions.
Getting dressed in the morning, putting your pants on.
They make a noise as you put them on a little bit.
Listen.
Do things.
You pick up the toothpaste.
You hold it for a moment.
Open.
Put the cap on the sink.
And then turn on the tap. (imitates water running)
And then while you brush your teeth,
you turn off the tap, because you don’t want to waste water.
(audience laughs)
But that’s not part of the exercise,
but it’s a natural thing (audience laughs)
And you can actually begin to like and to enjoy
the tiniest things around you
that would normally be completely overlooked.
So the way in which you interact with the world of objects,
that brings a richness into your life
that doesn’t depend on how many objects you own.
You don’t need to own them to interact with them.
So,
you acknowledge their beingness.
And sometimes you might just put your hand,
as I’m doing now, here’s the table.
It’s wood.
And I’m putting my hand on it.
And for a moment,
I feel the smooth texture surface of this table,
and it feels very pleasant.
But I don’t need the mind to tell me that.
I can sense that.
And the strange thing is,
even so called inanimate objects,
in a strange way, have a life of their own.
– You know, I’m experiencing anger.
Of course, you wouldn’t say that, “I’m experiencing anger,”
but to say, “I am upset,” or, “I am sick,”
is really sort of embedding that into yourself.
Where you say, “I’m having an upset,”
well, if you have something, you can give it away. (laughs)
– That’s right.
So it’s already progress if from saying,
“I am angry,” or, “I am upset,”
you say, “There is anger in me,” or, “There is upset in me.”
You have already separated your essential identity
from the emotional state.
So you’re no longer reinforcing the emotional state
through your identification.
So that’s already– – Exactly.
– That’s the beginning of inner transformation,
is that separation from
the passing mental or emotional state.
True self esteem comes from not identifying with form.
Now, whether we even want to
call that self esteem, I don’t know.
The true sense of worthiness and of power, true power,
comes when you realize the formless in yourself,
that dimension, and that all power comes from that.
But it goes far beyond the person that you are.
And then you’re rooted in the formless, so to speak,
or you are it.
There’s enormous sense of worthiness in there,
but it’s not comparative.
It’s not more than.
You see the same worthiness in everybody,
even if they don’t know it for themselves yet.
So there’s power, but not more than.
There’s just the power of life itself.
And you know everybody is an expression of that,
although they may not know it yet.
Everybody.
So this is, you transcend conventional self esteem.
And it doesn’t mean you lose your sense of worth.
It shifts into something much deeper.
If you think the world is full of evil people,
you will meet many evil people.
In other words, unconscious people.
And even people who are on the brink
or who are halfway between conscious and unconscious,
when you come together with them,
your belief will pull them into unconsciousness. (laughs)
And that’s karma.
So karma is the complete absence of conscious presence.
And so it’s automatic.
It plays itself out.
And time does not free you of karma.
That is a misperception, that if you only spare enough time
eventually you can become free of karma.
Karma renews itself and repeats itself.
It’s a wheel.
And so the only thing that can free you of karma
is the arising of presence.
And how is it that some person presence?
I cannot tell you why.
I only know that at any point in the wheel of karma,
presence can come in.
It can happen to a criminal in prison, condemned to death.
It can happen to somebody
who’s never heard of anything spiritual.
It can happen to somebody
who has been meditating for 30 years
or not happen to the same person
who has been meditating for 30 years. (laughs)
So,
in your own life, I can see from what you’re saying
that presence has already, I can sense that,
presence has already come into your life.
And presence frees you from karma.
Not all at once.
Karma has an enormous momentum,
meaning the patterns in yourself,
the thought patterns, the emotional patterns,
the reactive patterns.
There’s enormous momentum behind that.
But as presence arises,
gradually, karma diminishes in its,
the energy behind it diminishes.
And gradually, you experience
a fading out of those patterns.
They become weaker.
You’re no longer completely in the grip of those patterns.
So as presence arises,
there’s a gradual fading out of karma.
Not that it matters that much anymore,
because once you are present,
you can, as the previous question I said,
when we were talking about certain thoughts still arising,
certain negative thoughts, that’s still part of the karma,
the old patterns, the unconscious habit patterns inherited.
They still arise.
But it’s no longer problematic,
and they no longer cause
the suffering that they would have caused before,
because they are seen in the light of awareness.
So the light of awareness arises,
and in the light of awareness,
the patterns no longer dominate your life.
They no longer run your life.
And if occasionally it happens
that the patterns do take over,
then after a little while,
your presence returns and you say,
“Oh, well, there it was again.”
Pain body is part of karma.
(mumbles may be strong in some people,
not so strong in others.
And so as presence arises, you are freed from karma.
And then you have another completely different factor
coming into your life.
And so, for example,
for a person to become free of collective karma,
you need a considerable amount of presence
for that to come in to remove,
and it then will remove you, in one way or another,
either internally you find yourself completely free,
you might still live in a violent society,
but internally you will be free.
There is a possibility you can have a holy man or woman
living surrounded by violence.
It’s possible.
It’s rare, but possible.
Or very often it happens that life removes you out of there
and you find yourself somewhere else.
So, let’s say vast, collective karma, for example,
in the case of, let’s say, you have the Taliban there,
you have all kinds of unconscious movements.
You had Soviet communism.
You had national socialism in Germany.
And for a person being born into that
and not being drawn into that unconscious
requires considerable presence.
So not that many people,
for example, in Germany when Hitler came to power,
not many people were able to remove themselves.
Some were.
Some artists, some writers, they left.
They could see what was happening
and they were strong enough
not to be identified with the collective
when there had been a tradition
of obedience to authority for hundreds of years,
a tradition of following your leader, and so on.
To take yourself out of that collective karma
requires considerable presence, but some people had it.
So it is our destiny, then,
to go beyond karma by being the receptacles for presence.
All you can do to be helpful in this world and help others
is those people that you come into contact with,
you may, everybody in this who is awakening
will find that sooner or later
they become a kind of teacher to others.
And what a spiritual teacher does,
the teacher points out the possibility of awakening
out of identification with unconscious patterns,
which means the spiritual teacher teaches you
to go beyond karma.
(whoosh)
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I made this video because LiveNow06 asked me to.
If there’s someone you’d like me to profile
in a future Top 10,
please check out the link down in the description below
and you can cast your vote on who we should do next.
I also want to give a quick shoutout
to Linh Podetti from Outsourcing Angel.
Thank you so much, Linh, for picking up
a copy of my book, Your One Word,
and going through it and finding your one word of love,
and then sharing it with your newsletter, as well.
I really, really, really appreciate the support,
and I’m so glad that you’re applying the wisdom from it.
Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your own word is.
Much love.
I’ll see you soon.
(loud whoosh)
To meditate successfully,
the idea that you’re doing a meditation
can be quite an obstacle.
(audience laughs)
So maybe that’s the first thing we can get rid of tonight,
the preconceptions and the expectations
that come with that term.
So why did we call it guided meditation?
Well, we had to use some word
to get you here.
(audience laughs)
Meditation is usually something that you do,
among many other things.
Doing implies all kinds of things.
It implies time,
even future to some extent.
And yet, true meditation, if you even want to call it that,
and it’s better not to call it anything,
is not to do with doing.
It’s not a doing.
It’s the realization that you are,
of being,
which underlies all doing.
It’s prior to all doing.
Thoughts, emotions, it’s prior to that.
The simple realization,
not the realization who you are,
because there can be so many perspectives on that,
not the realization how you fit
into the totality of the cosmos,
how that seemingly little life, fleeting existence
fits into the totality somewhere,
not realizing how I fit into the whole.
It’s impossible to comprehend.
But an alignment with the totality
without the need to mentally understand anything,
a realization,
a simple realization
that you are,
which is
expressed in the sublime words
I am.
And if you’ve missed elementary grammar at school,
you might not realize that I am
is the first person singular of the verb to be.
(audience laughs)
You think it’s two completely different words. (laughs)
(audience laughs)
The realization that you are,
not as a concept
but as a deeper sensing
of the life that you are,
the aliveness, the life.
And something helpful to realize that
is to pretend for one moment
that there is no past and no future.
(audience laughs)
I’m saying pretend so that everybody is still with me.
If I said–
(audience laughs)
If I said, “There is no past and future,”
some of you might suddenly start thinking,
“Just a second, aren’t you going to sign books in an hour?”
(audience laughs)
No, hmm.
(audience laughs)
And the moment you go into thinking,
you’re off into
the realm of mind,
the realm of things,
objects in consciousness.
Every thought is an object in consciousness.
And every thought has a pulling power.
So it arises,
and it pulls your attention in,
and you start thinking,
“Okay, but I came here half an hour ago.
“There must be a past.”
(audience laughs)
Not realizing, of course,
when you came here it was the present moment,
and when the books are going to be signed,
it’ll be the present moment, because there is nothing else.
But no need to believe that.
Let’s pretend–
(audience laughs)
Let’s pretend for a moment that there is no past and future.
Or let’s just say past and future become peripheral
(mumbles) who you are.
There’s only this.
Oh.
That is the entry point into the realization I am.
(whoosh)
”
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