Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Transcript:

Eckhart Tolle

Do not wait, however, for difficult situations to push you into presence. It’s good if that happens, but choose presence even when you’re not being challenged. That is vital. Otherwise life, the Universal Intelligence that underlies all phenomena will see that, “oh, this guy needs more problems, because otherwise, he goes to sleep all the time.” (lol)

“Let’s give him a few more [problems].” (lol)

Or life says, “Oh, whenever you’re waiting, you become present. When you’re in nature, you’re present. You invite presence into your life. In the middle of the night, when worry starts, you suddenly realize, ‘this is not only futile, it’s also destructive.'” And you surrender that kind of thinking.

And put your attention on your breathing instead. Or into your body. Those are things you voluntarily invite presence into your life. Then, presence power, so to speak, presence power grows in you. And then when a bigger situation happens, there’s so much more presence to deal with it. I’ve spent years of my life just dwelling in presence. You don’t have to do that. I mean, you can be active at the same time.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Years of my life, very little doing.

I was just sometimes spending hours on my bicycle or walking in a park, just Being. And sometimes I have this strange, feeling, that there’s a reason why I have to “do” that. It’s not doing. So it’s like going very deep in order to go out and make a difference in this world. I had to go very deep within first, very deep, and then the going out became possible.

How much difference you make in this world is always relative to how deep you go within yourself. How much presence you access within yourself, how connected you are with the essence of who you are, or the Essence of Life.

That determines how much difference how much you really make in this life. You’re all going to make, and already are making an enormous difference. The Universe loves Consciousness. The Universe Is Consciousness, and wants to emerge more fully on this planet and many other planets I’m sure.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Because that is what underlies the whole evolution of the Universe.

So by having the awakening of consciousness, and the presence practice as your main life goal, no matter what you do or the service of your life, your job, your relationships. Your main goal is in your relationships, in your work situation, in your home situation, your main goal is being present wherever you are and whatever you do.

Then your life becomes empowered. And, you will do a lot of good, without necessarily feeling that “I” am doing it. It flows thru you, and those of you who are still looking for something to do, think of—people ask me, “What am I meant to do? Where am I meant to be? Who am I meant to be with?”

And of course the first answer is, the foundation for it all, to find out where you are meant to be, what you are meant to do, who you are meant to be with…

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

The first answer is, you’re meant to be Here, you’re meant to be doing what you’re doing right Now, and you’re meant to Be with whoever you are with right Now at this moment. That’s foundation.

I’m not talking about for the rest of your life. But right Now. So you come to a full acceptance of whatever is in the present moment. Now, most people who are who are trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do in their lives, they don’t give their fullest attention and they’re not fully aligned with the present moment. Where they are, who they are with, they are rejecting it in some way.

And that obstructs the Power and obstructs the arising of Presence. So you become accepting and comfortable with where you are, right Now. So, you’re meant to be Here, right Now. That’s why. I’m meant to be Here. So that can become a foundation for realizing what you should Do, once you accept the Isness of the Present moment. What the doing then arises out of that state of Alignment with Life, with Alignment of the Present Moment. Then you might get insights into what it is you want to do or rather what the Universe or One Consciousness wants to use you for.

So you no longer look at, “what do I want from life?” But “what does life want from me? How can I be of service to The One Consciousness?”, you could say.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

And then, it begins to flow through you.

And it could be, it might start in the same exact doing that you’re already been doing, but now you’re doing it fully, Presently.

Let’s say you’re an aspiring actress, but in the meantime, you’re working at a fast food restaurant. So can you be fully accepting of where you are right now without losing your goal but giving it your fullest loving attention to what you’re doing right now. Even if it seems repetitive. You give it your loving attention. And it is often the case that it is when you are completely aligned and completely accept what is, things begin to change. When you’re in non-acceptance internally, you’re stuck.

Can also happen that once you accept the present moment completely, you realize, this is not, I cannot be here any longer. And you just walk out. That can happen too. But it would not be a confrontation sort of thing. It would be a peaceful realization of what it is that you need to do. So, honor whatever it is that you’re doing at this moment. I sometimes admire in some restaurants waiters or waitresses that are wonderfully present.

They give you—it doesn’t necessarily mean the most expensive restaurant—in fact, most expensive often, they’re just snobbish and they don’t. Even in simple restaurants, some are just, when they put your glass down, they’re present, stand with care and attention. And they ask what do you want, they are present. So anywhere you can practice presence and you can affect people no matter where you are because you will come into contact with some people.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

And presence is contagious.

As Tammy just told us in a good way. Presence is contagious with whoever you come into contact with will be affected by your Presence. And you will attract, almost miraculously, the right people, or the right situations into your life that then will bring about a change.

So by being present, you are connected to the totality and you attract people and situations into your life that are helpful. And then you realize, “Oh, this is what I want to do.”

The insight comes.

Or it could be just a continuation of what you are doing already but now you’re doing it in an empowered way. Might be totally different too. Once you realize and you take more action, empowered by Presence, then you find many helpful factors suddenly appearing. The moment you are aligned with the arising Consciousness, and your main goal is Presence, sustaining Presence no matter where you are or what you are doing. Then your actions become empowered by that One Consciousness. New ideas come, events, helpful things happen.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

It doesn’t mean that obstacles do not happen.

In fact, obstacles often do happen, but an obstacle, and this is vital, you need to be very alert within yourself. When an obstacle arises in the form of something not working out, in the form of a person who wants to block you, sabotage you, whatever it is. An obstacle or difficult bureaucrats, government departments who don’t want you to do whatever you want, many forms of obstacles. And when an obstacles arises, you become negative and angry irritated upset, that means you’ve lost The Power, you’ve lost Presence. It’s no longer flowing through you.

The Ego has come in.

So how you deal with obstacles in your chosen course of action determines whether there is a power flowing thru you, or whether the ego has taken its place.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

So an obstacle is never fought against.

You either walk around it, so to speak. Or you transform it, by bringing in a Positive Energy to it. So you don’t make people who seem to be blocking you into enemies. So you transform the seeming obstacle, or it can be transformed into a helpful Presence. Because your state of consciousness determines the further development of that situation.

The situation arises. What happens after the situation has arisen, is determined by the state of Consciousness in which you receive or respond to in that situation.

So a difficult person, if you react “egoicly” against the “difficult” person, then that person will become even more difficult. And in the process, your Consciousness goes down down…

You may end up at the same level of Consciousness as that difficult person.

That happens the moment you both shout at each other. That has happened to spiritual people. They lost it. It’s okay.

You have to lose it. And then you regain it, and then you lose it again, and then you regain it. So if you find yourself in a shouting argument with somebody, obviously, you lost it. (lol)

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

And if you beat yourself up for being in a shouting argument with somebody, you lost it again! (lol)

And then you say, “Okay, I lost it again. Am I going to beat myself up again for losing it the second time when I beat myself up? No.”

So you become accepting also of your own shortcomings. And, start again.

But it’s so vital that any situation that comes, your attitude, your Consciousness towards the situation determines how it develops further. Whether it’s a human being or more complex situation. At work, or in relationship.

So there’s an active part in you that determines what happens. In that sense, one could say, the Universe, Realities, so called, tends to reflect back to you your state of Consciousness. And some people create enormous drama out of very little. A tiny little thing, and the reaction, the egoic reaction is so huge that the tiny little thing gets blown up all out of proportion and they—they even convince others that this is a huge drama.

One of my shortcomings is that I cannot respond to all the mail I get or read all the manuscripts and books that people send and I would need a staff of several full time people just to respond to letter. If they were responding to letters, they would get more letters back. And it would proliferate. I read some, and it’s wonderful to read, often, it’s a beautiful message, “We’ve been helped.”

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Some however, “the ego,” may be quite strong. They expect an answer.

They don’t realize how many people write in. When The Power of Now was published. Somebody said to me, you should send it to a famous person and that famous person could write an endorsement and then the book will reach many more people. So I wrote to Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer and never heard from them.

And I thought, “Okay, maybe they read it and didn’t fully like it.”

I didn’t fully understand, realize, they can’t read—they get hundreds of books every month—how can they read my book? I didn’t now that, I didn’t have an ego reaction about it.

Later, Deepak Chopra, of course did read the Power of Now and wrote a lovely endorsement when I didn’t need it anymore… (LOL)

But there are some people who got so angry with me because I didn’t respond to their letters. That it became a gigantic drama. There began to come letters one after another, “How dare you ignore me?” Gigantic drama.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

I became the worst person on the planet to them.

And it’s just a little example of relatively the same example growing, proliferating into some huge humor in Consciousness. So it’s actually the development of your life and the situations you encounter is related to your state of Consciousness. And as your state of Consciousness changes, the way in which you experience the world, in other words, people events situations, changes.

That’s, it doesn’t mean you won’t have challenges. But the challenges will be of a different kind. And dealing with them will become so much easier. And occasionally when a “big one” comes, that means you’re meant to go even deeper into presence. It all works beautifully once you see. Because many people often look at the surface of life and it looks like all random events happening and it’s totally chaotic and meaningless. And I don’t understand any of it.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

There is an intelligence behind it.

But when you only look at the surface reality, you don’t necessarily see it. You have a very limited view. So it’s up to you to be Aligned with that intelligence that’s behind the entire world that creates form. And lives through form and yet, also exists in a timeless, formless dimension that we couldn’t possibly conceive of. As you know the Universal belief still held by mainstream science is that the Universe is a random accidental event.

That is still the main belief of mainstream science. All life is accidental. There’s no intelligence behind it. And you are an accident. Somehow happened. And the greatest mystery of the Universe is not the atomic realm or the galaxies. The greatest mystery of the Universe, science hardly an approach. It doesn’t know anything about. The greatest mystery is that the fact that the Universe is Conscious. And what Consciousness Is, science doesn’t even know it. Some scientists even deny there is such a thing as Consciousness. What do they say?

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

It must be the chemical soup in the brain, is having some kind of illusion.

But the only thing you cannot doubt is that you are Conscious. Even if everything else is a dream, which it could be. In a way, it is. But the fact is, the dream is appearing in the light of Consciousness, without which there would be no dream. So I Am Conscious.

And of course science tells you that Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Another word for it would be byproduct, of the brain. Of the material brain. So Consciousness, if you even use the word is produced by something that happens in the material brain. And there certainly is a correlation between your Consciousness and your physical brain. It would be absurd to deny the correlation between Consciousness and your physical brain. What would easily prove it, is if a brick falls on my head now, I wouldn’t be conscious anymore.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Now does that prove that the Consciousness is produced by my brain? Not necessarily.

It could well be that my brain is a kind of transformer or transmitter of Universal Consciousness. In the same way that a radio or a TV picks up signal, transmits it, and gives it certain form. So when you destroy the television set or radio, nothing significant was destroyed because the radio was never the producer of that radio program. It was only created to bring those frequencies into this dimension in creating this particular type of world here. It is created by Consciousness. That is, permeated by Consciousness.

So where science is going, whether they realize—I believe that they will—Consciousness is not confined to the human brain. They would see that there is Consciousness in the flower, there is Consciousness even in so called a tiny tiny glimmer of Consciousness, even in a stone. So in other words, the material world, we could use the analogy, say the material world, the world of heart matter is a bit like frozen Consciousness. In the same way that water can exist in different states. You can have frozen water, you can have liquid water, you can have water as vapor in the air or mist.

So you can, Consciousness can manifest, and does manifest as the physical Universe. It can manifest as the human mind and thought.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

And it can manifest as Presence.

So you have the ice, you have the liquid, and you have the immaterial vapor or mist. And it’s all water, and it’s all Consciousness. And so there only Is Consciousness. It’s the One behind the many.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Everything is Consciousness.

The essence of who you are Is Consciousness. And then the mind says, “So what is Consciousness?” You can’t say what it is because it is everything.

So if you said, “God?”

Yes.

And so as a final insight—my mystical insight—this Consciousness emanates from a Source that does not exist in space or time.

That is what the Buddha calls the unmanifested, the unborn, the uncreated. That is, truly, if God has any meaning, it is that. You cannot conceive of it, you cannot talk about it, you cannot name it, it’s that which precedes the Big Bang. What was there before the Big Bang? Nothing.

So The Universe came out of Nothing?

Uh, yeah.

Okay. That’s strange.

That nothing. That No-Thing, is God.

And then God appears as the world. And begins to dream the dream of the world and after God has dreamt the dream of the world, the dream gets a bit difficult, and to all the entities in the dream, the cells of the Universal Consciousness believe themselves to be individual entities. Then the dream becomes a nightmare. And then God begins to wake up. That was the plan all along.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Even as God begins to wake up, God continues to Create, however, realizes His or Her own Source.

I’m trying to explain to you the Entire Universe, which is totally impossible. But it’s a little hint. It’s a bit like that. It’s all one can say, it’s a bit like that. But You contain the entire Universe, and the secret of the Entire Universe is within you. You have to look within if you want to know about it. What about the Universe? Well, look within, you have to look within. You are the microcosm of the macrocosm.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

As the ancient dictum, “As Above, So Below.”

God is in you, as You. Consciousness is The Light emanating by God. In the same way that the sun emanates light. Now, is light different than the sun? Or is Light part of the Sun? It’s always part of the Sun. It’s not disconnected from the Sun, it still Is the Sun. So in that sense, each one of you, me, is a ray of that One Consciousness. Like a ray of sunlight. Then the ray goes out and creates a world and looks out and then the ray doesn’t realize it’s part of the sun. It thinks it’s an entity, that makes it really interesting, the dream, otherwise the dream wouldn’t be that interesting.

And then the Universal Dream starts. Wow. And then it gets difficult and dangerous (gasp!). And then at some point its ray of sunlight of Consciousness begins to remember its origin, not only origin, but the Source out of which it continuously emanates.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

“Oh, it’s not that bad after all. It’s actually…”

And then it continues to exist in this world and creative in this world, but at the same time, it’s Conscious of The Source. That means a totally different world is created. That’s the new Earth on our planet, when humans are aware of their connectedness to the Source. What they then do, their activities, and what they produce as the world is very different than the world that is created by humans that are not aware of their surroundings. In other words, “egoic” entities.

This is what’s happening now. It’s not that the dream of form is coming to an end. But there is a significant metamorphosis happening. The dream is turning into a very different dream where as humans become more connected to Source, Creation will become much easier. Time will come when humans can Create by using Thought only. You don’t need factories anymore. You can create through Thought. But that cannot happen until humans are connected, Aware of their Source. Because if they had the power to Create—to some extent this already happens—but if they had the real power to create, it would create havoc.

Imagine the “ego” being able to create whatever it wants to create just by thinking about it. But thought is potentially the creative tool. It’s already operating now, but it’s often used unconsciously—and often not creating very pleasant experiences.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

So Thought, eventually we can use—we don’t need to “go” there. It happens by itself.

For us, it is vital to live in connectedness with Source. That’s called lucid dreaming. Lucid living.

And so, you become aware of the dreamlike nature of existence, and you actually enjoy that. So you create a more pleasant dream for yourself and for others.

So that was The Secret of The Universe. I left it for the last session. So now You go off, little rays of Consciousness, reaching different parts of Australia and the rest of the world. Don’t you forget to wrap up warm if you live in the central or eastern parts of North America. It’s very cold there at the moment. That’s okay, you can enjoy that.

So we had a wonderful retreat. I’m grateful for Being Here, with Us, in Presence. You Know what your mission is, but don’t become missionaries.

Eckhart Tolle Do This And Life Will Support You

Don’t try to convince anybody of anything. Just Presence is enough.

I’d like to thank our wonderful team for doing such great work, and people also here at our resort have been very helpful. And let’s, I’d like to ask Kim, here to say goodbye to you. Can you jump up?

(Laughs and Applause)

Thank you!