Rediscover Your TRUE SELF | Eckhart Tolle EP 465

0:00I am so grateful for you. I'm so grateful that you're here today, that you show up every single week to listen to one of our episodes on the School of Greatness. And did you know that this is our 10-year anniversary? That's right, 10 years of greatness. And this holiday season, I don't want to sell you anything. Instead, I just want to show appreciation and I want to do a big giveaway. That's right. Greatness is giving away$500 a day for 10 straight days to multiple members of our community. All you have to do is go to lewishouse.com slash giveaway. And that's where you'll get all the details about how you can be a winner.

0:39And again, we're choosing winners every single day for 10 straight days. 10 days of greatness is my way of saying thank you for a decade of greatness. So what are you waiting for? Head to lewishouse.com slash giveaway and enter the giveaway right now. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

1:07Who are we when we detach from our own mind? Very good question. At first, you were identified with the conceptual mind, the story-making mind. Your sense of identity was the story of me. My past, my memories, my beliefs, my... That's right. All these thoughts that are accumulated in my mind from the past that I've told myself, this happened to me, this is what's wrong with me, this is why I'm not good enough, or this person did this, or whatever. Now, when the awareness arises, your sense of who you are, your sense of identity begins to shift from being lodged in the conceptual mind, the voice in the head.

1:52It goes to a deeper place and you realize who you are in your essence is actually the awareness itself. In other words, this is a dimension of consciousness. I call it beyond thought. Thinking is a wonderful thing. Thinking is a very powerful tool for creating. However, if thinking is all we have and we look for our identity in the mind, then that is very limiting. If thinking is used as a tool, it's very powerful and empowering and can be very creative. But if thinking becomes self-serving, in other words, you're completely identified with this stream of thinking that for most people never stops.

2:41But the most important thing in a person's life, and this is why we're here, is to experience this shift in consciousness so that increasingly, in glimpses at first, but then increasingly, your sense of who you are is the space of awareness, the presence. on the one hand you have your form identity your form is the most of physical body which is the first thing people identify with but really it's not the physical body it's a mental image of my body which they may be happy about the body can be a source of pride or it can be a source of shame or anything in between and so people identify with my body and the next is the psychological form of me, all the things that I identify with in my past.

3:33The past makes up who I think I am, all the past conditioning, starting in childhood, the culture in which you grow up, the family in which you grow up. All those things become part of your identity. So you have form identity with the one hand, and everybody obviously has one. And you have a form identity, a psychological form. There is a deeper identity also that I call it essence identity. In your essence, we use the term awareness and we use the term presence. But another term we can use, what that really is, is consciousness. The essence of who you are is consciousness, the light of consciousness itself.

4:15This is something to be experienced. You cannot understand conceptually what it is that I'm talking about unless you experience in this moment, perhaps, what that means that you are, in essence, you are the space or the light of consciousness. For very brief instances, the mind becomes still. It subsides. But you are still there. Let's assume that you let go of any memory of your past because you don't need it right now. Who or what are you when you're not telling yourself who or what you are? Who or what are you without the story? Some people are afraid of that. They're so attached to the story they can't let go.

5:01Why do so many people hold on to their pain identity, their past story, for decades sometimes? Why do they hold on to it so long when you might see their friends and family seeing that they're suffering and struggling, but they're unwilling to break free of this old identity or current identity they've been holding on to for so long. People will finally, it gets so bad, they finally let that identity go. But why does it take an extreme, horrible breakdown or pain for people to finally say, you know, this old story of mine, this old identity, I want to let it go and step into a new identity. Why is that so challenging for people?

5:37It goes back thousands of years in a collective consciousness or unconscious in humanity, we all inherit this kind of dysfunction. Of course, another word for that is the ego. It is the human ego. When I use the term ego or in the spiritual context, ego simply means complete identification with your mind, the mental, emotional makeup of you. That's ego is complete identification with that. And so that's so deeply ingrained. Every human being inherits that kind of dysfunction. so it's so hard to let go. It's a challenging and wonderful thing to realize that your purpose, beyond any purpose that you might have on a personal level, but your deeper purpose is to evolve as a conscious being and to go beyond the ego here.

6:28You are an expression of universal consciousness and universal consciousness throughout the universe is awakening. We live in an awakening universe. So gradually, life forms, in our case, the human life form, begins to awaken into a higher level of consciousness. The essence here is realizing the possibility of living in a different state of consciousness where you're not necessarily always immediately thinking and interpreting things. there's someone watching or listening that is thinking to themselves you know what i'm just feeling pain psychologically off and on consistently and i haven't been able to figure out how to break free and feel a sense of true harmony internally true peace yes of course there's challenges that are going to come our way as human beings you know as we continue to grow but as a baseline peace and harmony and they just can't figure out how to get there what do people need to be aware of and then take action on in order to start working towards inner peace and harmony?

7:35Well, a good entry point is the present moment. I sometimes call it the portal into that state of consciousness that we call presence or awareness. The egoic mind is not really interested in the present moment, and it usually tries to obscure the present moment. It's interested in some other imagined moment but not past the future yeah it ignores the present moment but the first realization is the absolute importance of the present moment in your life it's a foundation for everything and your relationship to the present moment determines how the future evolves but what we call future which by the way never arrives as it's again the present moment.

8:24So the realization that all you ever have, all that you can ever experience, is intrinsically linked with the present moment. It's inseparable from the present. Your entire life unfolds in and as the present moment. When the past happened, it was the present moment. It couldn't happen anywhere else. And when you remember the past, you remember it in the present moment. When the future comes, when tomorrow comes, it won't be tomorrow anymore. It will be the now. The future as such does not actually exist, because all you can ever experience or have is the present moment. That's the starting point.

9:14begins with the realization of the absolute primary importance of the present moment. This is all you ever have. So you might as well have a good relationship with the present moment because if your relationship with the present moment is dysfunctional, your entire life is dysfunctional. If someone watching or listening is saying, well, my present is really challenging right now. I've got a lot of debt. I feel I've got some sickness in my body and my health is not there. You know, I'm going through a divorce or breakup. The career is not as good as I want it to be. There's some type of pain in the present.

9:49How can I actually enjoy the present when I'm in breakdown everywhere? These life challenges, situational challenges, are usually perceived as being part of the present moment. But they're not really the present moment. They are what is called your life situation. But other than your life situation, you have something that I call your life. Life situation exists in time. Life is now. and never not now. And since your life is now, you have to ask yourself, yes, I have all these problems. I don't know how I'm going to pay the rent, maybe, or my relationship is problem. I'm in the middle of divorce proceedings, all these things that happen to people.

10:28Primary question I often ask people, what problem do you have at this moment? And then they usually start by saying, well, I'm running out of money or I'm living in this unpleasant place. What am I? Just this moment, right here and now. What problem do you have here and now in this moment? Maybe you become aware that you're breathing and you look around. Reluctantly, sometimes people have to admit, well, okay, I'm ready to admit that at just this moment there isn't actually a problem. Any problem you have cannot survive in the present moment. Because problem is a burden that you carry in your mind.

11:12That's what a problem is. The rest is situations and circumstances. Either you leave them alone if there's nothing you can do, or you take some action. They are not a problem. Either you act or you don't act. And if you don't act, you take your attention into the present moment and see that it's actually okay.

11:42Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

12:32Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.