How to Practice Self-Observation | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

and that change in consciousness must there's only one place where it can happen and that's in you and that implies that you practice self-observation that is an essential part of the change in consciousness to practice self-observation is implies that there is enough presence or awareness in you from where you can self-observe and in almost all of you there is maybe not all the time but there is there is enough to have brought you here and that is quite a bit so is there enough presence in you so that you can self-observe your own motivations your

own thought structures what are the habitual thoughts that i think so that you are not drawn continuously into every thought that comes and follow it where it wants to take you one little thought comes in about your life oh and then another thought and you follow it oh oh no and then before you know it you're more thoughts comment than other conflicting thoughts in no no that's not how it is yes it is no no i can't take anymore and you believe in that thought too that you can't take anymore so the ability to to

observe non-judgmentally what goes on inside you there is awareness there needs to be awareness so that is self-knowledge self-knowledge means is really not so much knowing on a conceptual level what happened to you in the past and trying to understand the past the story of me i need to investigate the story of me there is a place for that for in certain cases you may want to understand what happened how why you acted or your what your parents did to you and come to an understanding your limited understanding of that but ultimately the arising of

the new consciousness is not it's not a better conceptual understanding of anything it's not a better conceptual understanding of who you are it goes beyond any concept awareness in itself does not necessarily imply immediately that you understand more about yourself in fact as you become more aware in yourself you the need to understand my life and work it out diminishes and so the compulsion to also to understand every other human being that you meet immediately formulate certain judgments and conclusions about that other human being and the urge to immediately form judgment inclusion about any situation

that you encounter and then this is how it is and then you have a narrative that develops in the mind and then you're telling yourself the narrative about who you are who they are and how it all is you've all met people like that and once you were like that yourself and just perhaps still occasionally that that comes back and you go it's good to act it out a bit because then you can recognize it that's not presence that's absence it's called absence the opposite of presence of course is absence that means you are not

there you are not there all that's there pretending to be you is the egoic mind the conceptual mind and so that mind says it's me and my life so what arises then is the awareness which means as it arises it seems at first that you know less than before because you no longer compulsively immediately interpret everything conceptually every human being you encounter and your own life you don't compulsively that con compulsive the compulsion to judge continuously isn't there and so it seems at first and the the egoic mind will may come in and say oh

wait a minute you don't know what's going on anymore if you don't if you don't judge it you don't you who knows who that person is if you don't judge it he he could be your enemy he could be how to deceive you you better be careful you need to judge but then he said no you don't and so i understood when i was reading plato the plato's works as you may know i don't know how many people these days read plato but uh he reports in his works the the what socrates taught how faithfully

he recorded what socrates taught we don't know but once certain things seem to be because socrates never wrote anything certain things however seem genuine and there's especially one statement that socrates made that's often repeated by plato and that is this when somebody went to the oracle at delphi in ancient greece and the oracle said who is the wisest man on the planet or in the world they all said socrates is the wisest okay they heard this then they they went to essence where socrates was and that oh oh listen the uh the um oracle at

delphi said you are the wisest all men why is that and socrates said i am the wisest because i'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing i'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing on another occasion he said i am wise because i know that i know nothing and then people later they read it over the centuries and most people interpret it as kind of a faint modesty and they say of course he knows what does it he knows a lot but he just says it it is it's a faint modesty

it's in other words it's ego but that's not how it is it describes a state of consciousness out of which his enormously creative teaching his deep insights arose it is a it describes the very foundation of the state of of what of what ultimately is the state of spatious awareness or presence and that state is one of actually cessation of mind activity without loss of consciousness so every of the so-called dialogues of socrates and the way it's reported by plato is not absolutely correct because i know exactly maybe i was there i don't know but

i know how socrates always started they he started the his blood his socratic dialogue with just not knowing and then he begins to ask questions and through questions the knowing gradually arises he does not start with already accumulated knowledge so it starts from the he was comfortable with the state of not knowing in other words he was rooted in the state of pure awareness pure awareness in your pure awareness conceptually of course you don't know anything when your mind stops for example now if i i stop speaking now and use and you can you're still

here too we can do it together i stopped speaking for a few seconds and as i stopped speaking do you need to fill that space between me stopping to speak and starting to speak again do you need to fill that space with thought or are you able to simply be present in that space in other words are you able to just simply be don't suppress thought it doesn't work you can't you can't hold your breath and say i must not think that might work but but then thinking will come even up even more strongly once

you start breathing again so it's not that you cannot you can't hold down thought it's a pure shift into a more alert state of consciousness alert alert means okay now acting out alertness now i'm not just acting it out when i look at you in this weird way i'm not thinking and when you look at me looking at you in this weird way you also could experiment with that and see whether as i stop speaking now for 10 seconds you can just be in that space of pure awareness where you take incense perceptions the background

of awareness and you might notice that in that space you don't know anything you don't even know your name because your name is a thought you don't know anything in that space and yet you are there conscious present without any movement in the mind you