The following is a transcript of a free talk by spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle on Conscious Manifestation, speaking about how to decrease fear, worry, and anxiety by gaining a new perspective using awareness. It is an excellent talk!
Whenever you encounter adversity, loss, or extreme limitation – some kind of disruption – that is a call to come more intensely into the present moment. Allow whatever form the adversity takes – allow it to force you into the present moment. If you aren’t in the present moment, you will be in a state of fear.
The first step for manifesting something better is to forget about manifesting and to give your full attention to the present moment. That includes not only whatever is happening around you right now, ie. sense perceptions and so on, it also concerns the thoughts that are going through your mind at the present moment.
What does “be present” mean?
There is a huge difference between having thoughts go through your mind and being aware of those thoughts going through your mind in the present moment. This is something very important and easy to overlook. Thoughts go through your mind all the time. For most people, there is no awareness behind the thought, and this is why we say they are unconscious.
Without awareness, there is only the movement of thought – and the movement of thought reacts to whatever is happening around you. The way in which the movement of thought reacts depends on the way in which your mind has been conditioned by past experiences.
The conditioning of your mind determines how you react to things happening around you, how you interpret them and what kind of narrative you create to what is happening around you. From that narrative, you talk to yourself – that is the voice in the head. Without awareness you are completely identified with the stream of thinking that is reactive to whatever is happening around you.
Making presence work for you
If what is happening is a challenge – some kind of adversity, limitation, loss or disruption – then the normal thing for most people is to interpret what is happening from a scary perspective/narrative. It is scary because you aren’t only looking at what is happening now, you are extrapolating from there and thinking how this is going to affect you tomorrow or next week, and you are thinking about the future and you see that it is getting worse and how it is going to affect your life, and you play out scenarios in your mind which are not pleasant.
You believe what you are experiencing is the reality. But it is not the reality. What you are experiencing is what your mind has created – the narrative your mind has created as a reaction to what is happening around you. You are confusing what is happening in your mind with reality.
Once presence or awareness comes in – you are aware of the kind of thoughts that your mind is creating. That is the beginning of spiritual awakening or the awakening of consciousness. To become aware of how your mind functions and what it says.
This is why it is so important to become aware of the present moment because that is an intrinsic part of being present is to become aware of what your mind is doing in this moment.
This is why I said the first step is to forget about manifesting something different, but the first step is to become aware. Without that you are at the mercy of the conditioned mind. For many, their worst enemy lives between their two ears and they don’t know it.
This is part 1 of the conversation with Eckhart Tolle. Click here to read the rest of the talk (published June 17, 2020). Click here to see the videos
This is a teaching by Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher in the US. Please see this page for a full video of this and other teachings on Conscious Manifestation
