Eckhart Tolle

who live with a very painful sense of identity.

They perceive their life as a burden.

So they live with this heaviness, and they don't realize this heaviness that they call my life is actually a narrative that they tell themselves.

And they say, that's me.

All the things that have happened to me, the dreadful things...

past that people did to me or circumstances did to me, or maybe even the bad things that I did.

So you get a very heavy identity builds up and that becomes your sense of self and people don't realize it's a story you're continuously telling yourself in your mind, but you're so identified with the story that you don't exist.

You're outside of the story.

And so that is what

what in some spiritual traditions is called the self.

The Buddha called it the self, which is the mind-made sense of self, which the Buddha said, which ultimately he recognized that that mind-made sense of self is ultimately a kind of fiction that you live through.

So now, when you realize that this is the case, this means that at this point of realization, another dimension of consciousness has arisen in you, which is not your mind.

We could call it awareness, or we could call it presence.

So when you realize what your mind is doing, that is not part of the conceptual mind that works through stories and words and concepts.

It is a deeper, or you could say deeper or higher, dimension of consciousness that suddenly has arisen.

I often call it presence, but another good word for it is awareness.

So awareness is the ability to know what your mind is

And then the wonderful thing is, at first, it's just glimpses.

When you detach from the mind, you say, oh, wow.

And then you have moments when you're not suffering because you allow this moment to be as it is.