Chapter 1: How does our mental narrative contribute to suffering?
Millions of people in this world live with this heaviness and they don't realize this heaviness that they call my life is actually a narrative that they tell themselves. That mind-made sense of self is utterly fiction. Can you see how insane that is? You've been one of my great inspirations here on the planet. Guided millions and millions of people to an understanding of who they really are.
Eckhart Tolle.
Your relationship with the present moment is dysfunctional. Your entire life is dysfunctional. Make the present moment your friend.
Then your whole life begins to change. If someone watching or listening is saying, well, my present is really challenging right now. How can I actually enjoy the present when I'm in breakdown everywhere? The problem is lives in the mind.
To get out of that...
I've got a number of topics today. One being about the law of attraction. I want to talk about stress and anxiety. I want to talk about why people suffer and how to get out of suffering. I want to talk about relationships and how to know when you're in a healthy dynamic in relationships. All these things I want to talk about today. But the first one.
I felt like I was trapped in suffering for so many years, and I didn't know how to get out of this suffering, anxious, stressful feeling that would come and go, that would ruminate at night, that would keep me up at night, that would make me anxious in social settings, that would make me feel like I wasn't good enough.
And I know people feel a sense of suffering, anxiety, overwhelm, and stress today, which seems like more than ever. I'm curious with all of your wisdom and experience, how can we overcome or eliminate stress and suffering and anxiety in our lives when it seems to be crippling us?
Usually if you are, um, not conscious of how your mind operates, and many people still are not conscious of how their mind operates, they locate all the source of their troubles outside themselves. So they perceive whatever their life situation is, and every life situation is to some extent problematic,
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Chapter 2: What practices can help us experience the present moment?
psychological suffering, because this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about toothache or anything like that. We're talking about psychological suffering. The psychological suffering arises from stories that you tell yourself in your mind about situations, about your life or your life situation.
As a practical exercise to introduce this teaching to people, I sometimes recommend this. Next time you find yourself in a situation in which suffering arises, and suffering, of course, is a generic term. It can come in many forms. On one end of the spectrum, suffering is just feeling irritated or upset about something. It might be a minor thing, but you feel irritated.
The other end of the spectrum, there's deep despair, deep depression and sadness, or extreme forms of anxiety, panic. And all that. So you have the two and in between there's a wide range of different forms of suffering that arise. And very often they are not recognized as suffering by people. If you are not conscious of how your mind operates, you don't even know that you are suffering.
You don't even know that there is another way, that there would be another way in which you could experience this particular situation. So I recommend next time you find you become upset about something or irritated, which is a form of suffering, minor form of suffering, experiment. I say, let's imagine a situation that these things happen quite often to people. You're in a lineup.
Let's say it's at the airport. Airport is a source where often people experience psychological suffering because things don't go the way they expect them to go. Yes. Especially these days. So you're in a lineup. It's not moving. You're getting more and more irritated and upset. Or it could be anywhere. You're waiting, but it's not happening.
You're waiting there or in a traffic time where on the telephone, nobody's answering. Just you get automated message that says, your call is important to us. And the Grokswood waiting time is 45 minutes. And you feel more when you get angry and irritated. Now, I recommend the following practice because you're standing there or waiting there. You might as well practice.
Ask yourself, how would I experience this situation if I did not add any interpretation or any thought to it? How would I experience this moment?
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Chapter 3: Why is the ego never satisfied with achievements?
If I didn't add any thought to it, if I did not interpret it in any way, if I just allowed this to be as it is without burdening it with this baggage of thought, it's okay. Let's say you're standing in this line up and you're very irritated. So how would I experience this if I did not, in other words, if I did not in my mind say this is bad? And all the other thoughts that come after that.
Because when you say this is bad, then the next thought comes, my life is bad. And then you get a whole string of associated thoughts that are negative. How would I experience this moment without adding any thought to it? Okay. So there you stand. And this would bring your attention into the present moment. And so your attention moves into the present moment.
And in this present moment, you're standing there and you're breathing. You're looking around, people moving, whatever the room is you find yourself in, you're breathing, you're perceiving things, people, and suddenly you may find that this moment is actually free of suffering. The suffering did not arise, was not caused by the external circumstance.
It was caused by the narrative in your mind about this circumstance. That's a huge distinction. And you begin to live consciously when you realize this. Until you realize that, you live unconsciously, which means, in spiritual terms, To live unconsciously is to be totally identified with whatever your mind is saying.
I call it the voice in the head, the narrative in your mind that tells you about how good things, how bad things are, how they should be. They are, but they shouldn't be. They should be different. But they are as they are always in this moment. You can't change this moment.
so you become aware this was discovered by the way uh two thousand years ago by a not very well-known ancient greek philosopher epictetus and he said uh the the the most of your suffering is derived from what your mind is telling you about a situation but not from the situation itself And that's an enormous realization.
And that can be the beginning of an awakening to see that the narrative in your mind is mostly what causes the suffering. It is possible, of course, that an external situation may cause physical discomfort, obviously. Yes.
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between manifesting from lack and fullness?
That's possible. Your legs are hurting or back is hurting or it's too cold or too hot. Physical discomfort, of course, that's possible. But that is not suffering in the sense in which we use this term right here. That is. No. The psychological suffering, unhappiness is another word you could use. It's a generic term for any form of negativity inside yourself, unhappiness, suffering.
So you begin to realize that most of that arises from a mental narrative about a situation or about your circumstances, but not from the circumstances themselves. And then you can begin to practice every time you feel
upset is arising, some form of anger is arising, some form of negativity, blaming people in situations and saying, this shouldn't be happening, or something is not happening, but it should be happening, or they should do this, or they shouldn't do it, all kinds of narratives in your mind. So your spiritual awakening is you're beginning to be aware of what your mind is saying.
The stories that you're telling yourself about situations, but also the stories you're telling yourself about what you call your life. So because people, there are millions of people in this world 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.
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Chapter 5: How can we recognize our true identity beyond our personal story?
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. But who are we when we detach from our own mind?
Very good question. Yes. So at first, you were identified with the mind. conceptual mind, the story-making mind, and you, your sense of identity was the story of me.
My past, my memories, my beliefs, all these thoughts that are accumulated in the bank of 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. Exactly, exactly.
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. It goes to a deeper place and you realize who you are in your essence is actually the awareness itself. And that is an amazing realization. In other words, this is a dimension of consciousness that is, 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 See, all through the day, they're talking to themselves. There's a voice in the head. Sometimes they talk, they say, I. Sometimes they talk to themselves and say, you. You shouldn't have done that.
You're not good enough. Yeah, all these things.
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Chapter 6: What role does acceptance play in overcoming suffering?
So... This is 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. Does that mean there's two of us?
one could say that there is on the one hand i sometimes call it 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 may be happy about or Either 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. That's the first form of identification. And the next is the psychological form of me, all the things that I identify with in my past. The 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, I call it form identity, or the one that, and everybody obviously has one, no matter how conscious you are, you continue to have a physical body until you don't. And you have a form identity, a psychological form. But there is a deeper identity also that, and this is spiritual awakening, that is, I call it essence identity, your essence.
And your essence is, if we want to put a, 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. And this is something to be experienced.
You cannot understand conceptually what it is that I'm talking about unless you experience in this moment, perhaps, well, it's the only moment there is, unless you experience what that means, that you are, in essence, you are consciousness, the space or the light of consciousness.
Between two thoughts, for example, sometimes there's a thought that comes to an end, another thought hasn't arisen yet, you have a gap of five seconds or ten seconds, and... This is an experiential thing. To realize yourself as consciousness implies that first, for very brief instances, the mind becomes still. It subsides. But you are still there.
So when you are not, let's say, let's assume that you let go of any memory of your past because you don't need it right now. You don't remember your past at all or your name or anything. and you're not thinking about future. In fact, you're not thinking at all, but you are aware. You're aware of your sense perceptions, but you're not interpreting sense perceptions.
You're allowing sense perceptions to be. 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? And some people are afraid of that. They're so attached to the story, they can't let go. But it's a wonderful practice for some people.
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Chapter 7: How can we cultivate abundance in our lives?
So So the essence here is realizing the possibility of living in this different state of consciousness where you're not necessarily always immediately thinking and interpreting things.
And if there's someone watching or listening that is thinking to themselves, you know what? I'm just feeling pain psychologically, kind of 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 type of application or what do people need to be aware of and then take action on in order to start working towards inner peace and harmony? Right. Yes. Good question.
Well, a good entry point is the present moment. The present moment is the, I sometimes call it the portal into that state of consciousness that we call presence or awareness. Now, the egoic mind, as I call it, 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.
The past, the future, worry, doubt.
Yes, 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, what we call future, which, by the way, never arrives, because when it arrives, it's again the present moment. Yes. So 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 moment. Your entire life unfolds in and as the present moment. That all there ever is. 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.
The future, when the future comes, when tomorrow comes, it won't be tomorrow anymore. It will be the now. There was a British pub in London that had... I lived in London for many years. They had a sign on the bar that says, free beer tomorrow. And of course, tomorrow never comes. So the sign is always true.
That's funny.
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Chapter 8: What is the ultimate definition of greatness according to the guest?
That's all mind stuff. But to experience how good it feels to give. So we have on the one hand appreciation, gratitude and appreciation are kind of the same thing. giving every day in whatever form. And the next thing is that obviously Jesus already in one sentence, one could say, told us the essence of manifesting and how it works. And he said,
So whenever you pray for something that you want, believe that you already have it and it will be given to you.
Yes.
There's the key. The important thing is it did not say believe that you will have it. He said, believe that you already have it. Now, this may not be immediately clear to people, how do I do that? How do I believe that I already have it when I know that I don't have it?
Right, right, right. How do you get that belief of having it before knowing, feeling, tasting, smelling the thing that you want?
Yes. So you feel the thing. It is already a mental reality in your mind. How do you feel now that you have it in your mind? How does it feel? And this feeling is really where the power of manifestation lies. But what is that feeling?
Because that feeling of having it already and feeling this deep sense of satisfaction is really connecting with the deeper power within yourself, which is the power where all or sense of aliveness originates there. It's a deeper sense of aliveness that comes from consciousness itself. So you might believe it might differ from person to person. One person might think, okay, what I want is a
a big house overlooking the ocean or whatever, and then you feel yourself already there, experiencing that. Another person might think, well, what I want is to have this great company that does good things in this world. And it's and I'm at the end. How does that feel?
But you might find that the feeling is actually basically always the same, whether your mind says, but the house overlooking the ocean, you know why? Or the other person says, Well, this is the company that I'm well ahead of that doing great things in this world. The feeling is basically the same feeling. And the feeling is a feeling of fullness of life. Yes. A completeness. That is power.
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