Are Your Thoughts Making You Unhappy? | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Most of the time, there is a voice in your head that comments and has opinions and viewpoints and interpretations about what's going on in your life. I call that the voice in the head. For most humans, that is completely involuntary. They don't even know that they have a voice in the head that never stops talking. Most of the time, silently in your head. At other times, it may even shout something out, so it wants to be heard. And so if you walk in the street, you will find most people look fairly sane. They're not talking to themselves, it seems, because they're not talking out aloud. But if you listened into everybody's head, you would be amazed of how noisy the inside of every human is. It's like, you know, these radio stations where the people talk in an excited voice. They go on and on. If you go to a foreign country and you don't know what they're talking about, you might think this must be extremely important. But if you can understand what they are saying, you realize it's completely meaningless. It's just noise. So a significant part of what happens in your mind, the larger part, is actually just superfluous noise. There's, thinking is a wonderful ability, a wonderful tool if used rightly. It is an instrument that causes dysfunction and misery for millions on the planet, unhappiness for millions on the planet, if thinking is not used, but if you are used by thought. So when humans say, I think, in most cases, that's actually not true because they have no control over their thinking. It's compulsive and involuntary. And they are so identified with these thought processes, they don't even know that they are in the grip of their thought processes because they are so identified, they become their thought processes. So whatever comes into your head, you completely believe in it. And then you, yeah, that's how it is. Leon just mentioned, I don't know, we were talking this morning or yesterday about when I was struggling to survive on a physical plane. I often ate baked beans on toast. I was living in England. This is, there's a little bit of relevance here and that could have been a very unhappy period in my life, not being able what to live on the next day or day after. And again, now I'm able to have good meals occasionally and I haven't had baked beans on toast in a long time now, but Leon gave me a can yesterday. Now, when I was reduced to eating baked beans on toast, and again, that's a wrong way of putting it, it could have been very unhappy. I was already in my thirties. And so my mind, my mental commentary, the involuntary thought processes would normally have said, this is your complete failure. You can't afford the rent. You don't know, you have no income. You've made a mess out of your life. And this is what I'm reduced to, baked beans on toast. Look at your contemporaries that are driving around in their BMWs. They've got all that. And so this is what life has done to me or what I have done to mess up my life. I could have had many kinds of narratives accompanying what was happening in the present moment that would have created unhappiness. And I wouldn't even have known it. And this happens, just a small example of how a narrative that you have that accompanies something that you are doing causes unhappiness. And you can do the same thing without the narrative and you're free of unhappiness. You're eating baked beans on toast and actually doesn't taste that bad at all. And you swallow and it is nourishing. And you don't even have to say that. You can simply enjoy the sensory perceptions associated with that without building a sense of self around it. The sense of self that you build around it arises through involuntary and compulsive thinking. Me and the Buddha was already talking about that. So, and this, I'm saying this now in case you need to leave early or want to go across the street. There's just a simple, if you only take this away from this evening but hopefully there will be much more. If you only take this away, if you look at whenever you feel unhappiness, this is a generic term, unhappiness in whatever form. Unhappiness can arise as irritation, can arise as anger, can arise as even boredom is a form of unhappiness. Sadness, all kinds of states that don't feel pleasant, unhappiness. And usually they are attributed to a life situation, something that's going on in your life. So for example, waiting at the airline counter and of course how often things don't go well there. Let's hope they don't drag you out of the plane, but that could happen too. Whenever you feel irritation arising, anger arising, upset in whatever form, ask yourself, is this caused by the situation or is it caused by what my mind is telling me about the situation? And in 95% of cases, you will find that the mental commentary that argues and complains about something that's going on but should not be going on, but it is, but shouldn't be. And the gap between what is and what the mind says should be or should not be, that gap is the arising of unhappiness and misery or as the Buddha called suffering. It arises in the gap between the isness of things in this moment and the arguing with the isness of things in this moment, imposing a narrative on it that says, no, this should not be. I'm not talking about situation where you can take action to change it. There are certain situations where action is possible and necessary of time. But even if action is possible and necessary at this very moment, it still is as it is, then you can take action. But this moment is as it is. So when you leave or when you allow this moment to be as it is because you recognize the inevitability of is, this seems so obvious but it's not obvious to most humans, the inevitability of what is already the case now. And if you can internally align yourself with this inevitable now, the next moment is a different thing. But when the next moment comes, it's now, of course, there is no next moment except as a thought in the head. Where is the future? You've never experienced it, you can't, impossible. And yet humans think about it more than the present moment. They want to get to the future because they don't want what is. They believe some kind of liberation or fulfillment will come next. Always missing the isness of things. So if unhappiness arises, examine, does it come, is it caused by the situation I'm in or is it caused by how my mind is interpreting the situation?