(bell rings) - 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 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 in 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.
(audience laughs) And then before you know it, you're... More thoughts come and then
other conflicting thoughts. And, no, no, that's not how it is. Yes, it is.
(audience laughs) No. Oh, I can't take anymore. And you believe in that thought too, that you can't take anymore. (audience laughs) So the ability 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, it's 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 in certain cases, you may want to understand what happened, why you acted or 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 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, the need to understand my life and work it out diminishes. (chuckles) So the compulsion also to understand every other human being that you meet immediately formulate certain judgements and conclusions about
that other human being and the urge to immediately form, jump to conclusions 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 comes back and you go (groans). (audience laughs) It's good to act it out a bit because then you can recognize it. (audience laughs) That's not presence. That's absence. (audience laughs) 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 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... The compulsion to judge
continuously isn't there. (indistinct) And so it seems at first, and the egoic mind may come in and say, "Oh, wait a minute. You don't know what's going on anymore if you don't judge it. Who knows who that person is? If you don't judge it,
he could be your enemy. He could be out to deceive you. You better be careful. You need to judge." But then you say, no, you don't. And so I understood when I was reading Plato. Plato's works, as you may know, I don't know how many people
these days read Plato, but he reports in his works what Socrates taught. How faithfully he recorded
what Socrates taught we don't know, but one certain things seem to be... because Socrates never wrote anything. Certain things over 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
Adelphi in ancient Greece, and the Oracle said,
"Who is the wisest man on the planet or in the world?" They always said, "Socrates
is the wisest." Okay. They heard this, they went to Athens where Socrates was. And, "Oh, listen, the Oracle Adelphi said you are the wisest of all men. Why is that?" And Socrates said, "I am the wisest because I'm the only one who
knows that he knows nothing." (audience laughs) I'm the only one who knows
that he knows nothing. On another occasion, he said, "I'm 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 feigned modesty. And they say, of course
he knows what does it? He knows a lot, but he just says it. It's a feigned modesty. In other words, it's ego,
(audience laughs) 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 describes the very
foundation of the state of what ultimately is the state of spacious
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. (audience laughs)
But I know how's Socrates always started the... He started his Socratic dialogues 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
a state of not knowing. In other words, he was rooted in the state of pure awareness, pure awareness, in new pure
awareness, conceptually of course you don't know
anything when your mind stops. For example, now, if
I stopped speaking now and you're still here too. We can do it together. I stop speaking for a few seconds, and as I stop 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, that doesn't work. You can't hold your breaths and say, "I must not think." (audience laughs) That might work, but
then thinking will come up even more strongly once
you start breathing again. (snorts)
(audience laughs) So it's not that. 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 in sense perceptions against a background of awareness. And you might notice that in that space, you don't know anything. (chuckles) 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. (water rushing)
