This is a YouTube video titled "Are You Living Your Life or Just Your 'Life Situation'? | Eckhart Tolle" containing a monologue by Eckhart Tolle recorded in October 2024. In this spiritual talk, Eckhart Tolle discusses the distinction between living fully in the present moment (life) versus being caught up in one's life circumstances (life situation). He emphasizes the importance of presence, awareness, and acceptance of life's challenges as inherent and unavoidable, encouraging listeners to transcend negative reactions and live with greater consciousness and aliveness.
It's easy to forget that it's always now and only now. And if you could remember that not as a memory, but have that as a live realization, every moment, or to put it more accurately, in the moment. Because there's only really one moment, although what happens in it changes. If you knew that, then there would be it, that's the awakened state of consciousness. You would be in alignment with whatever happens. So the ultimate spiritual practice is to remember. Remember may not be the right word, that it's now and only ever now. And this is now, this is your life. And you may remember from power of now or somewhere I talked about. Usually when people refer to my life, they say my life. I call that, that's your life situation. Whatever is going on in your life, connected with the usual things that are of concern to people, which is your health, your relationships, your work, or lack of it, finances, living situation. Usually those things make up your life, my life, but I call that your life situation, as opposed to life, which is only ever now. Your life situation exists in the mind. You have to keep it alive there. It's important, of course, you have to deal with situations as they arise in your life. But they only arise in the present moment. And when you think about your life situation, you can only think about it in the present moment. It's important to have these two, your life and your life situation. And not allow your life situation to completely obscure your life. Your presence, your sense of aliveness, your spaciousness. And that's helpful to bring attention, to learn to bring attention to your senses. The expression we could use is come to your senses, those five senses. So you become more aware of what surrounds you. Inhabit the body. It's another one that brings you, connects you with life, takes you out of the conceptualizing mind. Be here now, come to your senses, inhabit the body, be here now. They're all one. And then you don't carry continuously with you, like a heavy burden, your life situation. Of course, you address whatever challenges arrive. You deal with them as they arise in the present moment. Occasionally you might have to do some planning or some strategy. Occasionally. But also that happens in the present moment. For the rest of the time. Don't allow your life situation to completely obscure, completely stifle your sense of aliveness, your presence in the moment. Because then you walk around with the burden of a very heavy personality. And you don't see what's around you anymore. You can't truly relate to other humans because you have the heaviness of your problematic life situation. And whose Life situation is not problematic. It's in the nature of life situations to be problematic. Of course, you arrange your life as best you can, your life situation as best you can. Yes, you may acquire new skills so you can get a better job, or in whatever way you improve or attempt to improve your life situation. Find a nicer place to live, why not? That's all fine, but the expectation that at some point life should leave you alone and not challenge you anymore, and that there's something wrong when life challenges you, that's a delusion. That itself the unconscious assumption that there's something wrong when life presents so called problems to you. Better word is challenges. There's an unconscious assumption and an unconscious resentment and negative reaction the moment you are faced with a new challenge because of the underlying assumption that these things, these things should not be happening. But no matter how carefully you arrange your life situation and no matter how much positive thinking you do, which is a nice thing, you will still be challenged by life. You will still experience the polarities of life. You will experience, for example, that every situation, every new situation has its new set of challenges. And you will realize, even when you achieve what you want to achieve, the very thing that you believe would lead to ultimate fulfillment. When you achieve what you want to achieve, when you finally get there, you will find very quickly that even that new wonderful situation presents a new set of challenges. So you're never left alone, life will not leave you alone. And so it's in the nature of life to give you challenges in your life situation. So if you could remove or realize the fallacy of, of believing that such challenges should not occur, then that will improve your or enhance your ability to deal with situations greatly. It also will remove the otherwise continuous arising of negativity when you are faced with life situations from big to small, with challenges in your life situation. If you assume that there shouldn't be any challenges, you become negative. You say there's something wrong, you resent it, you resent. If you believe in God, you can have an argument with God. This is I can't take any more God. This is you've gone too far this time. Or you can draw the conclusion that there is no God. Because your life would be easier if there were an intelligent God. He would obviously make your life easy and everybody else's life too. So therefore there can be no God. This is the alt. We will address that some other time. So the. It's the very same thing. As I've mentioned before somewhere, people like to watch movies and movies are kind of reflection of life. Especially if they are good movies and they are art in general, like literature. Good fiction is a reflection of life. It is. It's always ultimately about you. And would you want to see a movie in which nothing ever goes wrong? It would not be very interesting. The characters would not be faced with any dilemma, no challenges they wouldn't develop. You would fall asleep or you walk out. It's the essence of every movie, the plot, the so called plot. Almost every movie there might be one or two exceptions. Can't think of any. You can reduce every movie, explain what happens in the movie as close to soon after it starts. Something goes wrong in the plot, it has to, otherwise there's no interest. So you love it when you see it in a movie. You hate it when it happens to you. And the strange thing is that every being, even a plant, and every animal, the insect, other animals, any life form, they are all, they all encounter challenges to their survival, to their well being. They all are faced with that. Sam.
