Eckhart Tolle explores the tension between doing and being, the mental conditioning that shapes us versus the consciousness underneath. He argues that challenges either deepen unconsciousness or spark spiritual awakening, depending on whether you stay trapped in ego or move toward presence.
So in English, we don't have a word that applies to both men and women. I don't know if in Swedish, in German, you have the word mensch, which means. Could mean it's man and woman. The English language doesn't have that. So you have to say human being. Human being. And that's great. I like that because I realized that that points to the two dimensions that constitute your reality. You are a human, undoubtedly, which means you have a past. You have mental, emotional conditioning that makes up the person or the ego, the personality. You have a life situation. You are a human, and you have your desires as a human. You have your goals and so on. All the things that you experience as a human. Right? Okay, but what about being? The being dimension is overlooked by most humans. They are lost in their human nature. They are completely unaware of that transcendent dimension of consciousness that actually is the essential reality to who or what they are. I sometimes call it your essence identity. The essence, your essence identity is the being of you. And the being is timeless. The being is consciousness itself. And then there's the human, and the two are together. And if you can awaken to the beingness of you, then of course, you continue to be a human until you are no longer. Until the body dissolves. In the meantime, your task, your mission, your purpose is to, as a human, to also embody the being. Then you have both dimensions in your life, the limited dimension of here that is temporal, inseparable from time. And you have the transcendent dimension to who you are in the timeless realm of consciousness itself. And that is a continuous realization. At first, it may only come to you as glimpses in brief moments. And you feel suddenly a sense of lightness and very peaceful, but very intensely alive. And you go, oh. And you may realize you're not thinking in those moments. Think. Thinking has subsided, but you haven't fallen asleep. You're awake. And then you may remember those moments. This was so wonderful. Sometimes it happens when you go into nature. If you can really be there, nature can help you in your awakening. If you can really be there with all the senses and be aware of the awareness itself when you are out there in nature. And sometimes it can happen to some humans almost accidentally. They're out climbing a mountain, or they're swimming or somewhere in nature, and suddenly the person subsides and just an awareness arises. And they go, wow. And they think it's been caused by the beauty that they see, but it's not really that. It's been caused by the cessation of thinking. And you can have that in the middle of a city. And that's a. This is your continuous practice. Are you able to, as much as possible, let go of habitual, especially habitual, useless, self serving thinking. Thinking that only feeds the fictitious self, the ego, the entity that actually loves its problems, whether it says it? No, I don't love my problems. Yes, you do, because you talk and think about them continuously. In fact, you create them through unconscious thinking. You create them. No, no, I don't. Yes, you do. And that this entity then becomes as first you have glimpses, sometimes accidental. They may only be a few seconds and then perhaps a little bit longer. And then the two, gradually, the being and the human kind of merge. The being seeps into the human. And so the human, the conditioned entity, the human becomes less and less obnoxious and less and less dysfunctional and less and less creating completely unnecessary and absurd suffering for yourself and others. Completely unnecessary and absurd suffering created unconsciously by the ego. This entity, in its attempt to strengthen itself, it loves its problems and its enemies. Oh, I feel much bigger. Anger is great. And you can talk about it all the time. This is completely asleep. Completely asleep. And so as the awakening happens, presence begins to sometimes completely replace the person. And, and at other times it kind of shines through the person in the same way that a light shines through the lampshade. The light shines through the lampshade. And the person still. Yes, the person still has its conditioning to some extent and can never be totally free of the conditioning. There's always certain ways in which you behave that's part to do with how you were brought up. Your environment, all the conditioning, the country, even the language that you speak is the form of mental conditioning. All those things, they are still there. But the most dysfunctional and unhappiness creating patterns, they subside more and more. Certain patterns remain. As long as you are a person, a human, certain patterns remain, but not the heavy, deeply unhappy and obnoxious patterns. They gradually dissolve and all is left will be certain idiosyncrasies in your personality and so on. That's okay. So the person remains, but it undergoes a substantial transformation. It no longer creates suffering even in the face of challenges, because they continue to happen even as you awaken. The universe will continue to present you with challenges, new ones, no matter what situation you go into. At first you oh, this is great, I'm in a new situation. Before, you know, comes up from behind another challenge. The universe won't leave you alone. But the Wonderful thing is, if you are not undergoing the awakening process, every challenge that arises will make you more unconscious. It will strengthen the self. The self that is reacting is reactive and complaining all the time and reacting. So the challenge will make you more unconscious if you are not awakening yet. And that is you can verify that in your. Perhaps in your own experience. When things go wrong, there is a reactive entity there that works itself up. Either you become angry or despondent or whatever the reactivity is. People like in professions such as lawyers often encounter people in their most unconscious states because they tend to go to lawyers when things go wrong. They're being sued or the divorce is happening. Divorce lawyers. To be a divorce lawyer potentially could be a very enlightening job because you encounter deep human unconsciousness, which most people, when they, in a conflict situation like that, become more unconscious than they are normally deeply unconscious. And so that's when you're being challenged by life. The challenge will create a reaction, and the reaction will. You become completely identified with the reaction. And you can even more unconscious than your normal state, which is unconscious enough, but it's now it's more unconscious. Oh, can't stop thinking about it. And now, as you're awakening, challenge comes again. And then you suddenly see the possibility of actually being more intensely present. When the challenge comes and you go, it's like, you know what a dimmer switch is on an electrical switch, you can turn up the light dimmer switch. So when a challenge comes, something goes wrong, so to speak. A difficult person arises, a difficult situation arises. Some kind of loss arises, whatever kind of loss it may be. And instead of reacting and becoming more unconscious, you suddenly sense you're becoming more present in the face of a challenge. And that is when the challenges of the world are becoming helpful to you. Rather than make you unconscious, they can intensify the awakening process.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
