Eckhart Tolle on Growth Through Life's Challenges

Challenging times. That's what we are living in. But that's precisely when the birth of wisdom is most likely to happen. And that's a fact that perhaps many of you can verify in their own life. Because many of you would not be here if you had not gone through serious challenges in your life. You would still be sitting on sofa right now watching Netflix. Comfort zones are wonderful when they happen and sometimes one gets them in one's life. You have when everything seems to be working fairly well or very well. Health is good, finance is okay, work situation is fine. Security, I have my life insurance, pension scheme investments, all working. Stock market hasn't collapsed yet. Stock market is doing okay, relationships are fine, loving wife, husband, whatever. Children, my children are doing great. They're all successful. It's absolutely fantastic. I have a nice house. Everything is absolutely great. My aging parents are fine too. That's a kind of fiction that very rarely happens. And when it does happen, it doesn't last very long. So if your life situation, the totality of what I've just described, we could call that, or I call that life situation, if your life situation is in the way I have just described, which is extremely unlikely, that there's a single human being here whose life situation is as I just described. But if it is, just wait a little. So the challenges come on a personal level only affecting you or your family or your people close to you. And other types of challenges come on a collective level. And the degree to which the challenges come on a collective level affect the individual. The varies from person to person. But sometimes huge things happen that affect almost everybody's life. For example, Covid we had that I now use, and some other people do use the expression BC when talking about years. We had a retreat here in 2018 BC before COVID So that affected everybody. Some people became some people, obviously some people died, others were ill for a while of considerable amount of time. But even if you didn't fall ill, it probably affected you one way or another to later, lesser degree. But how you experience that situation, that collective challenge, ultimately depended on your state of consciousness, not the external challenge itself. Because human beings experience the same challenge in different ways depending on their state of consciousness. The state of consciousness with which you meet the challenge that is more important. In other words, the thing that happens to you is less important, less significant than the way in which you respond to the thing that happens to you that determines your entire life experience. And that's a very important lesson. We could call that a very important piece of wisdom that your Life experience. The way you experience your life is to a great extent determined by the way in which you respond to the situations that you encounter. And especially the challenge is. Challenge is a word for problem. Some people call it problem, difficulty, bad, something bad. When you call something bad something that would conventionally be called bad, you call it a challenge. There's already a positive spin on it. So. And sometimes when it's happening to you in the moment, you may not say, oh, this is a great challenge, unless you're very conscious already. You only experience, this is really bad. And then perhaps something, some higher level of consciousness then kicks in and says, well, is it really bad? Does it actually need to determine my state of consciousness? Am I at the mercy of external conditions, or can I rise above external conditions? As far as my state of consciousness is concerned, my state of being. And the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said, when you quote people, make sure. When you say you're going to quote somebody, make sure that you know what it is you're going to say. That's another piece of wisdom. I think he said something like, life is what you do with what's been done to you. Something like that. That is the most important thing. What do you do with what has been done to you? Not an accurate, not a literal quote, but more or less so. That's already something. Even this little piece of wisdom, if you apply it in your daily life, can change everything. The way in which you experience other people. Because for many humans, challenges come in the form of other people. Because the weird thing is, you might have noticed people are difficult. And many people are very unconscious. Not you, others. And for many people, some of their greatest challenges, not perhaps the very greatest, maybe physical state, your health is even more of a challenge. But for many humans, other people are one of the main challenges. And it is not unusual for humans to whom you give the capacity to make you happy, or humans who you expect to be made happy by. And for a little while, the other human makes you happy. It's called an intimate relationship. When you sign a form, it's called marriage. The human that makes you happy, then suddenly something shifts and turns around and this very human that made you so happy becomes your enemy and makes you very unhappy. If there are any divorce lawyers here, then I congratulate you, because that is a wonderful job. Because you really get to know human unconsciousness at first hand. You encounter humans at their most unconscious unless they're able to deal with that situation in a more conscious way, which means they are, if not awakened but they are awakening out of their unconscious state of total identification with the ego. Because that is the essence of the unconscious state. Total identification. Identification with the ego. And then you can practice. If you do, if you are conscious and you do go through a separation, it is no longer traumatic. It doesn't have to be traumatic. It becomes particular traumatic if both are unconscious. Sam.