Eckhart Tolle on Replacing Guilt with Wisdom

The book is called Ecclesiastes and it begins with a famous vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Vanity in the older sense of the word means pointlessness. So it will presumably be written by an old man who we assume who saw that everything is so short lived. And he describes all that in the book. It's beautifully written, it's a great work of literature and it's a reflection of that state of consciousness. So basically he says, just get out of life whatever you can, because you're going to die and, and no matter what you achieve, you're still going to die. So even if you achieve wisdom, you're still going to die. And it's all pointless anyway. But his rights, in more beautiful language than I'm summarizing it here. But it's funny how that book found its way into the Bible. Somebody's wondering about the pointlessness of it all. So that afflicted certain individuals here and there, but not vast numbers of people as it does now. And a lot to do with it, as I mentioned the other day, is the fact that in the mainstream culture the entire universe is regarded as a random coming together, an accidental coming together of atoms and molecules. And then accidentally all this comes into existence. Then of course there is another religious theory that is, there is that there is that God regarded as an architect or something like that, who created it all at some point God created it all. And what did he do then? Then? So some people would say, well, he must have walked away after he created it all, because if he were controlling things now, then that wouldn't make sense because I could do better than that. So that happens when the belief is there's an external creator who does it all. And then according to some beliefs, he's still in charge of things omnipotent, an omnipotent entity somewhere and looking over things. And traditionally the belief was that if bad things happened, it's God's punishment. Traditionally, not many people dared say, how dare you, God punish us or punish me. They immediately said it's our fault. I know it's my fault. I know that is the traditional approach. Even when I was a child, I was brought up as a Catholic and in those early days, I believe, I seem to remember the mass was still. There's a lot of Latin in the Mass, which is very nice. And even as a child, a 10 year old, we had to say where to beat our chest and say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa Maya culpa. My Guilt, my blame. I am to blame. As a child I tried to figure out what that was, why I was to blame for the. And at the age of 10 came the First Communion. That is a big event in the life. I don't know if it still is in the life of a Catholic child. The first communion is preceded by the first confession of your sins in the cubicle. Dark, dark cube, very scary. And you have to. And then before you do that, the day before or days before, you have to what was called searching your conscience for your sins. And I took it more seriously, I remember, than other children, because other children were playing in the streets saying, are you coming to join us? No. I was sitting at a table, I had stacked books upright around me to hide the paper on which I was going to write down my sins. But it took a lot really to think very hard. I must have done something really bad. I came up with a few minor things and I even invented one or two because there wasn't enough on the paper. But a sense of guilt goes all the way go through the millennia of deep seated guilt in the human mind. And that is also part of egoic consciousness, the sense of not only is there something wrong with the world, there is something wrong with me too. There is something wrong. And even more fundamentally that sense which is part of egoic consciousness in the sense there is something fundamentally wrong with me. However that expresses itself in religious terms, it expresses itself as this. It's immediately saying, we deserve your punishment, God, because we feel bad. I feel so bad, I deserve what I'm getting. And that is the feeling of guilt. So whenever a disaster happened in the in past, a natural disaster, earthquake, pestilence, the Black Death or dreadful things that happened, flood, floods, fires, volcanic eruptions, whatever it may be, humans immediately said, they didn't say how dreadful this is. Why is this happening? God is punishing us for our sins. We deserve it. It's our guilt. We need to atone. And then came global warming. And then bad things happen, perhaps through that feeling of strong guilt which strengthens human unconsciousness. So it's equating unconscious action with identity and then again that becomes another heavy part of the egoic identity. Many people carry a sense of individual guilt about something they did or failed to do, but should have done in the past and they cannot let go of. I'm speaking, I know that quite a few people usually ask me questions about that. So this will be relevant to quite a few people, for quite a few people. So they carry an identity around, not recognizing what you manifested was human unconsciousness at the time but you recognize you know that it was it created suffering in some way to other humans or whatever and yet to transform that into an identity is a mistake. It keeps you trapped in egoic consciousness by the egoic consciousness that brings about a lot of havoc on every every level in the human life on the individual level and the collective level so all these are things that we can now be transcended we don't need a feeling of guilt just a clear we need wisdom we can let go of guilt as we let go of egoic consciousness guilt also disappears because guilt is on an individual level it means that you have done something bad in the past at that time you didn't know that it was bad we presume you did it because this was a manifestation of your level of consciousness at that time Then you become a bit more conscious then you look back on their past and say oh I did that and that can easily become develop into.