Eckhart Tolle on the Purpose of Suffering

And at some point you realize that the suffering is ultimately born out of a reaction of your mind to the events in your life. That's where the suffering does not originate in the external world, what we call suffering. It does not originate in the external world. It originates in your reaction to the external world. Not easy to see sometimes. And when you reach. When you realize that the origin of suffering is ultimately your own unobserved mind, your own conditioned mind, conditioned by going back thousands of years of dysfunctional mind activity, going back in your own family and your ancestors and your racial memory and your national memory and all those. The collective conditioning going back thousands of years. But it all manifests as your mind and a point you reach, a point where you see that suffering is actually unconscious mind activity, ego, in other words. And when you reach that point and you realize suffering arises in the human mind, and don't ask me silly questions like what would you say to a person who lives out in the street and has lost your home? What do you say to him? They say suffering does not originate in the human mind. Look, he is. He's hungry and he's got enough to eat and he's lost his home. And he's sitting there. How can you soil. It's still true. He may be hungry and cold, but he is suffering. The suffering arises in his mind. You can be hungry and cold without suffering. I've had brief experience of that in my life. And I can tell you you can be hungry and cold and not suffer. And that's what I would explain if a person came. I've met a few people on park benches who lived on park benches, and we've had conversations about it. Nowadays I don't meet people on park benches that much anymore, but it still applies. Or you may be a refugee or migrant. You've lost their home in these countries where there's havoc and you're moving across countries not knowing where you're going to end up. Isn't this person totally justified in saying that they are suffering and they are unhappy? No, they could to be deprived of your home. And this has happened many evenings. What is now Europe. Very wealthy countries in Europe. Not that long ago, there were huge movements of migrants even within Europe. After the Second World War. Huge movement, migrant people. Millions lost their homes everywhere. So it's a continuous experience for humans to lose their homes, the homeless. It can be a great opening into all the structures that made up your external life. Collapse. And then there's a possibility that internally too, there can be a freeing. So if you're suffering, it still implies being cold and hungry. Isn't suffering. That would be wonderful to live in a world where this does not exist anymore. And perhaps we can get there and we need to help people who are cold and hungry. But even if we eliminated all, all hunger and dis. Physical discomfort, suffering would remain in humans. And it doesn't matter in what form it arises. There is a huge amount of unseen suffering in the world, so called wealthy world. Otherwise there wouldn't be millions and millions of people who cannot live without some kind of substance they take to alleviate. Alleviate their suffering. So it arises in your mind, but you need to. Most people need to experience a considerable amount of suffering before they realize that it arises in their mind. And whether they realize it consciously and say, oh, I'm doing it, or whether it just happens to them as it did to me, I didn't immediately realize that suffering came out of my mind. It just stopped coming out of my mind. The mind just didn't do it anymore. And only two or three years later I realized why I wasn't suffering anymore. I only realized I was suddenly at peace. I didn't realize that my mind wasn't producing the suffering. I couldn't even, couldn't have explained anything. Just why am I so peaceful? I don't know. Until I met a Zen monk two years later who said, well, Zen is really about not thinking. Not thinking. Oh, that's what it is. I experienced not thinking as peace. I didn't know it was not thinking. It was. I experienced it as peace. So, and then you reach that point where you. You no longer have this personal sense of self, the me which is continuously fueled by unconscious thinking. So when this personal sense of self that is fueled by unconscious thinking subsides, you are there as the consciousness, unconditioned consciousness, and that's the end of suffering. And then most people do not drastically go from one to the other. They go through a prolonged transitional period where they are partly still the suffering entity and partly the liberated consciousness. So that can go on for quite a while. And many of you are probably at that stage where you move between being liberated and being back in the narrow personal sense of self with its reactivity, its complaining, its unconscious thinking, and so on. So many of you are transitional. And that also means, however, that you are awakening. So you are in the awakening process, and that's why you're here. And so then you reach a point where you suddenly realize that suffering is optional. W and you also realize that you needed to go through quite a bit of suffering to come to this realization. And if you hadn't suffered, you would never have realized that suffering is optional. And so the way I put it is suffering is necessary for you, for humans, let's say, for you, you need. Suffering is necessary until you realize that suffering is unnecessary. A slight paradox here. Only by suffering can you come to the realization that it is ultimately not necessary. So the paradox then is if you ask a question, if you apply to humanity as a whole, we would say suffering has a purpose. And there is vast suffering on the planet. Vast suffering. It has a purpose. On a conventional perspective, you say, this is so unfair. Why is there are all these people suffering? It's terrible. And it is on a conventional level, looks like it. And yet every human is a temporary expression of the evolving consciousness. A temporary expression. No human being is autonomous. No human being exists separate from the totality of consciousness. Every human being is a brief manifestation of the totality of consciousness. So if you ascribe to human beings a totally separate selfhood, then suffering looks just the most dreadful thing ever. Because there's this separate. Why is this being suffering so much? And then that's a whole life. But if you look at a deeper level, if you look at a human being as an extemporary expression of the evolving consciousness, then you see that it's a birthing process for humanity, gradual. This does not mean that you do not help those who are suffering. In fact, you do. And the greatest help, of course, in addition to physical help, the greatest help is to bring an awakened consciousness into the interactions with the world and with other people. That's a true help that you can give, is to bring your consciousness into this world, and then the awakened consciousness spreads out from you.