Eckhart Tolle explains how we carry our life situations as a heavy mix of problems and pleasures, suffering most in health, work, money, and relationships. When awareness deepens beyond the ego, that burden lightens and obstacles become openings.
So everybody here carries a life situation you carry around with you. This is the person, the human, you carry around with you a life situation. And to a greater or lesser degree, the life situation that you carry with you is not easy. It is. Well, there are good things about it. Yes, there's good things, they're nice. There are things that you can enjoy. Some aspects of your life situation are good and other aspects of your life situation are very problematic. But so there is a certain heaviness to the personal, the merely personal sense of existence. There's a certain heaviness to it. You carry the burden of yourself. And I'm talking now about if you are not at all, especially if you are not at all in touch with the deeper dimension of the being dimension. At the moment we are just talking about the human dimension. On the human dimension, the dimension of the person, you are a burden to yourself in a way. It might not be very huge burden, or for some of you, it may be a huge burden. And the problematic areas in your life situation, you can usually, you can see it either involves the physical body that becomes problematic through creating whatever dysfunction, illnesses and so on. There's the physical as the problem area for some. There is your work or professional situation or things related to that. There is your financial situation, difficulties in that realm of existence. Very common area of suffering for people. There is, and now a huge one comes. Now it's called other people. So you will find that many of the challenges, problems or difficulties in your life situation are caused by other people. If you only could get rid of other people, all those problems would be gone and all you would have is left is your body and well, but of course, then there's no more money coming in because you need others. Okay, that doesn't work. So you can see your living situation. It might be other people. Either the people your intimate relationships or people in your family, environment or background that are making life difficult in one way or another for you. Now, we're not talking about to what extent you contribute to the problems, but so we have work or professional difficulties. Maybe your boss, your company suddenly gets swallowed up by another company and after 35 years of faithfully working for this company, the boss calls you in and says, well, as you know, we just got bought out by this big conglomerate and I'm afraid we'll have to let you go. Goodbye. Now what? I have a mortgage, I have a family, I've got huge, a huge obstacle suddenly. Or you might just think about the possibility that it might happen. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen, but you wake up at three in the morning so you will be challenged. Physical relationship, financial living situation. And those are the main areas where people get challenged. And it's very rare that a human being experiences life growing harmoniously and smoothly in all those areas. In all of them, my physical body is doing great. I'm totally healthy. Fantastic relationship. My children are all doing so well. They're just fantastic. You're all succeeding beyond all expectations. My partner is a person just experienced fantastic happiness continuously. I have a great income and my investments are doing really well. We have a great house and we're thinking of buying a private jet soon. It's all just great, just fantastic, fantastic. It's very rare. And if it, of course, if it does happen, if there's one of you here who at the moment is experiencing that particular fantastic life situation, I don't want to disappoint you. So it's not going to last. And the ego has, of course, the world tells you on the one hand, not for you, because you're all, truly speaking, relatively much more conscious than the majority of the population. It's not an ego thing. So don't, don't, don't make it into a conceptual identity. But the fact that you're here means that there is an awakening consciousness in you which is still relatively rare or it is growing. And so what the world tells the unconscious people all the things that the great celebrities, their lives, all these magazines that tell you about the glamorous life of the celebrities. And then on the one hand you have that, and then the ego, oh, I wish I had that, or that. And then the great satisfaction that the life of these celebrities continuously is collapsing. All the relationships are breaking down and they're suffering. And you get these pictures on the magazines where they look miserably unhappy. They just. Her fourth marriage is now breaking down and huge drama is happening to this person and this. And they were on their private jet and then it all happened there and they broke up. And then the ego, oh, it's great. I'm not the only one who is unhappy. They're all unhappy. So the human level and so the being level is that which brings in something very different that greatly. That makes the burden of the self much easier to bear because it diminishes the heaviness of the self, the personalized self, the conceptualized identity. It diminishes the burden that otherwise you carry of yourself, that you're completely identified with you. You still have a life situation that may be problematic but there is another dimension arising in you that gives you a sense of freedom or almost detachment from your life situation. Not only that, they don't exist completely separately, the awareness that is arising in you, it also flows into your life situation and changes the way in which you deal with the challenges of life through the awareness. And as you change the way in which you deal with the challenges of life, the nature of the challenges also changes. The duration of the challenges also often changes. Instead of being a very prolonged challenge in your life by approaching it in a different way, by responding to the challenge in a different non reactive way, often the very obstacle turns around and becomes an opening into something else that is good. That is how a difficulty many when the your so called future your so called future is determined and your whole life is determined not by the things that happen. That doesn't determine your life. What determines your life is how you respond to what happens to you and so that is your freedom lies there.
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