Embracing Impermanence | Eckhart Tolle on The Deeper Self and Collective Awakening

You fall in love and this is the person that's going to liberate you from your sense of insufficiency and incompleteness. And this is the base person that's going to make you happy now for the rest of your life. How wonderful that is. And then you get disappointed. That wasn't supposed to happen. He was meant to make me happy. And so the this so called love suddenly turns around into its opposite. So all that happened was initially the so called love relationship covered up that feeling of distrust in life, that feeling of lack and insufficiency. And it was temporarily, it wasn't removed, it was temporarily covered up. And then when the other person does not behave in the way that he or she was supposed to behave, the feeling re emerges and you feel it even more strongly than before. But the mind misinterprets it as meaning that he caused me to have that feeling or she caused me to have that feeling now, that terrible feeling. But of course the terrible feeling was there before. You just feel it more strongly now because the COVID has been removed again. And this basic distrust and unease emerges. And you feel it even more now after having been deceived, deceived yourself. So human relationships change fundamentally once you do not look to other humans as a source of finding completion for yourself or somebody that you actually can place trust in. This is a very important point. And I even remember having looked at two or three questions on the pieces of paper that I'm still reading. I even feel inclined to do something on the Internet and spend a few hours answering some of these questions. But whether this is going to happen, of course, I don't know. The wonderful thing is you don't. I'll say it again so that it doesn't disappear from your mind. You don't need to trust another human being. It's not necessary. The trust isn't a state of consciousness and it's a trust in life. You don't trust that a particular thing is going to happen and so on. You know that all phenomena around you are impermanent and cannot satisfy you. And that is a liberating realization because then you stop looking to this movie show around you and find something in there that's going to make your sense of self more complete and satisfying. Of course, occasionally things do that, but not for long. So when you don't, when you don't look at this movie show anymore for satisfaction, personal fulfillment, then you can only not look for it when you, when you are connected with being within. So you, you begin to enjoy Even the fact that things are impermanent. There can be a sense of peace when you contemplate the impermanence of all things. I sound like the Buddha now, but that was a very deep teaching that he gave and it's still alive now. When you become aware of the impermanence of all things, it's quite amazing. And that can strengthen that, the sense of beingness within you. The more you watch impermanence, the more you feel the something within you that is not touched by that consciousness itself, stillness, whatever you want to call it, the timeless being, the timeless you, the timeless deepest essence of who you are, the center of the wheel is not touched by that. And the more you become aware of impermanence, which to the ego is a fearful thing. Oh, don't remind me of death. I don't want to be reminded that I'm going to die one day. Don't be negative. Don't talk to me about that. I don't want to visit a graveyard and walk around and look at the gravestones. It's awful, but it can be a wonderful thing. It can be a deep. Suddenly you feel more deeply connected, more deeply connected because of the fact of impermanence around you. By becoming aware of impermanence and not running away from it internally, not denying it, facing it fully, yet actually will have the effect of strengthening your connectedness with being. And this is the idea, of course, behind that. In some Buddhist traditions, the monks go to the morgue and meditate surrounded by dead bodies. Periodically they go there and of course the egoic self, particularly the Western conditioned egoic self, is how morbid, how absurd. Why do they do that? It's just absurd, isn't it? There's a deep reason why they do, why they do that in order to strengthen that connectedness with being which they call emptiness and somebody else calls fullness. Same place. And so you might have seen those of you who came to the last retreat, some of you were, or the one before that. I had a spiritual entertainment evening when I showed little clips from video clips. And one video clip was a commercial that was never shown because it was regarded as too shocking. It's a one minute thing. It shows a woman giving birth in a hospital and the baby comes out of her womb and shoots up into the sky, out of the window, into the sky. And then the camera follows. The baby's flight goes up first. And as the baby flies up into the sky, the baby, it's a boy, begins to grow. Already it grows and becomes a young man. And then it grows and then it reaches the highest point and then the descent starts. Now the baby's no longer babies, it's a middle aged man. And gradually the speed increases and all the time the, this man is kind of screaming, he goes. And then finally descent, the man has become old, beginning to, has lost his hair and his teeth. And then he goes up into, he hits the grave and his end and there's a graveyard. And that's the end. So that's basically the story of everybody's life. And, and to me, that's the most spiritual commercial ever shown. And why is it spiritual? Because it shows you the impermanence and the short lived nature of a human existence, the human part of it. And if you contemplate that, you go, whoa, whoa. And if you don't run away from it internally, don't deny it. You suddenly feel a deeper sense of connectedness. For a long time I didn't know what this commercial was actually for. And for a long time I thought it was for beer. Because what it is for is only shown at the very end. Because at the very end of the screen you read life is short. And then it says play more. And then there's an X. And I thought the X referred to a Mexican beer that has three X's, but it's not. It refers to something called Xbox, which is a video game apparently. And of course what it should have said at the end, we did say life is short, but the next sentence would have been don't waste it playing video games.