Evolving Through Difficulty | Eckhart Teachings

Today I may just answer some written questions. This is only a very small selection out of several hundred. It's hard to choose. It's only almost random choice. Not totally random, but almost. But before I do that, perhaps just a few words. And this will take between five minutes and one hour. When you want to strengthen the physical body, what do you do? You exercise. But what is that actually, when you exercise? What do you do when you exercise? One way of putting it is to say that you create difficulty for the body. You create obstacles for the body to overcome. There it is, running on the treadmill, lifting weight. You are creating a difficulty for the body. Any exercise is making life difficult for the body. That's a way of looking at it. That's not a normal way of looking at it. You take the body out of its comfort zone. Although there is a stage where the body, once it gets going, the body may enjoy the energy of it, but until that flows, there's a discomfort. And that's the only way the body can get stronger. If the body stays in its comfort zone, then, well, you will be lying on a sofa or in a deck chair. That's very nice. But the body doesn't change. So that's an interesting, almost an analogy for something that happens to humans. Because it seems that life for everybody creates difficulties. So it's not. One would have thought, if I were God, I would make life easy for everybody. And you would then see, most likely if you did that, most likely there would be no evolution would ever have happened or no further evolution. If you do it right now, because it's only, it seems, both on the physical level and beyond, it's only through facing difficulties, which you could also call challenges, which you could also call problems, if you like, which you could also call one damn thing after another. The strange thing is, only by encountering these challenges do we grow in consciousness and generate energy. It awakens us eventually. Now, if you overdo physical exercise, you put too much strain on the body. You could kill the body, you could kill yourself. And this has happened. People who were so obsessed with physical exercise that they overdid it. I've read, for example, whenever it was one or two years ago, a man who wrote about the incredible benefits of jogging died of a heart attack while he was jogging. And he wasn't that old. So you can overdo it. And then instead of the body getting stronger, it dies. And you could also say when you look at life, humans, life on this planet, probably many other planets, you would say, well, it's all Very well. Sometimes it seems to work that through facing challenges and problems, we grow. We grow out of identification with mind, we grow out of the ego, we transcend our conditioned state of consciousness and a new consciousness arises. And if I know, not actually speaking for myself, without facing difficulties and challenges, there would not have been any growth in consciousness and no awakening. If I had had a. What's the word? For example, a trust fund where, you know, from a very early age your parents have already looked after your security. And you know, from an early age, if you don't want to work or anything, you don't have to. You can have a comfortable life without ever doing anything. There are people like that. There may even be one or two here. But if you are here and you are a trust fund baby, then other things must have happened to you that created difficulties. It wasn't financial, but there were other things. And even eventually to a trust fund baby, other difficulties will happen. But for quite a while it could be that this person remains stagnant or might enjoy certain activities or indulge in sensory pleasures until it gets too much, it's no longer satisfying, and then reaches a critical stage. And sometimes there was a man in. I met him many, many years ago. I was taken to a kind of cocktail party. I didn't move in those circles, but it just happened accidentally that I ended up there. And somebody took me and says, you must come and look. This is. You're going to meet the sixth richest man in England or somebody, a friend of mine who was impressed by these things. So I met this man who became rich apparently because he invented one little thing. 1. He had one idea and became a billionaire. This is not uncommon these days, by the way, with the Internet. But this was before the Internet. He had one idea, and that's called Tetra Pack. The drinks that come in a carton. And it has a carton that has a particular kind of. Opens in a particular way so that he can pour out the liquid. It's called. It's a patent Tetrapak. So he came up with that and he became a billionaire. And I talked to him briefly and then had forgot about many, many years past and forgot about it. And two or three years ago I happened to read in the paper that his son, who was by now he was probably 40 years old, was a drug addict, seriously addicted to drugs and lost completely control of his life, adrift completely. And he was. They arrested him. He was driving under the influence of some drugs. And when police entered his house, they found in one of the bedrooms in big house in Belgravia, London they found his wife. The dead body of his wife had been in that bed for several months and he just couldn't. He hadn't killed her but she probably died of a drug overdose and he just couldn't face dealing with it so he just closed the door and there was a dead body. This can happen to these are extreme cases of trust fund dysfunction. So in other words when life gets too easy for you things can quickly deteriorate but that's your opportunity then because first life gets too easy then because it gets too easy it, it deteriorates and you lose more and more consciousness and then it is possible that you encounter so much suffering that then finally experience the difficulty of life and then there's a possibility of growth. So this could happen to this man too. Now there's always the possibility of awakening. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.