Facing Obstacles Consciously | Eckhart Tolle on Awakening Through Challenges (Part 1)

So it expects that. But the realization is that nothing needs to be added for awakening. This is not to say that on the level of your personality, the historical person, there are not things for you still. How did you respond to the challenges? It doesn't matter how you responded. If you were not present and the challenge made you reactive and mental emotional reactive movement. So that's fine. If you realize it now, it's never too late. Oh, that was. That I was unconscious. Isn't that interesting? But you can see it now. So you must be conscious now and then wait for the next challenge. You may have arrived in your room and it was very small and like a monastic cell. And mentally you compared it to wherever you were on your vacation. It's not the Ritz Carlton, obviously, but a monastic cell is a lovely place for surrender and realizing that very little is needed for presence to arise. It's much more likely to arise when things are taken away from you, rather than when things are added to you. The mind doesn't know that. The mind thinks something needs to be added to you in order to awaken an added experience, an added realization, an added whatever it may be a vision, angels, whatever. So the mind expects to be by adding something, then I will arrive. Adding a future moment. Unless you are 95, there are not still things for you to do. There may be interesting things for you to add to who you are as a person. You can add new experiences, you can travel, you can learn something new, a language, take up an musical instrument, read books to add some, build up a business, whatever it is, adding some. On that level, there's nothing wrong with adding things to you. And on that level of the person or the personality, you're never really complete. There's always more that you could do. And if you pursue one particular avenue that excludes and many others, you could add things by becoming a great sports person. If you're young enough so you train hard and you enjoy it. Of course, that excludes and it's unlikely that you would develop into an intellectual because you don't have the time to read the books. But if you read the books, then that excludes that you're not physically active for six hours a day. So you choose this particular avenue and you're never complete. There's always more you can do, and life sometimes demands that you do certain things. It gives you a challenge, or you choose a challenge. It's usually better to choose a challenge on the level of the personality, on the level of the person. The person has its own life and they choose something, have a goal. I want to do this, that or the other, without the expectation that this goal, once you achieve it, will lead you, take you to ultimate satisfaction. It can't do that or will reveal to you who you really are, give you your true identity. So when you're looking in this level of the person, when you're looking to the things of this world, through achieving this, that or the other, that this will give you some very satisfying sense of identity, of being, the sense of having arrived. Because almost everybody who is still trapped in ego has a sense of something that should happen. Hasn't happened yet in my life. There's something missing. This can be very strong in the forefront of your mind, or it can be in the background. The sense of lack. The sense of something is not quite right here, but you don't know what it is. You're not at ease in the world. There's an underlying sense of unease. And for some people, the underlying sense of unease is so all pervasive that they don't even know it, because since early, even childhood, it already started. And so they don't know anything else. There's always this underlying sense of unease, this underlying sense of either there's something not right, I'm not right, or something that should be happening, hasn't happened yet, or even something that did happen, should not have happened, whatever it may be, wherever you interpret that underlying feeling of unease. But if you are completely trapped in ego, it will be there. Sometimes it may surface very strongly, in which case you become very anxious or very sad or very depressed, or you can manifest in many ways, you can even get angry, can be part of that. So there's this. And if it's been there for many years, you don't even know it. It's unlikely that this is the case with anybody that's here, present here, because you would never come here if there hadn't been something that makes you aware, at least, that there is a sense of unease in you. And you know that. You begin to suspect that something else is possible, that there is another way of being in this world. There is another way of being in this world. There are still many millions, though, who don't know that they live with constant unease. Sometimes it manifests as fear, it manifests as anxiety, or just a more obscure sense of something not quite right. Another way it manifests is that people see themselves as a problem. So your identity is basically, you're a problem to yourself. You consider yourself a problem that needs to be solved. And then of course you go to a psycho something and says please solve the problem of me I am a problem to myself and you are you are a problem to yourself. That would be a great thing to realize that you're a problem but if you're really deeply immersed in that you don't even know that if you're really deeply immersed in that pattern it's always the others who are the problem. So if you're very unconscious you wouldn't even say I'm a problem to myself. No he she they they are the problem not me. And so perhaps you wouldn't even seek a psychotherapist because if you seek a psychotherapist at least there is an admission that change is possible and change is needed but there are still millions who don't even know that the inner change is possible and needed. It's all out there and these people are very active online you might have noticed because that's an ideal forum for them to externalize their inner mental state. It.