Finding Inner Peace During Stressful Times | Q&A Eckhart Tolle

I find it impossible to find inner stillness and peace with the prospect of genocide in mind. How can one remain at peace knowing genocide, torture and kidnappings have happened and will keep happening? Could I truly remain at peace if my family members were being tortured by some military army? The last part of the question, Could I truly remain at peace if my family members were being tortured by some military army? We cannot answer that here, because as far as I can tell from your question, your family members are not being tortured by some military army. So the question does not arise from an actual situation, but from thoughts in your head. You imagine what would happen if now it is beyond doubt. And we all know that these things have happened and are happening, as you say, all over the planet. Therefore, you find it difficult to be at peace or defined inner stillness knowing that these dreadful things are still happening all over the planet. That seems understandable. But is anybody being helped, you or anybody else, by your unwillingness to find peace within? It's not the case that you actually go out into the world in order to alleviate the suffering or to stop all the genocide and kidnappings and torture, as you put it. Now, if you did feel called upon to go to some corner of the Earth where violent or dreadful things are happening to alleviate suffering, that's another matter. If you look at human history, you can see that these things have happened thousands of years ago already. They continue to happen throughout history to the extent that, as I sometimes put it, reading history of humanity seems like reading the story of insanity with a few lucid moments here and there, and in particular, the 20th century, a place of incredible insanity and suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. Now, once you see that your unwillingness to embrace spiritual awakening because so much unconsciousness is happening all over the planet, that is the cause of the violence. That doesn't really make sense, does it? Your mind is saying, I'm refusing to invite the spiritual dimension into my life or to enter the awakening process because so many people on this planet are unconscious. Therefore, I refuse to become conscious. It's a convenient excuse for the egoic mind to stay in charge and to keep running the show. And while it does that, it can complain, of course. It's lovely, isn't it, the complaining about all the dreadful things that are happening. Does that help anyone? No. Did the Buddha, who taught 2500 years ago how to go beyond suffering, did he say, I'm not telling you how to go beyond suffering because so many humans on this planet are still suffering. Let's wait for them to come to an End of suffering. And then I'll tell you the secret, and then we can overcome enlightened. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't start with, let's wait for the rest of the universe to become enlightened, and then we can enter the spiritual dimension. It has to start from you. Any change on the planet in order to be true change, and not just a variation on the same theme, must entail a change in consciousness. Because whatever humans produce, whatever they manifest externally arises and corresponds to, arises out of their state of consciousness. If that state of consciousness is dysfunctional, disharmonious, negative, fearful, angry, and millions live in that state, identified with their ego, then you get huge collective egos fighting other collective egos. And that's the insanity. Change has to change. We both agree that change is necessary, but it doesn't come from out there. It would also apply to your own lives. There are some people who come to me and say, I have to sort out various outstanding matters in my life. That big problem solving still in my business situation and my living situation. And this. I don't really have time to go into all this spiritual stuff because there's too much for me to deal with at the moment. Or as the expression goes, I have too much on my plate to have time for spiritual awakening. That has to wait. Sort these things out first. And if you do that, of course you'll find that the time never comes because there's no end to the problems that arise out there. Jesus told the same story in the parable of the wedding feast. People are invited to a wedding feast, and each person has their particular excuse why they cannot come to the wedding feast. One person says, oh, I've got to have some business dealings to do. Just have to sell my cows and sheep and need to do that. Let me first do that. Maybe I'll come. Then the other one says, oh, my father has just died. Let me first bury my father. Every excuse starts with the words, let me first do this. And that shows the prevalent attitude of believing that something out there needs to change before I can. Or in your case, before I feel justified in looking for inner peace. But that is a fallacy. The external peace can only come when humans, or at least a sufficiently large number of humans, embrace inner peace. And you can't wait for the torture and killings to stop and then embrace inner peace. Change happens from the inside out, not from the outside in. So, yes, knowing that at this very moment, every second, every minute, every dreadful things are happening on the planet, of course it's always been like that. At this very moment, somebody's being murdered, perhaps. Bombs are exploding, people are torturing, kidnapping others, warfare between armies or gangs. Of course it's happening every moment. Does your anxiety help that situation, your non peace? No. But if there's a shift in consciousness, there may be a change, and that starts with you. So don't believe what your mind is telling you about the undesirability of inner peace because the world is so mad and so violent. That does not make sense. If you look closely, 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.