Give me 25 minutes and the suffering you carry will begin to make sense | Eckhart Tolle
In this talk, Eckhart Tolle responds to a written question from Souviède, who asks how to help humanity shift out of a collective "dark night of the soul." Tolle explains that the dark night is a form of suffering that both individuals and humanity experience. He outlines how personal challenges—relationships, work, health, finances—are sources of suffering that, when faced consciously, become opportunities for awakening. He expands this to a collective level, describing humanity’s cyclical pattern of consciousness growth and regression, likening it to planetary mass‑extinction cycles and historical epochs such as the flourishing of the Buddha, Taoism, and early Greek philosophy, followed by collapse, the Dark Ages, and later renaissances. Tolle attributes much of human‑inflicted suffering to the ego‑driven, unconscious state of collective consciousness. He urges listeners to remain a witnessing presence, stay conscious, and avoid reactive identification with suffering, thereby contributing to a higher collective awareness. He further connects his teaching to the central Buddhist concept of dukkha and the Christian image of the cross, both of which illustrate suffering and its transcendence. The overall message is that suffering, while painful, is a necessary catalyst for the evolution of individual and collective consciousness.
I myself can look back on time periods in my life when I was very unhappy and experienced a dark night of the soul, and when I look at it now, it's like a nightmare out of which I awakened. And so that's what the suffering is.
It's a a written question. It comes from Souviède from Ottawa, Canada, and here's what she wrote in. Dearest Eckhart, I went through the dark night of the soul over 20 years ago, a total collapse of meaning after my old teacher got discredited. I remember it as the most challenging time of my life. It took a lot to work my way out of it. Including a loving husband, a great therapist, a lot of writing, and God's grace. When you said this is what humanity is going through now, I recognized it right away. So I've decided to take this course for the sake of humanity. How do I support others and help the world shift out of our current collective dark night of the soul? Thank you so much for being here for us at this time.
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, no, Dark Night of the Soul is a form of suffering. Suffering, important term. There's suffering that happens on an individual level because you're being, as an individual, you're being challenged in your course of your life several times. You will most likely encounter big challenges in your life from time to time. They come whether they are to do with relationships— very often it's that relationships are the source of suffering, individual suffering for many, many people because humans are very difficult. Relationships are a source of suffering. Your job situation, your professional situation can be a source of suffering. Your living situation, your financial situation, your health situation. All you're being— you will be challenged from time to time on any of these levels. And unless you're really conscious, you, you would suffer when you're— when these— when think something goes badly, very wrong in your life, and that does happen, that's also always an opportunity for awakening. The strange fact is that humans do not awaken when they're in their comfort zone. There's little chance There's some— exceptions are always possible, but you're most likely to awaken spiritually when you're being challenged, you are taken out of your comfort zone. That's where change happens, that's where evolution happens. Every life form needs to experience being taken out of their comfort zone in order to evolve and to manifest whatever powers they have. So every life form is continuously challenged, and only that is the driving force behind the evolution of all life forms, the awakening of consciousness, because gradually life forms on this planet and anywhere in the universe gradually is becoming more and more complex, exhibiting more and more complexity. If you go back on the planet to— the planet, I believe, as geologists have found, the planet has already experienced, I believe, 5 mass extinctions. Each mass extinction, a large percentage of life forms became eliminated. There are different reasons for mass extinctions. The last one was the death of the dinosaurs, when it was not only the death of dinosaurs, also extinction of many other species, probably 70-80% of life forms gone. And so it was only— now, the planet always regenerated. It took a little while, just a few million years each time. The planet regenerated, and each time new life forms evolved and were more complex than the previous life forms. So the planet had to go through chaos, and then out of the chaos, a new higher order developed. And then that lasted a few million years, then another period of total chaos, and then rebirth Death and rebirth. Good Friday, we had a few days ago, and Easter, death and ascension. So this was the planet. Now, as far as humanity is concerned, you— I just mentioned you, you may be challenged, you You're challenged as an individual by difficult situations in your life, suffering, but you can also be challenged collectively. Collective challenges is when a large group of people, sometimes millions at a time, are experiencing the same challenge, affected by the same challenge. And this is, for example, when there's warfare between nations or conflict within a nation or conflict between civil war, pandemic, all things where that collective challenges. Now, just as the planet experiences every few million years a death and renewal, the evolution of humanity has certain similarities there because it is a general— it is a universal pattern here, and that is humanity also goes through periods of evolution, they go forward, consciousness grows, civilization arises, they learn new things, create new things, gradually become more conscious. With these, there were time periods when the— we can recognize now retrospectively that consciousness was growing and there was a new, a huge influx of consciousness. A very significant time period, for example, was 2,500 years ago, with a few centuries there, when in many parts of the planet consciousness grew and grew. It was a time when the Buddha was alive. It was the time when Some of the books of the Old Testament were written. It was a time when Tao— the Lao Tse, who wrote the Tao Te Ching in China, was alive. I believe also Zoroaster in Persia was alive at that time, and the ancient Greek philosophers started there. What, 2500? Enormous growth in consciousness. It lasted a few, gradually a few hundred years, and also produced civilizations. And then collapse. We all know about the Greek civilization, much began to diminish, but then the Roman civilization took over, but they were still very well linked to the Greek civilization and derived a lot of Knowledge from that, and work really can be— antiquity can be considered almost as one civilization. And then, as we all know, Roman civilization at some point collapsed, first gradually and then suddenly, and then about the year 350, 400 the Western Empire dissolved. It still survived in the East because it had been divided into the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire. In the Eastern, Byzantium, in the Eastern Empire, it survived for a few more, few hundred years more, but also collapsed eventually. Then it was followed by a period of regression. Sometimes we call it— in Europe, we call it the Dark Age, when people— all the philosophies disappeared, people lost the ability even reading and writing. Very, very few people could still read and write. Only mostly they lived in monasteries, monks. Living, building. They couldn't build complex structures anymore, and there was no— there was a lot of violence, a lot of lowering of consciousness, a lot of very dark superstitions and And yet, and this lasted one or two— one can argue how long it lasted, but you could say almost 1,000 years of Dark Ages before the Renaissance came and so on. But even within the Dark Ages, there were individuals who were very conscious. So even even the dark, mostly in religious terms, they were religious people who were quite awake, quite enlightened, although the majority of the population was a fairly low level of consciousness. So it was, and so this long story, what I'm aiming at here is to show you that The evolution of consciousness for humanity is not a straight line that goes up. It goes in cycles. In the same way that the evolution of the planet goes in cycles, the evolution of consciousness goes in cycles. It's a cycle of growth and a gain in consciousness, and then there's a cycle of regression, a loss of consciousness. And usually the cycle of regression is also associated with an increase in human suffering. So what we are experiencing at the moment, especially in large parts of the world, collectively we are going through a cycle of regression. You might have noticed if you watch the news— or the news is not everything, there are many other things happening that's never mentioned in the news. But we are going through a cycle of regression when humans become more unconscious again and produce more suffering for themselves and others, because the greater part of suffering that humanity has experienced The greater part of suffering— yes, there has been some suffering through natural disasters and disease, but the even greater part of suffering was inflicted by humans on other humans. Self-created suffering out of an unawakened state of consciousness. The unawakened state of consciousness, collective consciousness, creates suffering. And so we are now— we have entered a regressive period when many humans encounter more suffering. And it's important to recognize that this cycle— otherwise you may misinterpret what you're seeing and see how— and you might tell yourself, thoughts in your head may arise and say, you see, we haven't learned anything and we're just repeating the same mistakes and we're not going anywhere. It's all utterly pointless. And that you might feel, and then you can feel the suffering you contemplate, because the suffering kind of comes almost into your living room through our modern devices. And you see suffering other parts of the planet. This is so terrible. It is. Why does humanity have to suffer? Well, first it's self-inflicted by you. It's the victim and perpetrator, but the roles are sometimes interchangeable. Victim, perpetrator. And why? Because why are humans doing it? Well, it's out of the dysfunctional state of consciousness that we call the ego. And so we're creating that. As you know, we had another regressive period in the first part of the course, first half of the 20th century was particularly bad as far as regression was concerned. The first 50 years of the, of the 20th century was with the two world wars, countless of other wars, genocide, horrible, unbelievable, unimaginable. Uh, so this is So the suffering is dreadful, but if you— obviously you will, you can, you feel the empathy and the compassion, but you don't need to be consumed by it. It's important that you, as a large section of humanity, is in the grip of the regressive movement, loses some consciousness. Don't underestimate the importance of your state of consciousness, because your state of consciousness is connected to the totality of human consciousness. You can look at human consciousness as underneath the sense-perceived reality. All humans are connected and interconnected. There is such a thing as the one collective human consciousness. Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious. Well, of course, in many ways it is very unconscious. I call it the collective consciousness. And a lot of the collective consciousness, yes, is still very unconscious. You are connected. You are a cell, just to speak, within the collective consciousness of humanity, and your state of consciousness affects the totality. So it's very important that you do— that you do— that you don't become part of the regressive movement. You don't have to be. As I mentioned before, even in the medieval, uh, so-called Dark Age, there were always humans, some humans who were very highly conscious. And now there will be more humans, far more humans who will be able to stay conscious. So, and if so, a vast number of people stay conscious here, which means you're not drawn into reactivity, anger, or develop some kind of mental interpretation that causes you to become despondent and enter the dark night of the soul. You can look at it as a witnessing presence, still feeling compassion, and if you— it might even come to you, the suffering at the moment. Most of it is still— you contemplate it in more distant parts of the planet, but it may come close to you, closer to you before you know it. And that's fine. Your function is to stay conscious here to represent the awakened consciousness, be the witnessing presence, the observer. Don't go into reactivity. Don't personalize things. Sometimes it looks as if one or two people were responsible for all the upheavals, but really they are just a manifestation of the collective unconsciousness. Sometimes the collective unconsciousness goes into, into certain people personified, they personify the collective unconsciousness. And all that is part of the awakening. It's humans— now, before we need to finish soon— humans awaken. This is the fact, the importance of suffering Humans awaken through suffering. Suffering provides the driving force behind the evolution of consciousness. It's like a nightmare. When you're having a pleasant dream, why would you want to awaken? It's quite nice. When the dream turns into a nightmare, you will want to awaken because you can't stand it anymore. And you have the nightmare self-created. Humans create it for themselves and each other. So when life turns into nightmares, you need to awaken into higher state of consciousness, the awakened state where the ego doesn't operate anymore. And so what do other humans who die as a result of all the suffering. Well, no human is an autonomous entity. Every human is an expression, a temporary expression of the one universal consciousness that has taken form as a particular human life form. And then when The physical form dissolves, it assumes another form and another form. So you are a ray of the universal consciousness. You are consciousness. That's the real— that's the realization. What we started with that in our session today, to realize yourself as the underlying I am, the being which is consciousness. You're not a person. The person is a garment that consciousness puts on for a little while, and then the garment dissolves, and the conscious, that ray, is still there. It has its own individuality still, and then it takes on another garment. And then another, then another. Between the essence of you is actually timeless, and a point will come in the evolution of humanity when humans look back at these time periods as a very bad nightmare out of which they have woken. I myself can look back on time periods in my life when I was very unhappy and experienced a dark night of the soul, and when I look at it now, it's like a nightmare out of which I awakened. And so that's what the suffering is. It's a self-created bad dream Ultimately, on its own level, it's very real. When you're in the bad dream, that is your only reality. So I'm not denying the reality of suffering on this level. There are different levels of truth. So on a higher level, you look back on the suffering and it is seen as a a dreamlike thing, a nightmare. And if not, the paradox, the strange paradox, is you needed it in order to awaken. The individual needs it, and sometimes it's a collective nightmare. So that is the suffering, is a very vital part of the evolution of humanity. Both— let's just, before we finish, briefly look at this. The central theme of Buddhism, in the words of the Buddha, is dukkha. I teach suffering and the end of suffering. That was the words of the Buddha. Which meaning I teach suffering means I show you how suffering arises and I'll show you how it can end. Jesus, what is the central image of Christianity? A suffering man on the cross and the death, the cross, the torture instrument, and then death comes and then resurrection, a new birth, resurrection comes. And the cross, the torture instrument, is also a symbol for the divine. So that is the suffering in Christianity. The central image of Christianity is suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The cross signifies both suffering and the transcendence of suffering. This is an image. Buddha expressed it in words. I teach suffering and the end of suffering exactly the same. And let this be sufficient for our session today. I thank you. Thank you for being here.
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