Eckhart Tolle explains how the ego mislabels emotions like anger, which inflates the sense of self while producing negative physiological effects throughout the body. True comfort comes from not-knowing and observing present-moment emotional states without egoic distortion, rather than building rigid belief systems.
"The reason why they call me the wisest of all men is that I'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing." That's what Socrates said, and even that statement is not understood by people who teach philosophy in universities because they have never tasted, they've never experienced, realized what that not knowing is. What he was actually saying is, when he said, "I'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing," what he really was saying— and he might even have said that literally, because we don't know what he said literally, because everything else is reported by Plato, Socrates didn't write anything— What he really said, in my view, is, "I'm the only one who is comfortable with not knowing. That's why I'm the wisest of all men. I'm the only one who is comfortable with not knowing." And all his philosophy, all his— Socrates, Socrates is considered a profound thinker, but all the creative thinking came out of the state of not knowing. This is why he continuously asked questions. He didn't have the answer beforehand. People think that he was just pretending not to know and he was asking people. His teaching method was he was asking questions, because his starting point was always not knowing. So when you become comfortable with not knowing and then you begin to use your mind your thinking becomes more creative, but you are not going to be trapped in the thinking anymore. Socrates never created a system, he didn't create an ideology, it's just creative thinking, but there's no final answer to the system, to the universe. Later philosophers did that, in the 19th century particularly, they had systems of thought that were meant to explain the entire universe, but Socrates never did that. There was creative thinking, he just puts forward possibilities, this, that, insights, and so you're not overvaluing thinking but being able to use thinking as a creative tool. That can only come with becoming comfortable with not knowing. So that's an important thing. So don't project awakening into the future. It's not going to happen in the future. Become comfortable with whatever is going on internally or externally. At this moment. Unhappiness, that's a generic term that can be applied to many mental-emotional states. Unhappiness is a wide term. Unhappiness can be despair, Unhappiness can be a slight irritation. A slight irritation is already unhappiness. Many, many forms of unhappiness: worry, many kinds of thought streams are unhappy thought streams, "I'm not enough, I don't have enough," things, countless So I'm just using unhappiness as anything that goes on in your mental-emotional field that doesn't feel good. The ego, by the way, doesn't even know that, because many things that actually don't feel good, the ego interprets as good. Anger, for example, the ego loves anger because it inflates itself through anger. But if you really look at the body's reaction to anger, you feel that it affects the body in a negative way. The circulation, the heartbeat circulation, the entire energy field that's behind all the cells in the body stomach, everything is affected by anger negatively, but the ego loves it, so the ego can't often, can't even tell the difference between what's good and what's bad.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
