How Do You Deal With Unconscious People? with Eckhart Tolle

A question for you regarding dealing with unconscious people and whether you yourself, maybe more so earlier in your life, whether you have felt lonely or isolated or frustrated in dealing with unconscious people and what your approach was to that at different stages of your life.

Right? Yes, thank you. Well, that perhaps is the main challenge for everybody, because you. It is people mostly to who we get challenged by. Other sources of challenge are, of course, your physical body could present a challenge. There can be financial challenges, but most large part of challenges come through humans. Because humans are difficult. Many humans are still very much trapped in ego. First part of your question. I was relatively isolated for many years of my life. When after the shift in consciousness, I carried on with my normal life. It had a certain momentum. I was still in the academic world. And then three, four years later, I had to go out of that, leave it behind completely. And then many years happened when I was not related to the world, to any of the usual channels. I had no particular job, no relationships, no close relationships. And I spent many, many days, weeks, months not seeing that many people. And gradually, people would come to me for advice. That happened gradually, slowly grew through word of mouth, and then I had that kind of relationship with humans. But throughout, there's always challenges. Even if you live in relative isolation, you will come into contact with humans that are unconscious. So I think you need to welcome that because those challenges force you to become more present. You remember I talked about the other day, if you want to make the body stronger, you do exercise, you do physical exercise. And what is physical exercise? It's making life difficult for the body. That's a new way of looking at it. But if you look at it closely, you'll see it is true, because the body suddenly has to make an enormous effort. You're forcing the body. You're giving the body challenges that were not there before. Lift a heavy weight, run a mile, or whatever it is you're doing. And so then through being challenged beyond its comfort zone, the body gets stronger. And in the case of spiritual growth, we need all those unconscious humans to challenge us. Otherwise the presence would not intensify and arise. So the first thing we need to do, and I learned that also to regard these unconscious humans as blessings. So rather than believing you shouldn't be here, making my life difficult, regard the undron human as a necessary part of being here on this planet at this time, and so you can welcome them when they make life difficult for you. The important thing is, though, that humans, unconscious humans, do not pull you into unconsciousness yourself. That is the Challenge. The biggest challenge and what I mentioned in the previous session also applies here. When you are being challenged by situations or people up to a certain point of human development, the moment a situation gets challenging or you meet a challenging person, you become reactive and become more unconscious than you were before you were challenged. So you meet an angry person, you get angry yourself, you meet a confrontational person, and you become even more confrontational. You're fighting, then a certain thing happens. You reach that level where, beyond which the challenges make you more conscious. I think most of the people here will have reached a level where you may occasionally be pulled back. Yes. But may have reached the level where, from now on, when challenges come into your life through situations or people, you become more present rather than be pulled into unconscious reaction. And that's your spiritual practice. That can be your main spiritual practice. So if you realize relationships are your spiritual practice, whether they are short relationships or at work or family relationships, if you can shift the way you look at relationships and then regard relationships as spiritual practice, it's much easier to deal with unconscious humans. And then the challenge is to stay present while they are being unconscious with you. I learned that early on when, after my shift in consciousness, my father's second wife was quite unconscious. And then, not only unconscious, she developed a mental illness. But the unconsciousness was already. The mental illness was already hidden in the unconsciousness. The mental illness she developed was acute paranoia. And she was in a mental home for a while, then came back home. Whenever I visited them once or twice, as I mentioned before, I stayed in hotels, but many times I went there, visited with them. And I realized the moment I saw her, I would become intensely present. I would just go, and then she would start talking to me. Usually the stories would start with talking about her enemies, the people who were waiting down in the street, and would follow her, people she would see in shops. And according to those stories, there must be at least one or 200 people whose main occupation is to follow her and make her life difficult. But that was the story, so I had to listen. The moment I arrived, she would tell me the latest events of what happened to all these people who were following her and doing things to sabotage her life. All fictitious. And immediately I went into very intense presence. And by the second day, the stories would subside a little bit. And by the third day, she wouldn't talk that much. And once or twice it happened that I was not acutely present when she was talking. And immediately the old stories would come back up. She would even look at me suspiciously and say, what do you. Why are you really here? What do you want from me? So I noticed there was a. My consciousness had an effect on her state of consciousness. So that was particularly noticeable in that case. And she became more sane while I was there. And the moment I left, she went back into complete unconsciousness.