Eckhart Tolle talks with someone who feels like an outsider about how to connect with others. He draws on his own experience of being different and explores what belonging actually means from a spiritual perspective.
In my life, I've always felt like a little bit of an outsider or the weird one. And there haven't been really people that I can talk to the way how I see the world. Like neither in school or later at work or in family and friends.
And.
Like people early in life were fighting a lot. And I always tried to handle things differently. And now I'm in a point, at a point in my life where I wonder if I will ever find people or like near me that I can be connected with.
Right, right. I understand you completely. There are probably quite a few people here you can connect with. But of course, after our event here, the oldest people here become dispersed again throughout the world. You can, through the miracles, modern technology, which is not all bad, you can perhaps keep in touch with some of them. And quite a few of you, I'm sure, will keep in touch with each other. The sense of being an outsider is also something that I have had throughout my life. And the sense of not belonging here. Watching my parents being engaged in continuous conflict, not because they were bad people, they did what they did and they loved me as best they could. And they did what they did as a reflection of their state of consciousness at that time, which was a normal state of consciousness, egoic state of consciousness. But I sometimes felt, how did I get here? Somehow didn't. There must have been a mistake. It's often outsiders. Feeling an outsider, on the one hand seems a terrible limitation that you can't participate as much. On the other hand, it's a great opportunity because some of the most creative people in the world have been outsiders. They did not fit in. Misfits is the English word, misfits. Now, the friendships I had when I was a child, that's another interesting thing. I had a friend, one of my friends was severely physically disabled. And nobody else wanted to be friends with him because of that. And he was probably my closest friend. And the other one was so weird that nobody wanted to talk to him, but he became my friend. So they were outsiders too. And. But the interesting fact here, as you know, I couldn't believe it when they told me that there are people here from 70 countries. It seems almost unbelievable, but it's true. I saw the list, 70 countries. And you may find, I'm sure you will find quite often you can feel a bond or you have more in common with many of the people who are here then you have with your own people in your own country, at home, who are not going through any spiritual awakening, who are still totally conditioned, hundred percent conditioned by their culture. So you feel a connectedness here with other humans that transcends culture and conditioning and all the silly political stuff. It transcends that. And this is a wonderful thing. So to some extent, you can now connect with people, even if you don't always see them physically, where you might live. I don't know whether you live in a big city or a small village.
A small city.
Small city.
Small city.
What city?
Innsbruck, in Austria.
Ah, yes. Nice. Very nice. I don't know how many people in Innsbruck are 120,000 and how many of those are awakening? We don't know. We don't know, of course, but this helps. I believe being here and feeling you are not alone, you are connected. So this should be a help for the rest. You just have to accept that this is how it is, and no matter how hard you try to fit in on the normal level, you probably won't, nor do you have to. So I know there are many people here who feel that and be happy with it, but don't make it into some kind of superiority, because the ego can always creep in. Before you know it, there's always a back door, and then the ego is back in. So you could go from feeling bad about being an outsider to suddenly feeling, okay, I'm an outsider because I'm superior, so we have to be careful, don't go there. So that's just how it is. You probably would not be here if you had not been felt like an outsider for many years. So it worked.
Yeah. Thank you.
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